You could spread out your stats and be more creative. There were even more options for extra stats. New runes is like a neat change to masteries but honestly I wish we had old runes back. They shoulda just made runes free and fully available from account level 1 and changed masteries.
Champion Skin18 votesYeah old runes were decent most of the time though heavily limited for most players because of cost and lack of pages combined with not being able to edit them in champion select (leading to most players only having standard pages as they didn't have pages or runes enough to afford having specialized pages or experiment with what works best)
Though they probably could have used some work in making scaling and flat runes being closer in power as one option was usually the better choice if you wanted that stat
ModAcademy Kayn9 votesThat type of thing is coming back, check out the Dev Corner post that talks about Big League changes
JAYCCCCCCCCCCCCE1 votesCan you link it i cant find it
ModAcademy Kayn1 votesEditted post with link.
JRobin313 votesYay! Player choice returns?!?
deadlychuck2 votesSo basically they've admitted that removing the old rune system was bad...
because make no mistake, the only system the really got significantly changed was the rune system, the mastery system pretty much kept moving in the exact same direction they'd been forcing it in the past 5 years.
ModAcademy Kayn5 votesI think something that people need to keep in mind, with examples like Dynamic Que and Rengar/Leblanc/Kogmaw reworks, is that Riot isn't a company to immediately revert something. They tend to try and fix things they think is a problem, to make the new system work, because they think that maybe it has potential and could lead to a better experience.
That's not always the case, and sometimes they do miss the mark. But there's always been a minimum of a year with big systematic changes, to let those changes settle in the playerbase, and see whether or not it's a good system long term (Like the SmiteBuffs from jungle camps, where it settled into a fairly concrete rotation of what to smite.)
Lil Homie busta1 votesThat would be nice, if the stake in hand wasn't said playerbase. Each one of these "unhappy" changes takes a lot of players away. The results are today's situation.
I understand Riot's pursuit to bring perfection to the game. I really do, personally. But every move cost resources, and they shouldn't be so bold when they don't have the playerbase fully supporting their idea (cough* cough* 
). That's where SINCERE and DETAILED communication is so important. All they did back when they announce the new runes was showing some flashy and interesting stuff, without putting the whole perspective of the current rune system that we have today. If we knew back then that the choices would be so much decreased, we wouldn't accept the change, they would (or at least could) take our feedback and we would have stat choices separated from the runes from preseason day one.
ModAcademy Kayn2 votesI mean, with the Aatrox thing, they announced back during the last roadmap how drastic his rework would be to his playstyle. Dunno if anything came of that from the Aatrox playerbase during that roadmap, so enh. You also need to consider, that people hardly ever like change, as seen with the plants.
You don't know how something will work until it's released on a mass scale, playtesting can only do so much. You also can put too many eggs in what the community thinks, especially something like Runes, because they've been a thing for so long that most people just accepted them as a fact of life. How do you go taking in player feedback in something that's second nature to them? How would they know something better exists?
I think a lot of shit EA get's is deserved, but one thing I agree with them is a less "excuse" version of "Players don't know what they want." EA uses this as an excuse to disregard players opinions about a fanbase (Saying fans that want a real C&C game don't know what they want). The truth is, Players can only see so far in front of them.
How would they know, something is better? Metroid Prime was criticized for leaving it's 2D platforming for it's 3D FPS aspect, but Metroid Prime is an amazing advancement of the series. Not a lot of fans from the 2D age would tell you "You know what I want from my 2D game? Make it 3D and first person." Same goes for Mario Sunshine, a far relative from the usual gameplay of Mario, but still a great game.
So, my point, is how does a company strive to make their change Metroid Prime level of Success, when also striving to keep the familiarity of something old? It's hard, and doesn't always work, but the chance is worth it imo.
Leetri1 votesPeople generally don't know exactly what they want until it's right in front of them. Had you asked a person from 300 years ago what they wanted they wouldn't have said "a car", they would've said " a faster/stronger horse" despite a car being superior in basically every single way when it comes to transport. It takes a visionary to think "What if we made something better than a horse?" to realize that horses aren't the only alternative. To quote my favourite champion: "People fear change. They settle with fine when they could have exceptional."
deadlychuck2 votesRiot's problem is actually an issue with progressivism, and I mean that in a technical sense not a political one.
They feel that any progress is better than no progress, which isn't always true, and most companies only realize this once they've ended up with only a niche audience and need to try their hardest to maintain what little they're left with. The contextually appropriate action is better than any singular philosophy on changes.
