If you started this game between beta and roughly season 4, you have to accept that the game is new

When I say new, I mean it is practically a new game now. When we started, damage was not as outrageous and plentiful. Durability actually mattered because there wasn’t flat pen + lethality galore in addition to %pen and true damage non-stop. Games were actually strategic and could be carried from any position. While the junglers absolutely we’re important, they didn’t all but decide the game. They had an influence but it wasn’t game deciding. Kits were more simplistic and didn’t have the capacity to escape their own weaknesses like literally every new kit/vgu. CC wasn’t so prevelant, e.g. attached to every damn kit in the game - so getting stun locked into instant death wasn’t a thing because you could actually control your character and rely on your capacity to survive damage. The simplistic of runes and masteries made abuse cases for champions less variable, so it was much easier to separate champion balance from runes/masteries as it is so hard now to separate champion power from keystone power because it more or less breaks or makes champions.

A number of different strategies were viable to win the game: split pushing, teamfighting, pick comps, early game, late game, etc. Now the game is an ugly mesh of all those things and you basically zerg one lane until someone makes a critical mistake and win the game off that mistake, making that player look and feel terrible and usually giving them the green light to be flamed endlessly. There were noticeable skill differences across elos, now everything diamond 4-5 and below are practically the same, just slight variations in the amount of mistakes people make because the game has been so stupidified at the expense of flashy kits and “mechanics” (this is what I refer to when I mean less simplistic kits, I don’t mean simplistic in the sense that they are harder, they just do way more and have escape hatches for everything).

I could go on for days. The point is this: yes Riot has done plenty of positive things, too. However, it is glaringly offset by all the negative things. And whether we like it or not, the game has evolved and changed so much that it’s hardky recognizable. Many of us enjoyed this game for those things in the past and while some of it still exists today, the reality is that games are still 25 minute zergfests that aren’t going to go away. As a result, as older players we have a choice: adapt or move on (and many have adapted while many have moved on). All these things I’m saying are my perspectives and complaints with the game now but there could be just as many, if not even more, older players that feel exact opposite of me and recognize the positive changes over the negative. So, this is strictly an opinion but I state it knowing that the game is totally different now and it is absolutely true that adaptation at a large level is necessary if you want to continue playing this game.