Riot, have you ever considered that you ask too much of your casual players?

I’m going to preface this with my experience as a player to highlight my points

Here is my greatest frustration with your game:

I am a full-time college student; full time worker, full time father/husband. I know, my experience is a bit different than your casual player. However, it is not that different. Many of my friends that play this game at least work full-time, and a good portion of them work and attend university, too. And we honestly still enjoy this game the same as we did when many of us began playing 7 years ago. However, this game has become way too complex. Let me highlight some points:

You guys patch every two weeks or so, which makes getting used to the game hard because unless you play 6-8 hours a day, you need roughly a week and a half or so just get familiar with it. Certainly, the game doesn’t change too drastically between patches, but over the course of time with constant patches and you being unable to adjust to every patch completely, you inevitably fall so far behind that you become out of touch with meta, champion capacity, runes, game physics and game objectives.

I may be overstating how much you need to play, but if you are on a strict schedule - like many adults are - then you don’t have the kind of time you need in a game that constantly changes to stay caught up. And your game isn’t getting simpler: you’re making your champions more complex, you’re making gameplay more complex, you’re making runes/masteries more complex, you’re making items more complex. If you go a few months without playing - which again, not unreasonable for anybody with a shred of responsibility in their life- you come back to a game that is totally different. You barely recognize it. And you’re making this worse as you’ve gone along and you show no signs of slowing down.

Imagine someone from season 2 or season 3 coming back now. They’d be like “wait what? How many different dragons? What does that dragon do? It’s RNG? Wait, what happens at 14 minutes? Wait, why are those crabs important? Wait why can’t I use my wards yet? When do I get to use them? Wait what happens at 3 minutes? What is that thing in baron pit?”

1. Of course I realize that the game had its complexities back then and this is a bit of a strawman but I really want to emphasize the point that you’ve made so many changes to this game that have over complicated it to the point where it’s incredibly hard for players like me to keep up. I was a diamond player at one point, capable of reaching mid diamond if I was really interested in doing so. Granted, my mechanics are shit now but I can barely keep gold because the game changes so much that I can barely keep up. This isn’t your fault or anyone’s fault but my own, but I literally do not have the time to play enough to stay up on this game to reach anything higher.

I am definitely not the typical casual league player. At best, I’m an extreme example. But there’s are many players like me and my position highlights this point: when does it become too much? When are you asking way too much from your non-professional players or players that don’t aspire to be professionals? Surely you must have these conversations. And surely you’ve done things in the past you regret (big mid season patches) but that’s a no-brainer and let’s be honest: you caved on that because your professional players complained, not your casual players. I would like to think there’s point where you guys slow down patches, find more simplistic fixes rather than complex fixes and stop over complicating new champions. Fresh and new doesn’t mean more complicated and I really think you guys do not understand that, and as such you really don’t understand casual players.