Some of my thoughts about League of Legends after more than 6 years of playing.

Hello everyone,

Today I'm gonna be open and discuss about the game in many different aspects from my perspective. I have been playing this game for 6 hand a half years since October 2012. My peak rank was Plat in season 4 and 5. Before that, I played DotA 1 from 2010 to 2012. The reason why I decided to move to League is because League, and my opinion, feels much better than DotA in many ways:

First, when you die in League, you don't lose your gold. This encourage you to make more risky plays, and reduce the effect of snowball from your opponent.
Second, you can back home at anytime you want. This requires you to make more precise calculation before you can back home and buy items.
Third, there's no way to directly deny minions. You focus on other creative ways to control your minion waves.

These are the main reasons why I moved to League. There are a few more reasons, such as in the competitive scene, I think, Riot games was doing better at around 2013.

To me, season 4 and 5 were the best seasons of League, not because old things feel better, but because they were genuinely better. There are many different team composition that you could build to win the game, and those team-comps require different strategies to be operated. For instance, if you don't want to pick a 5v5 team comp because the other team has better adc player that love hard carrying his teammates, then you could pick a spilt-pushing top laner like Shen, and smartly play the map. Or you can have a strong assassin like Zed and counter that strategy by picking the adc and win the 3vs5 combat. And many other different teamcomps: -Poking -Strong teamfight: -strong early teamfight -strong late-game teamfight around adc. -2 adc. -4 tanks -Strong engaging and/or disengaging. -Strong sustainability. etc...

Each player can chose his or her favourist way to win the game. Some love picking early champ and stomp the enemy early, some love play it slow and safe and win by map-controlling.

But all of a sudden, season 6 happened. New mastery was introduced. There's no way you can have a 0-30-0 mastery anymore. There were less creative ways to win the game at this point, it all came down to who could win the team fight, but at least there were still different teamfight-comp. And then Rift Herald was introduced, which was a bad idea: the game was sped up faster and faster. Mid season 7 was when the game became unfun to play. I remember during the tank meta, watching esport wasn't really fun, because I could tell who was gonna win by counting the tankers, whichever team had more tankers would win.

And season 8 was a true nightmare: Blue essence, Rune reforged, Conqueror, Akali reworks, AP botlaners meta, Kai'sa and Xayah 80% of the time, Scuttler changes, jungle exp nerfs, and vision gut.

Now here I am, in season 9. Champions are either broken or useless, because the only way to win the game is through teamfight. One mistake and it cost you the game. The game is now more about who will be punished for making mistakes than who will be rewarded for making a nice play. Game ended when you have not even enjoyed it.

I feel lonely. My friends quit ages ago. The game is no longer the game I used to love, it's become a skin selling machine. New Esport casters are less and less professional, going off the topic frequently. They even spoiled Captain Marvel on an LCK match. Riot worries more about gender neutrality then the game quality, more about prestige skins then fixing bugs. I feel disappointed and burnt out. I hope they will address the issues and fix it, but every patches released just took away my hope bit by bit. And to be honest it's not that hard to fix the game, following these steps:

1. Wait until preseason so the changes won't affect pro play too much. (Which Riot just missed this window 4 months ago).
2. Revert to old runes. Revert Mastery to season 5. Adjust champs base stats with the revert.
3. Ungut vision.
4. Remove Redemption.
5. Remove Stopwatch. Only Zhonya should have this privilege.
6. Remove or adjust Attack damage-Defense items (jugganaugt items).
7. Revert Scuttler. Buff jungle exp.
8. Revert shutdown bounty.
9. Remove first turret bounty.
10. Revert AP items changes to before 8.4.

That's what came to my mind at the moment. I think all other things are fine, or at least will be much easier to balance after those things I mentioned has been done. Turret plates are fine.

In conclusion, changing for the sake of change is not a good idea. Riot has made unnecessary changes for the past 3 years, which made them game less strategy-depth, and less fun to play. Riot should think about the bigger picture: if people love playing the game, they won't mind buying the skins, no matter how much it is. If people hate the game, they won't buy a single skin, no matter what. And remember, the playerbase can only grow to a certain size, so instead of trying to attract more players, Riot should try to keep the old ones.