I don't know what to say.
I think I've given up on this game. I really do. Do I create another post about how crappy the game is in it's current state, and either get down-voted because I didn't voice it correctly or, at best, get up-voted and completely ignored by the only people who can change anything? Never-mind how harmful that is to the game in the long-run, but... oh well. I have a lot of major problems and awful, awful feelings for the game right now and I don't have any other way to voice them to people who might listen and care.
Every game I play this season just makes me want to play less and less. I went from playing the game obsessively to disliking it more every single match I play. People say "Oh, you're just burning out!" which I can tell you isn't true because if I imagine playing in S6/7 once more, I get that fire welling up inside of me that tells me to play 'just one more!' Too bad now it's almost retrograde.
Toxicity in this game is... rampant. Absolutely, irritatingly rampant, and it's because people aren't having fun in a game where they can't play it. I know this might piss some people off, but have you ever noticed how the assassins (and now ADCs by extension because they are functionally assassins but for entire teams now) are the most toxic people in League, in general? That could, could be pointing at something like a feast-or-famine play-style being... I don't know... unhealthy because it's either you or the enemy team unable to play the game at all if something goes wrong for either of you, but... what do I know as a Psych. Major.
Giving everyone assloads of damage has made toxicity even more of an issue. Everyone, at one point, has been toxic because they have not been having fun. There's a reason they massively increased the report threshold for punishment. There's a reason you have three free match leaves instead of the one you had during S7 and S8. They are just bandaging a gaping wound.
Next, we have the dumb ranking system, which blows at this moment. I have not seen a PvP-oriented game with worse matchmaking. I have played APB. I have played DotA2. I have played GW2 (a game with the most barebones of PvP matchmaking) and I just... have not seen anything worse than League's. The ranks are a sad joke; You can have three completely separate leagues in the same game, at the same time, in solo/duo ranked. Entire teams with above-average win-rates up against teams with sub-standard win-rates, leading to steamrolls that're only sometimes fun for the other side. (Don't tell me "You deserve boring, unfun misery if you lose!" It isn't always your fault.)
Smurfs. Lets talk about those small blue creatures who can ruin an upwards of ten to fifty games (note: that's ninety to four-hundred and fifty people, per smurf, who now have lost or gained undeserved LP) from Bronze all the way to Challenger, for their montages I can assume. Thanks to the absurd damage creep, it is admittedly easier than ever to create those montages... but I have a feeling that people are going to get real bored of them fast, since the big-brain plays that went on within them aren't there anymore.
SKIP THIS IF REALITY SUCKS AND YOU DON"T WANT TO HEAR IT I really don't want to get into this one too deeply because it will strike many peoples' nerves. I love/d LoL just like you... but even I can see that their constant stream of events, unique icons and skins and wards and emotes and all, is an attempt to get you to stick around even if the game itself is bad enough in it's current state that you want to move on. Their matchmaking, a constant streak of effort and payoff (loss-streaks, win-streaks) piled on top of the events to trigger that primal urge just... as a cherry on top.
It just sucks to see. It hurts to see other people hurt, and it hurts to see them not leave even if I myself won't because I want to convince people to quit, or at least inform them on why they may stick around even if they aren't having fun and even if it's worth it.
...what else? What, what else? China's grapple on LoL/Tencent? ...yeah. Fine. It fucking sucks as much as you think it does. It does suck. What sucks more, though, is that they could slice off a small fraction of the people from their main company and let them have their own little company made specifically to manage and balance the U.S'/E.U's version of the game akin to the way Korean MMOs have a tendency to vary wildly region-to-region, just so people could pick the game they like while the master company running the game makes money off of every possible audience. Will it happen? ...eh. Tencent probably thinks it's people like GhostCrawler who keep LoL alive and kicking (nah, not the art team... who gives a fuck about them, right?) so they're unwilling to hand management of the U.S version over to someone else more reliable. Riot also won't change problematic item passives into unique item passives so that they don't break the game anymore, and they'd rather just nerf the AP it gives for some reason, so I won't hold my breath hoping for their leads to be as mindbogglingly brilliant as I am...
It's just... from every angle this game seems to be fucked. The only light they have is the community which offers fair insight into the current problems the game suffers from, but because of a minority of vocal people who express their dissent for any opinions the forums as one living entity has, on top of outright attacking the people behind those opinions (kinda' like a certain president, his following and his candidacy) all of the community's insight is blown off by the people who could do something about it because those people who can do something are already emotionally biased and invested in their creation. "It is perfect, see? That one person agreed with me! Everyone else is just being unreasonable and/or conjuring issues up out of thin air!"
That's all I have to say, I guess.
