In-game death is both exhilarating and frustrating at the same time.

I don’t read the news a lot and I can be really slow to the punch, but I did take a look at the Finals match in Worlds 2017. Holy shit, only 7 kills in the entire game? Holy shit that is boring! They even killed Baron before they got a first blood.

I think that’s prolly why they increased the numbers a lot. 2018 Worlds was a lot more fun.

So... why are people favouring more for the 2017 Tanky Meta than the 2018 Damage Meta? Because champions die more in-game, for many different reasons, and dying is just FRUSTRATING.

It’s FRUSTRATING that this champ is repeatedly killing you, either by your lack of awareness or power spiking.

It’s FRUSTRATING that your team lost the team fight.

It’s FRUSTRATING when your teammates keep dying and you can’t do anything to save them.

It’s FRUSTRATING that you were so close on killing somebody, but they were able to turn it around and kill you back with maybe a slow last tick of Ignite.

From those strings of frustrations, we, as Homo sapiens, tend to outcry more towards the public. It’s just in our system, as anger develops from that frustration.

However, on the other spectrum, killing champions and outplaying them, can make us feel superior, and that feeling of superiority... is EXHILARATING. Let’s take this for example: an Akali continues to harass a Swain during laning phase and kills him two times before and once she reached level 6. Not only that but she also continues to shit talk the Swain. Naturally, the Swain player would outcry back and feel the frustration beginning to affect his playing, but after a deep breath, careful steps and planning, a tower and a stopwatch, the Swain player would kill the Akali player right back in a duel, helping him and his team to help win the match.

These kinds of comebacks are EXHILARATING to make, and I believe Riot is trying to target that exhilaration to happen more frequently.

It’s EXHILARATING when you score first blood.

It’s EXHILARATING when you score the Ace or Multikill.

It’s EXHILARATING when you get first tower after shoving your opponent in lane.

It’s especially EXHILERATING when you make that shit talker on the other team lose their bravado.

Sadly, with more EXHILARATION, comes the FRUSTRATION. And I could see why people prefer a slower, methodical (boring and stale to others) metagame over a faster, reflexive (frustrating and rushed to others) metagame. Because they don’t wanted feel the frustration of dying so easily, especially with the new champs and reworks that came out in 2017-2018.

TL;DR: Because of Worlds 2017, we got more damage. This causes us summoners to both kill more, and die more; a philosophy Riot wants to enforce. From the increased killings, we either feel more exhilaration from successful games, to more frustration from deaths and losses.