What's unfortunate is that as such they will sometimes be so focused on implementing something new, because it's new, that they will not consider what's being lost or if the new thing is worth more than what exists when it's no longer new.
The runes were a perfect example of this... I'm not even speaking about this from a post hoc 20/20 hindsight prospective either. This is a repeated pattern by riot for years now and the exact problems that now exist were obvious on the inception of the new system and are fundamental to it's design making them extremely expensive problems to attempt to solve working within the bounds of it.
ModAcademy Kayn3 votesWell, no, they don't just do it because it's new. They do it because they think something is better. To assume that they blindly move forward without understanding the merits and disadvantages of an older system is ignoring the fundamental of design in the first place.
With Old Runes, and this is my opinion, they were needlessly complicated for new players, and had plenty of noob trap choices along the way. There was also the hassle of having to use outside sites to see other players Rune pages, yet more barriers. I don't include "They were expensive" despite being an old complaint, since the argument "they can be made free" exist. Is a learning curve bad? Not at all, but just because you can learn to deal with a problem, doesn't mean we should just accept that a problem exists.
The Old Runes merit: They did allow a lot of choices, either to bandage a weakness, or to emphasize a strength. It had a bunch of fun choices, as people like SivHD can surely agree. The ol' 1% crit chance meme, Movement speed out the wazoo, full HP regen etc. The question remains however, does the confusion outweigh the learning curve and barrier for entry to Newer players?
The runes weren't perfect, and there's a reason to as why they were changed. How they were changed is a different problem all together, but it remains the fact that it is change. It leaves room for "Can we make this better?" instead of just removing one of possibly more problems.
deadlychuck1 votesFirst, these are terrible points to bring up when justifying system changes, because it assumes two things. It assumes that these choices will never become viable. It assumes that everyone must and will use the "most optimal" choices, based on someone else's play style and talents.
had plenty of noob trap choices along the way. There was also the hassle of having to use outside sites to see other players Rune pages, yet more barriers
Simply because, as you said, they're not bad. They are only bad to the degree that you assume they're bad.
The question remains however, does the confusion outweigh the learning curve and barrier for entry to Newer players?
Not when you're running out of new players to entice to play your game. Which after 7 years, 4-5 as the most popular title in games, there isn't any new untapped audience left in NA.
Either way, they do credit "new" as inherently more valuable when weighing the merits of the systems, which is completely irrational. Simply being new has no relevance to the system itself, only your perception of the system, which will change when the system has been out long enough to no longer be considered "new"... which is exactly what's happening a year later where people are now starting to take a critical look at the rune system now that the little depth it did have has been completely explored already.
Mokuto Bunshi1 votesLike Mercy said, there's nothing to miss. A lot of people (myself included) forgot that the baked in stats were a tested system.
FéliXXX7 votesi feel like old runes was better nowdays lethality stackers cant keep it up with people who spend 600g on armor
Janakin7 votesDon't remind me my ultra-super +37 armor runes :-(.
Lil Homie busta1 votes1% Crit cheese
9 Armor + 12 MR, no level 3 two-shots
Xp quins...
Tegash7 votesTheyre bringing back choose-your-stats next year, so that's something.
League of Legends 2019, featuring new Munes and Rasteries.
Lil Homie busta7 votesI miss them too. Back then, we played champions using runes, now we play runes using champions.
Shobek1 votesThis is deep bruh. Very deep.
EvilUnicornLord6 votesI like the new runes (except for the new thunderlords, screw that).
But I'd like them a lot more if you didn't have to buy rune pages. League shouldn't be pay-to-win.
hrooza dota 1 votesyou get 2 for free and you are free to change them champ select
EvilUnicornLord1 votesYou have very little time to change them and, most of the time, I wind up not changing them before the match starts.
It's just a major pain that nobody needs.
hrooza dota 1 voteswhen i started maybe but now i have no problem changing my runes picking phase in any mode out side of aram maybe you just need some time to get used to the runes and you will end up changing them in half a sec
EvilUnicornLord1 votesAnd when you do that, you will have no need of preset rune pages and paying for them is just another obnoxious gimmick that should normally be free.
It's not like you can flash your rune pages at enemies after whacking them or walk into battle wearing them (they aren't emotes or skins) so there's really no reasonable point in having to pay for them.
hrooza dota 1 votesthen dont pay them they are more of QoL things then game impacting things so if you want to make your life easier buy some with BE or just ignore it all together and buy champs like me :)
Automated Riven1 votesIt takes like 15-20 seconds if you are even slightly families with where things are. I have 19 mastery pages and I use 5 on the account (cause I can) but on my other accounts I only ever use 1.
