Rant

Well Riot likely wanted to make this an echo chamber since the top threads on the old forums were often about important problems or cool ideas (dragon swain) (pool party)(or important champion design discussions) . With the new forums riot can distance their company from the community because of the echo chamber. We know no new ideas come out from here, they no longer have any reason to read the forums because of it. They believe that the circle-jerk majority outnumbers the number of players who have legitimate concerns about the game. Riot has also figured out that by shifting balance extremely quickly, through changes to items, champions, and the jungle, they can artificially create a state of "balance" since a champion who is good now, will be mediocre in 3 weeks, and a champion who is mediocre now might be amazing in 3 weeks. This constant shifting prevents the game from settling in to a well defined meta since a patch comes out every month or so. Sure this is nice for some players, who get to see their favorite champion at the top every now and again, but for players who just want to improve at the game and become good, it becomes a silly exercise since your performance is directly determined by how good a champion is at this time, so you have to switch champions, constantly, which doesn't do any good when I have a smallish pool of 20 champions who I can play well enough with to get by at my current mmr. The second a new patch comes out and a change happens, I have to switch champions (hopefully to one of the 20 I can play), or deal with the nerfs, which is a result of the echo chamber, so in a really roundabout way, my performance is influenced, abet slightly, is determined by the circle jerk of this forum.

To put it simply Riot has been constantly distancing themselves from the community for a very long time, there are no new posts on balance design and philosophy, no more ziles posts on game design, or the parrot stopping buy to talk about his armor kink. I don't really like that, I also don't like how champion balance changes at the drop of a hat, and these changes are sweeping. We all remember 4.20 Warwick, we all knew the original devourer was a bad idea and yet that change went through. This game is very much like these forums, they artificially make sweeping changes to the game in-order to make it "feel fresh". However to a player who gains enjoyment from improving his skills, These changes do nothing, all they do is make one subsection of champions better than another subsection. Riot no longer has to improve their game, all they have to do is shift balance as they please to keep the game fresh, cater to the vast number of players whom actual balance changes do not effect. I see this design philosophy in the forums, which cater to the circlejerk of x is op, y is up and the players keep on coming back for more because riot just patches the game and x is now up and y is now op so everyone is happy for the next 4 days.

This game isn't dead, and cannot die because players will keep coming in and not realize that the entire game changes every few weeks. There is no reason to improve when you can just complain and game design will change it for you. The only reason pro's are here is because riot pumps stupidly large amounts of money into their prize pools. This game is the ultimate version of casual because there is no actual depth, no development of a meta game, all balance is determined solely by who shouts the loudest, and which champion benefits most from riot's changes, currently riot just shifted all the power to items, so the most powerful champion is the one who synergies best with items x and item y. It is a great design paradigm to gain the most players, but at the end of the day this game is not much better balanced that it was in season 3, and the meta has actually seen less development due to the consistent sweeping changes.

This game is designed around Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, since the champions are either obviously op or up at a specific time but they are all moving towards being op or up, there is no stability, there is no consistent meta to build on or learn. Just look at the patch notes and build the best strategy from there. In fact it could be easily be said that game depth has decreased, due to the increased amount of movement options all options are now more forgiving, get caught in the jungle, just use your escape, get caught again, I guess you have to burn flash. Face checking a bush is now very safe, not only that you get a free ward every 90s, you no longer have to worry as much about gaining vision, not knowing where their jungle is, and you can even use this 90s ward to check the brush for you. You also don't have to worry about managing wards as support since you can only have 3 placed at a time. Conveniently sight-stone gives you two and has 4 charges, so if they kill one of your wards, you just place another right in the same spot. There is no need to think of how many wards to buy at fountain making support even less of a role, just rush sight-stone and peel for your adc.

On to the team play. In keeping Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in mind you get 4 players on your side and 5 on the enemy's however it is unknown what the skill levels of each player will be since not all players play each role at an equal skill level so it is unknown if your randomly assigned team will each get roles they are good at, god forbid you get 3 players who only play 2 roles, and they conflict with each other. This is not accounting for disagreements that happen during champion select or trolls or humans interacting. You simply do not know the competence of the people you are playing with, we know that matchmaking does not make 50-50 game odds, so did you get the good team, or the bad team?

That is pretty much all of the rant I can type out now, since it will be buried by whatever x is op y is up circle jerk that happens but what I want to say, is that the game is far too random for my tastes, I likely will be back, but just until I pick up a PC that does not have a trash graphics card, this game was nice while it lasted but after some amount of time

I just feel like there are so many factors outside my control that improving my game play doesn't feel worth it since I might get worse teammates, or champion balance will not be in my favor, or none of my teammates get the roles they want, or someone does not connect, or someone wants to troll, or some bug happens that wasn't there as of last patch. Or any of these things happen to the other team, then it is just dumpster them until 26 minutes grab baron and go 1,2,2 and win.

This game will always be a magnet to new players since they will always win some and lose some, they will never lose 70% of their games, even if 80% of the community is better than them, it hides experience and skill behind a cloud of other factors, there are games where solo q pro players lose gold level games, it doesn't happen often but it does happen. Even though these characters are at the pinnacle of the league meta game, they still lose to players outside the top 10% I find that funny and it helps show that the game doesn't have as much depth as some players believe it has, it always comes down to communication. This game's target demographic and matchmaking system does not support that communication, and so the game holds less interest then I wanted it to.

but don't worry, no one will read this because it will be buried under a mound of circle jerk that these new forums support.