First off, screw premades. They're toxic to anyone outside the group and that's simply human nature.
Not in my experiences. I've never once been a victim to premade bullying. And when I play with my friends we are always nice to people outside of our group. Don't use absolutes about things that aren't absolute.
Secondly, purely solo players are still at least 30 percent of their playerbase whether temporarily or permanently.
Source?
Actually, if anybody has any hard numbers of any type for League players from within the last year, I'd love to see them. I'm having trouble finding any.
I know I hate having my friends list full of 200 strangers whom I've forgotten what character they play and why they matter, nevermind how offensive that one asshat who spam invites everyone on his list whenever he's bored is.
If someone isn't your friend, why are they on your friends list? Not only is this outside of the scope of discussion, but it's also pointless to complain about because you can solve this in 5 minutes any time you want. If you get offended because someone invites you to play a game, just delete that friend. Problem solved.
But I /do/ believe Lyte is lying about how difficult a decision it is to release solo queue given that the mechanics aren't that hard to work out.
You can think whatever you want of Lyte. You can say he's lying, and that's fine, so long as you admit that you have no legitimate reason to believe so. I'm sure he doesn't care about players' opinions of him at all, given how we've treated him in the past.
But don't say you understand 'the mechanics' behind how difficult implementing solo queue is. There is absolutely no way that any one of us could possibly understand the behind-the-scenes situations and difficulties Riot has to deal with every day. Saying you do is just extremely naive and arrogant. You do not know better than the whole of Riot.
Make the decision in a vacuum, disregard Dynamic Queue, stop subjecting a solo player to curse/skype led 4 man teleport/jungle ganks bot any time they decide to have a fight break out.
Good decisions aren't made in vacuums. You need to consider everything in order for it to be a good decision, right? Maybe I'm not understanding what you're getting at here.
Also, come on man. It's a 5v5 game with lots of strategic depth. I can understand why a solo player would find himself out of his depth, but that's the danger with sticking your head in the sand and acting like this isn't a team game. They aren't incapable of doing anything new, either; last season the term "clown fiesta" was borne/popularized and there were 5-man ganks (since mid took TP more often before it was nerfed) in bot lane. If the support lays down a ward in your bot lane bush, don't push up past it if their top lane has TP and the jungler is MIA. This is just good advice whether you're playing against a premade or not.
Bot lane has two people in it. It's more impactful to shut down two players on the enemy team than just one. Additionally, ADCs are weak early, as they scale from items. This is why bot lane is subject to such hellish plays early on. It's just a result of efficiency.
Stop subjecting every single competitive game to exclusively split-pushing and non-risky play once the gold lead is comfortable, create more time to make plays when behind and make more possibilities for a team that is 5k or 10k gold ahead to throw (without allowing them to split push all 3 lanes in without anything dedicated to split pushing and waveclear)
What does the pro meta have to do with solo queue? This is a completely different subject. Are you just looking for things to complain about?
Bringing back 1000g bounties on carries who are at godlike status would go a long way toward shaking this season up, whether it's forcing them to split push enough to where they can actually be caught out, or whether they are forced to decide to teamfight more often without just baiting whoever comes to push the lane back out up the lane and into a gank.
I like that you're suggesting ideas and trying to be helpful, but I really doubt that punishing players who get ahead to such an extreme degree would entice them want to take any risks. Long death timers and paper towers, yadda yadda.
Splitting the whole baron buff into five stackable auras to force a team that wants to end the game to push a single lane in as 5 would also work to shake this season up properly, and that's without touching towers or death timers.
I dunno, people don't seem too happy when Riot "shakes up" the game. The boards is still whining incessantly from all the shaking up this preseason did. I won't pretend to have any real idea whether or not that suggestion would be good for the game, but I do have one counter-argument, if I may play the Devil's advocate:
If a team wants to 5-man seige a lane when they get Baron, they can already do that. So in this case, the change has no positives, really. But as for negatives, there are two that I can see: 1) it would decrease the strategic value of split pushing (which you may be in favor of, by the sound of it. But why do you think split pushing is a bad thing? It prevents stalling and allows for a wider selection of champs in the top lane, for starters.), and 2) it would make Baron much less valuable of an objective. If all 5 auras are needed for it to be fully effective, then a team would not opt to risk taking Baron down unless they are absolutely sure they could do so without losing even one man. This hightened risk would only discourage people from taking it, which would probably be a bad thing, as Baron is intended to allow teams to crack open bases.
This game has seen its share of the seige meta in seasons past, much to peoples' chagrin. Do you dislike split pushing so much that you'd rather go back to that?