Saibbo5 votesYou could spread out your stats and be more creative
Aka. copying the pro's rune pages x)
Automated Riven1 votesNot everyone did that. Tbh I hadn't looked up a rune page in like 6 years by the time they were swapped. And I didn't look them up the first year aside from right away when I was figuring out which ones were the best to unlock right away.
deadlychuck2 votesWhat do you think people do now?
I can promise you that for every player that stopped looking up rune pages, a player which previously didn't look them up started... or you know, just quit playing all together That said, the majority probably didn't change what they did, the same people still overwhelmingly look up the pages and the same people still overwhelmingly make their own.
Saibbo4 votesso really there's no point in the old runes to be more creative if the result is the same?
deadlychuck1 votesThe point in the old runes is that for those who are creative they offer more flexibility and depth of creativity.
The new system offers only an illusion of choice with how little flexibility there is in the choices you make.
Anatera4 votesI said this exact thing months ago and no one believed me rofl. Guess people have to experience it for ages before they finally getting it through their fucking heads.
Elewd4 votesFuck runes, they were awful, spend 70,000 IP just to be competitive at all, making you not able to buy champions on fresh accounts it was horrendous. a Huge timesink before you can even attempt ranked and most people not even understand runes in teh first place. Also all runepages were "solved" You didnt modify a runepage for almost 3-4 seasons unless a Quintessence rune got nerfed hardcore (movespeed nad lifesteal)
Hordecorez4 votes100% bring them back. Diversity was good for gameplay.
trunktractor4 votesYou could spread out your stats and be more creative. There were even more options for extra stats. New runes is like a neat change to masteries but honestly I wish we had old runes back. They shoulda just made runes free and fully available from account level 1 and changed masteries.
Absolutely right. The new runes are too simplistic, and really just masteries reworked. The old runes were great in concept, and it was easy to customize and create unusual options for various champions.
It's funny, some people complain that the old runes were complicated. They really were not complicated, except maybe for 6 year olds trying to master the game. They were easy to understand, and fun to manipulate, as long as you could read.
It's not fun to be forced into a cookie cutter with the new masteries/runes. There just aren't many choices for us any more.
Riot, you need to bring back runes, maybe keep the new system as a revised mastery tree. Bring back runes, add some new types and make them purchasable with the valueless blue essence. Make it so there is only one tier of runes, but with a large variety of options.
nikos pyridis24 votesOld Runes could create fun things Gold Gankplank. Also you could get Resistance stats so you would not get blowed up like you do now. Like, what does riot expect when they give akali 23 base armor?
Dllesh3 votesi miss teambuilder
Arcane Blue Boi3 votesIf they just made it free, so you wouldnt just get 2 standard ap and ad pages and move on to buy champions...
Crookodile3 votesR.I.P one percent crit rune.
Press F to pay respects.
DXD13562 voteswho dosent? they really made you plan out your runes but the new ones are more beginner friendly which is fine tho
Shobek3 votesThey could easily just have kept old runes; made them free; and made reccomended pages auto selected for beginners.
No reason to ruin the complexity of the game.
MagicalDemons1 votesI think the reason I liked runes reforged so much more than the old system is because runes are now free. Spending weeks grinding for a couple rune pages before was such a pain and I hated spending IP on runes.
Shobek2 votesThey should have just made the old runes free.
QsoloPro1 votesI don't miss old runes, I miss the ability to provide a decent amount of choices that old runes provided. I'll give you a for instance, now in theory they make it sound like the new rune system has some variations right? However it really doesn't, there are whole sections in there built around "takedown". Now that might be good for assassins or frontline damage, but for supports those things are completely none viable. And I bring this up because there are supports that can greatly benefit from using more than just resolve or sorcery but they'll never be able to use any of the other runes because they don't have anything in them other than shit designed specifically for kill based upgrades.
TrikzterzArma1 votesHahah I got downvoted when I said this
SpecterVonBaren1 votesOnly thing I miss about them is being able to take tank runes while having traditional support masteries so I could start off tankier but still scale well with utility. Fortunately they've said that they are disconnecting stats from specific trees so I should be able to do what I did then once they do that.
RainXBlade1 votesWe all do. I'd rather run runes that allow me to run my champ much smoother and cover up his/her weaknesses rather than ones that just say, "do more damage XD".
That's what kills online games in the first place: when all the choices in a team-based, pvp game just gives more damage instead of utility or even defensive stats.
Shobek1 votesAnyone who doesn't miss the old runes needs to just imagine if they were all free. Because thats what we deserve.
Bring back our runes and talent tree style masteries!!!!!!!!!
