Season 6 is by far the worst season LoL has ever had, and for numerous reasons, all of them riots fault. The core of the problem, above all, is that Riot has gotten their head so far up their own ass they don't even understand the basics of their own game anymore. They are obsessed with adding fluff and frosting and extra decorations and making the game new (aka reworking everything every six months and making the game unbalanced as all hell), yet completely ignore basic functions that they have been asked for for literally years. They care so much about being "shiny and new" and appealing to unskilled, lazy, short attention span casual players that they are actively alienating their long standing community.
Issue #1: Where in the flying hell is a replay function? Or training mode? No really, where are they? These are basic functions that exist in LITERALLY ALL OF LOLS COMPETITION ON THE MARKET. The players have been asking for a BASIC FEATURE with which they can practice and analyze and improve their own skills for years, and riot, even after promising to add it, has done nothing. There is no excuse for this. None. Zero. Period. There is no pile of BS lines they can feed us to try to play off how badly they failed and just flat out ignored the players. Riot makes billions of dollars. Billions. If they wanted to put replays/sandbox mode in, it would have been here by now. They don't want to because they don't care. Oh, but they'll definitely put in the effort to add a champion mastery system that amounts to LITERALLY nothing more than giving obnoxious players another emote to spam.
Issue #2: Dynamic Que is horrible. Absolutely awful. It sounds good a first, you picking your role and all, but the immense tendency to get stuck on teams and be the odd man out as well as the god--awful matchmaking quality have turned ranked play into even more of a nightmare than it already was. I was plat 3 last season. This season I was legitimately stuck in silver 2 for MONTHS, because the matchmaking system is that terrible. As long as I was trying to play alone, I was giving bronze and unranked players on a constant basis, and the frequency of afks was astounding. Now yes, that's just a personal story, and at first I thought it was just me, but then I checked my friends list. Several months after season 6 started, all of my silver friends are in bronze, all of my gold friends are in silver, and all of my plat friends are in high silver/low gold. Only one person on my friends list, a diamond player, is NOT ranked an entire league below where they were last season. Then I found a group of people to duo with. Just some silver/gold players who I play with roughly half the time i'm playing ranked. While doing this, I shot back up from silver 2 to gold 3 in a single week. Because now that I was duo'ing, the game bothered to give me teammates in roughly my same elo and the afk's (while still present) were much less frequent, which brings me to my next point.....
Issue #3: Ranked is broken and everyone knows it. While getting a free win in ranks you've already been to is a help, it is a small patch on tape on the incredibly frustrating and toxic system that is ranked LoL. The idea of promos, where a match is worth more to one person on the team than the others, is unhealthy to team mentality, and demotions only serve to make the game more unpleasant, more infuriating, feel incredibly unfair when at the hands of an afk/troll/feeder, and only provides to make the community more hostile and toxic to each other, constantly looking at their teammates through the negative lens of "I hope this dumbass doesn't hold me back and get me demoted so I have to do a ton of work all over again because THEY screwed up". There is also that fact that in 6 years of ranked existing in LoL and Riot hearing complaints about afk's and trolls literally every single goddamn day, they have done NOTHING to fix it. NOTHING.
"Well they made the tribunal". The tribunal is literally a joke. Everyone knows that. In other Moba's like DOTA2 and Dawngate, if a player on your team is afk for more than 5 minutes, the rest of the team can surrender at no punishment to themselves. The idea that a simple mechanic like that, or anything at all meant to deal with that problem, is laughable and embarassing. There are a hundred ways Riot could add a system that keeps you from getting unfairly screwed over by someone on your team Dc'ing or whatever, but Riot, because they don't really care about you, hasn't bothered to do any of them. This makes ranked feel like (and very much is) a gamble just as much as a skill test, and gambling involves luck. Nobody likes losing 40 LP and getting demoted because of an afk and constantly feeling like they're playing against the ranked system more than they're playing against their actual opponents. It makes ranked several times more stressful than it should be and for the wrong reasons, and makes the community feel angry and cheated and that they wasted their time and effort for nothing, which makes them more likely to lash out at the next person they see who they think is making a mistake, which makes the community extremely toxic and bitter. Riot has known this for years, has been told about it on a literal daily basis, but doesn't do anything because they're too busy adding a loot system nobody really cares about.
