The Urf Problem

So first people were angry that URF didn't come out April 1st, and now our problem is people seem to hate URF this year. So what gives?

Honestly the only thing I can point to is that there's no separate queue for those who just play to win, and those that want to try out all of the new champions with URF. I remember thinking that I was going to go in and try all the new and reworked champs to have some fun and destress before finals. And then I got matched against a team with Karma, Sona, and Xin.

Compounding this problem, there are much less tools to deal with the problem champions this time around. Pink trinkets have been removed so this means that Shaco and Wukong's power levels jumped up 2x or 3x from that of last seasons. The upgraded red trinket does almost nothing to stop them because it's practically useless. The point of having a pink ward every 30 seconds was to create a barrier between you and Shaco where you place the ward and back off slightly so he must run through it. Also hurting the itemization is just how much damage people can put out this season. Bruiser and survivability items do nothing when a Sona Q + AA at 15 minutes will take any non-full-tank to 10%.

Lastly, I think other gamemodes have done well because the meta of god tier champions in those had at least shifted from when they were last played to now. You could even tell that people were banking on the meta having changed before it was released. One common quote being "A weekend is the perfect length for a rotating queue so that no definitive meta forms and it gets boring". And then bam, URF gets released and within a few hours 30-50% of NA is back to grinding wins for keys and S ranks with Sona, Shaco, Zed, Xin, Karma, Wukong, and a few others I might have missed because of permabans.

I don't know of any other reasons there could be, this is just what I personally feel has done it in for me. I played URF the past two years for the full length of their release and it never got old. But, something changed with this year, and I don't think my reasoning here accurately describes how I feel.