Tired after so many years of Riot not caring about us

Just a warning, this is gonna be a rant.

I started playing this game near the end of season 1, just when it started becoming popular and all of my friends were constantly going on and on about it. I didn't think much of it at first but after playing it for a while it became a really fun way to kill a couple of hours every day, basically filling the void that World of Warcraft and other games couldn't fill.

Over the years though the game keeps becoming more and more complex in a bad way, which becomes particularly obvious with every "pre-season" patch they've done that brought a million different tiny and pointless changes that forced the players to adapt to so many different things at once that it might as well have been a new game.

The balance in this game has never been perfect. There have been times when I felt that the game was in a good state, balance-wise, and then Riot goes and fucks it all up by either introducing a new hero that defies all established logic, or by reworking some champion that didn't really need a rework, at least not as urgently as some other champions who to this very day are still pretty much shit. They will consistently keep adding and changing things without first fixing some of the ridiculous things, i.e. Fiora and Darius in the current meta, which will just make everything that much more frustrating as there are now more things that'll ruin a game.

They won't listen. Maybe it's because they care more about the pro players and the absolute casuals who watch said pro players, since they're a lucrative business for them, maybe it's because they're incompetent, maybe they're too proud to admit that they're making all of these glaring mistakes (that'd normally cost you your job in any other field) or maybe they're just completely greedy and they feel that it's more important that they make the game more appealing to new players with shiny new things, rather than cater to their existing audience by fixing some of its many problems.

Regardless, the result is this messy pile of poop that the current game is. I don't need to go into too much detail I feel, because most of you know exactly what I'm talking about - binary stomp games (stomp or get stomped) that end within 15 minutes, some champions not getting banned and ruining your day, turrets made of sponges, and so on. Who the hell even enjoys a game like that is beyond me, but it's definitely not me anymore.

I hate being vague though so I'll be more specific:

• With this patch you once again completely reworked masteries. For my degree thesis I'm creating a site that tracks stats and stuff about players using your API so I was dumbfounded by how the layout changed completely, as did the masteries themselves - you're not doing any favours to either the players or developers with how often you rework this. But even worse, the current system appears to be Ghostcrawler's inspiration in that it looks so much like the mess that WoW talents became after WotLK, the expansion when he took over. No longer do you have the option to choose multiple masteries from a tier in a tree, you max one or the other or split between the two. Do you want to go hybrid between trees? Tough luck, we've introduced completely broken talents at the end of the tree that you're a fool for not picking. Do you play a non-AS based AD champion and want to go offense... sorry I mean, "Ferocity"? Yeah tough luck, it's either AS or spell damage. So utterly ruined in just one patch, all you had to do to make the mastery system important yet have less of a negative impact on new players was to make individual masteries weaker and buff the base stats of every champion very slightly, much like you did with the nerf to boots in Season 3. But no, you just had to pick up the wrecking ball and in one just one patch introduce masteries that are both confusing and game-breakingly overpowered. Well done.

• You did this a while ago but it's still corroding your community today. All of those toxic players in your game, you couldn't find an elegant way to deal with them and the tribunal was apparently not working or something because you instead introduced an automated system that's quite arguably the worst punishment system in the history of BIG online games, and then went one step further... You made it so people who get banned, as a form of "punishment" have to play normal draft. What? Normal draft is my game mode of choice and over the last year I FELT the amount of toxic people increase as all of those ranked players that would otherwise be stuck being toxic in the average Bronze game were now stinking up the place in normal draft instead. And tell me, did it really accomplish anything? Sure, you took out some toxic individuals out of ranked temporarily, but the amount of trolling in ranked is virtually the same (as you STILL don't have a system that punishes intentional feeders and AFKers adequately) and relocated them to normal draft instead. Just brilliant.

• Turrets. They were always a sore spot in that everyone had a different idea of how strong turrets should be, how early you should be able to turret dive, and so on. However, nearly every player in my group of friends who I play League with felt that turrets were just too weak in S5 - they had too much HP/armor, possibly, but the damage that they did was so trivial that for the vast majority of the time if you ever died in lane then the turret became a non-option as a means of playing defensively as recovering, as many champions were able to do more damage to you than the turret did to them and as such turrets became inconsequential walls that only served to artificially slow the game down. The solution you came up with? Remove the artificually slow the game down part by having them be made of sponges, and keep the inconsequential part. I read and re-read your reasoning behind this, and I hear you - turrets in pro games and turrets in normal games function completely differently essentially, as the previous iteration of turrets meant that teams with good team work could destroy turrets so quickly that they held no meaning. But the current system... How did that ever happen? And why has no one come out to publicly apologize for this mess?

• Champion balance. There has always been a trend on League that there'll be a couple of champions that are ridiculously overpowered due to a tweak you made without testing carefully (or sometimes just ignoring the testers) and they'll become the new must-ban champions of the month/semester. When there were less than 100 champions that wasn't much of a problem as you banned them and moved on with your life - but now there's so many champions that you need to ban, so many champions being reworked all at once that you also want to ban because the make the game painful, and also you have all of these OTHER new champions that you keep releasing with progressively more outrageous mechanics. I mean, setting aside the actual balance of things, I'll mention some examples - Gnar has 3! count them, 3 passives, 2 of which are just in his W. Some of the older champions in the game STILL have a dysfunctional passive that doesn't even synergize with their kit, and instead of fixing those, you create a whole new champion who has multiple passives at once. Or when you added Kalista - one of my favourite champions, might I add - you essentially created a new standard of mobility that new and old ADCs alike have to contend with for no discernible reason. You eventually nerf those champions to be in line again, but does every new champion really NEED to be more ridiculous than the previous one to be interesting? What if you made less of them, and made it so their mechanics were more synergistic with other champions, rather than being so individually convoluted? Yasuo is a great example of this, you have him a skill that works great in teams with multiple knock-ups - and while Yasuo is pretty broken right now, the idea behind this is great... if you also hadn't gone and given him 2 passives, a lack of resource and infinite jumping. Why, just why?

That pretty much sums up the end of my rant. I'm just really sad because a couple of years ago I could think of nothing better than kill some time with my friends playing some League during the weekend. Now, I feel that I TRY to motivate myself to play this game because I want to like it for how it used to be, but every game ends up being more disappointing than the last one. It's that feeling of knowing that you've lost 5 minutes in the game that's the nail on the coffin for me, but I guess at least now you can be happy that you only lost 20-25 minutes of your life playing that game. Shame you also get the same feeling when you win a game.

I don't know if this is Ghostcrawler's fault, and I'm inclined to pin it on him because I started getting this feeling after you guys announced that you got him on board, but you killed this game for me and that's one of the most improbable things I could have imagined happening 2-3 years ago.