a good idea of the effect that zoe has on league in her current state :]
so. me and my two friends (i'll call them Thresheous and Cerberus) have been grinding out twisted treeline games hardcore recently; trying to get that gold chroma for orianna. and believe it or not, we're actually enjoying the gamemode. It's actually tons of fun having JUST us and not having 2 other people who can potentially go full braindead and throw a game. it's really in our hands, yknow? we were very surprised at how pleasant a time we've had playing 3v3s, as we are all nearly 100% vanilla 5v5 players.
anyways. we've been grinding it out for about... 2 weeks now? probably more like 1 and a half weeks, and it's the most enjoyable time we've had in league since like season 6 or 7. The towers are genuine threats, the games don't drag on for an hour but also don't last 15 minutes, the objective (Vilemaw) is a genuine threat that will potentially fuck you up, etc etc...
we were playing today, us 3 together. in total we got through about 4 or 5 games before we stopped, and we climbed a fair bit of lp. i'm nearly silver 1! we were having the usual great time, joking around in voice chat, making calls as we needed, strategizing and trying to come back from lost games (sometimes succeeding, sometimes not) and it was nice. there were a few difficult games, like the one with a very fed lux where I was at 500 ping, but we moved on from those.
and then, in the final game, the enemy picked fucking zoe. and everything just fell to shit.
it started at lvl 3 when i was scrapping with their jungler in the enemy jungle. i'm sitting in the far enemy bush at full hp, and i Q into the jungler to take him by surprise (i'm Vi.) I slam into him, ready to fight; when their enemy top laner (Zoe) suddenly flashes directly at me (keep in mind im full hp and we're all level 3,) instantly ignites me, IGNITES ME AGAIN BECAUSE OF A SHARD SHE HAS, and point blank Q's me. I die nearly instantly before I can even blink to react.
the fight continues without me, and she escapes the skirmish by flashing 3 times in a row. at this point, we're all a bit upset (especially me) but we figure one kill to zoe isnt a massive loss. we grumble a bit and go back to farming.
level 6 comes around, and as soon as I have my R, I wander towards the bush in our jungle area. before I can even enter it, i'm pelted with a zoe bubble that she shot from near her own tower (ABOUT 2 SCREENS AWAY) and am killed in about a second by the enemy jungler, who was waiting in our bush. I curse and whine and all that; but it's still a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of the game. i'm noticeably tilted now, and decide to stop talking as much.
but thats when it started. my top laner, Threshous, is fighting their botlaner on the bottom side of the map. zoe ults in from over a wall, uses a fucking Hextech GLP shard on Threshous, and hops back over the wall. he keeps fighting despite being very slow, and once he sees hes losing, he flashes away.
zoe emerges from fog of war, uses her own flash, picks up the flash shard from Threshous to get on top of him, ignites him, and runs away at legit mach 200.
after threshous dies, he starts cursing in the voice chat too; clearly tilted. me and him aren't talking much now, and our friend Cerberus tries to tell us that its okay.
cut to about 15 minutes later, after we've all been killed by across the map zoe bubbles and redemption shards and free ignites and cleanses and ghosts about 20 fucking times; and the 3 of us are absolutely pissed. we're fed the fuck up. the enemy FINALLY ends the game, and we're all 3 sitting in chat mad as shit. everyones's complaining about zoe and talking about how ass the game is, and none of us can muster the energy to even continue playing league. we all agree that after only a few great games, we were done for the night. not to contribute to a dead meme, but we all logged on to fortnite instead. I just finished a game of it with them, it lifted our spirits a bit.
5 games. 3 wins, 2 losses. one character was literally enough to completely ruin a nights worth of playing and sour the mood of every one of us to the point where we just flat quit the game. NOT AFTER A LOSS STREAK. NOT AFTER WE ALL HAD A BAD DAY. the champion was just so egregiously obnoxious, the experience of it alone turned a pleasant night into 3 rage quits and hurt feelings.
so... yeah. ignoring game design, ignoring win rates, that is the experience of zoe just being in a game on 3 people. i'm not really tilted anymore, I didnt expect much less. i'm just mad that riot continues to let that character suck the life out of this game and ruin peoples times.
this is for those of you who continue to argue for zoe being an okay design for the game. it was just such a mood-shattering experience, I felt compelled to share.
have a nice night yall