Issue #4: Riots balance team is utterly incompetent. Let me be absolutely crystal clear, this is not just me being salty because they nerfed my champ or whatever. Riots balance department is flat out terrible at their job. Over and over and over and over again they make the same mistakes in the same ways with the same things to the point where even they have to admit how often they make the same screwup (how many times has a character done way too much damage while building tank?). I honestly believe that their balance department is either a small group of people who have become so detached from the reality of their game that they just start making stuff up and hoping it works, or making changes pro's suggest without actually understanding why they want those changes, or that the department is basically just replaced with brand new interns every few months and we have to watch them learn the same lessons that the last batch did. The first big problem with Riot's balance team is that they do an enourmous amount of changes reactively instead of proactively, and simply do not test their changes for nearly as long or as well as they should. This means that the games balance and meta are constantly in a cycle of being determined by "what did riot screw up THIS time?". They make a big change or add a character or rework or whatever, didn't test it for crap because they have extremely limited access to a PBE sever that has tons of lag on it or because they were just plain lazy, something in that patch becomes overpowered, sometimes game-breakingly so. And riot apologizes, then over the next few patches usually ends up overnerfing that thing or nerfing it in the wrong ways, and shoving the teeter totter of balance all the way in the other direction and either making something else way too overpowered, or just mercilessly gutting something and leaving it in a ditch to die for months or even years before they bother making it useful again, so the people who liked it can't even use it at all now. Over and over again we are being apologized too for their latest game-busting balance screwup that after this long of doing their job they really have no excuse for making. And we are getting really tired of "sorry sorry sorry" from people who should know better by now. Remember the 6 second ryze root? That was on the PBE. You know how busted jungle malz is right now? THAT WAS ON THE PBE. THEY KNEW. They knew full well that these blatantly overpowered things were in their games and they went and released them in that state anyway. This is why the meta of LoL is almost always determined solely by whatever Riots latest balance disaster was. And this is made all the more frequent by their next problem.....
Issue #5: Riot is way too eager to rework the entire game. Sure, early on some of the major season reworks were welcome. Playing support and jungle back in season 2 and 3 was god awful compared to now. But lately it seems that every 6 months riot has to turn the entire game upside down and inside out and make the players have to re-learn half the game, and EVERY SINGLE TIME this happens the game becomes horrifyingly unbalanced. Preseason has become it's own meme for how infamous it is that something in it will be so drop-dead game-obilteratingly broken that you question the sanity of whoever ok'd it to be put into the game. This makes it extremely hard for the game as a whole to stabilize and for it's balance to become more understandable. And at this point with the mage rework, it really feels like they're just reaching for stuff to change even though they don't need to. Like the line in the patch notes "we noticed that towers are still taking the lion's share of value for objectives".
It. Is. A. Tower. Defense. Game. Did. You. F**ing. Forget. That?
Towers are SUPPOSED to have the most value. But in riots quest to "fix-what-isn't-broken-so-we-can-have-a-new-feature-to-brag-about", they've only made the game less cohesive and more confusing. Remember all those times when you were tying to take an inhibitor and your dipwad adc was at red buff instead? Well Riot wants to encourage idiotic play like that. They love it when you win a teamfight and everyone splits up to try to take different objectives and you just end up wasting time. Trying to legitimately make ALL objectives equal value only serves to add confusion, miscommunication, a lack of teamwork, and of course toxicity in the ranks of your players. It also makes the game that much harder for new players to join and quickly learn, which is a big problem LoL is really starting to feel the brunt of about now. But most of all, while new players are finding it harder and harder to get into the game, Riot is steadily chipping away at the other end of the spectrum, which is......
Issue #6: ........(continued)
and 
are pretty strong. Just sayin
Seriously? He's still a thing, he's still a decent pick with ridiculous damage, speed, regen and overall health? He's still a reason to build an entire team against him?). And yet when they do listen it's to something that negatively affects gameplay in the worst way possible, don't even get me started on that.
