What ultimately killed the game for me was the addition of keystones

Even though I ended up playing for two seasons with them, to me, they are the real culprit. “Damage creep” is just a symptom. Tanks doing too much damage is a symptom. ADCs lifestealing everything is a symptom. Supports shielding too much is a symptom. None of these are or have ever been the problem. They represent a larger problem and that was the addition of keystones. And while I don’t fully understand the new rune system today, I can still see some of those ridiculous tenets in the current rune setup.

It’s very simple: keystones took concepts that were fine in very low doses - 2-3% lifestealing as an example for vampirism mastery and changed to bloodlust and the amount became ridiculous. You turned the volume up on different mastery concepts that had their volumes down for a reason: they would be busted as fuck if they ever became strong. You had them masterfully (pun intended) spread out in the mastery tree where you had some meaningful decisions about what you could and couldn’t take. With the entire mastery setup, you had a rather bland setup and a mixture of raw stats but very rarely did a single mastery ever cause the same amount of trouble any keystone did.

This isn’t including the fact that keystones added another variable to the game. A complicated game. A game it’s own developers say they truly don’t even understand and that’s evidenced by the fact that they can rarely balance it. Why would you add a completely gamechanging concept that further complicates that with no real benefit when you weigh risk vs reward. I realize the game needs to keep fresh but let’s stop pretending that you don’t have 100 champions who are outdated and need massive changes to compete with today’s more advanced champions. And dear god, if you don’t play those new champions or the small group of meta champions that cycle in and out, boy does the game become unfun for you in a hurry.

I still love riot. I had a great run. 5 years of an awesome game and yes, some of it is definitely accumulated mileage that was going to result in some burnout no matter what happened. But you guys have been your own worst enemy at times by making this game and many aspects to it so needlessly complicated just for the sake of staying fresh. There’s a beauty to simplicity and somewhere along the line, you guys lost track of that in your obsession with your esports and adding anything flashy that you could. Remember, esports might be the face of your company now but your playerbase has always been what’s kept you afloat.