The real thing that's eating away at the "quality" of playing this game.

This is made all the more noticeable in urf, as all parts of the game tend to be.

It's the fact that the only part of the game which is being catered towards is the goal of winning the game. It's always been a thing in the game, but I don't think I've ever seen so much try hard in the game since I started playing in early 2010.

It's really noticeable in urf, because players are capable of pushing towers in 10 minutes given a substantially better team. Given that the teams are random, people almost NEVER goof around messing around with different game mechanics or interactions. They're more focused on getting to 1 of 2 end game screens, throughout the entire match, than they are on the way by which you get there.

It's not the destination it's the journey. You can't remove the journey and have the destination still feel just as satisfying.

Now, who's to blame for this? The community? Esports? Riot? Riot's Target audience? It's hard to say, but i think that most people would agree that the game has lost it's satisfaction to the community which has spent years investing time in the game. Now i know the immediate gut reaction to such a statement is "well it's rose tented glasses", but that's clearly not the case, new players who have tried, and didn't enjoy, the game in the past, can now enjoy the game. The game has clearly changed substantially and you can't say that it's objectively gotten better.

For such a popular game, it's not longer simply about appealing to a larger audience. It becomes trading 1 subset for another. Which is bigger, the one you've already got or the one you're trying to appeal too, is hard to say and how each subset is dependent on the other is even harder to say. For example, if all of the support players left the game, for some reason unique to them, then a very large portion of the ADC players would leave, on the basis that they preferred the gameplay which involved the support playstyles which have all left.