Meta: Has Gameplay & Balance Always Been This Angry?

I've only been reading these boards for a few months, and I gotta say, there's more ragers on these boards than in my actual games of League. I think Riot's made some big mistakes lately (see the repeated Jungle nerfs that they are finally starting to address), but I'm curious. For anyone who's been here longer than me: did the season 5 changes create all this anger? Or were the boards always like this, and season 5 changes are just what its hot to be angry about right now?

EDIT: I think the fact that many of the responses to this thread are "the balance is the worst its ever been" rather than talking about the state of the boards confirms that the boards are angry. But it doesn't tell me whether that anger is new.

There was one post that was really on point from Test Account though, so I'm going to post it here in the OP in the hopes that more people read it:

[{quoted}](name=test account,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=kAPET5Au,comment-id=000d,timestamp=2015-03-09T15:03:14.089+0000)

The forums always had their share of rage and QQ. There's been a bit of a shift for the worse, though I think it's mostly a matter of perception and the switch from forums to boards.

I think part of it is the way the new boards are set up, combined with a playerbase that is now much larger than it had been before. The voting system allows a vocal minority to push things to the top, and with the size of the playerbase that vocal group just happens to have enough votes to put things to the top. People who are more level headed are also generally less likely to downvote things -- we see this phenomena a lot on reddit, which these new boards are quite obviously based off of. It's referred to there as the circlejerk. You can guess why. The upvote/downvote system works on reddit because it's set up in such a way that if people strongly disagree with the more vocal proponents of a community they can break off to make their own. In some cases, the new community actually becomes more popular than the old one as a result. Since that's not an option here, and it seems like many people are still unfamiliar with how the voting system works we are all essentially stuck in the vocal-group's echo chamber.

Combined with that, it definitely feels like Rioters as a whole, with some few exceptions, have become quieter and less communicative here. I'm not sure if it's because so much vitriol is being pushed to the top and visibly "favored" by the playerbase and they're trying to avoid it, which is understandable, or if they're actually actively just less interested in communicating with us all. Back in the days of the forums, you could see Rioters posting more often and more frequently -- there were also more than just a few of them posting. That, combined with the fact that "upvotes" didn't strictly decide what was at the top in default view, definitely helped to calm people down and create more civil discourse.

I'd also like to add that Fed By Snu Snu makes a really good point, and you ought to read through his post, along with Eedat's (who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite posters here) response. As someone who was here in S1, and eventually left for a while because of how toxic the community was before returning once it got better, it definitely feels like nowadays we have less of a chance to influence the game meaningfully. Riot isn't some small indie company anymore, though, and we all maybe need to come to accept that. The removal of the tribunal has let the toxicity grow again, and as others have pointed out that's creating growing discontent. As Eedat pointed out, many of the recent patch changes feel very haphazard, even if you can clearly see what the goal behind them was, and that's definitely not helping.

Over all, however, I firmly believe it's the way the boards are set up and the quiet on the part of many rioters (which may or may not be a partial fault of the way the boards function). We had anger in the forums, but it always felt less apparent.