RIOT's New Policy?
I quit playing back in July of 2015 due to a few mechanics changes, and admittedly getting a bit bored. Saw that those mechanics had since been fixed (Let's ignore Lethality for the moment), so I hopped back in to take a look. Looks good. Start playing again regularly, more than I have since before Season 1, and then started to notice a few things:
1: Hacks actually exist
They always kinda popped up, but not very often and the ones that did were quickly quashed. Admittedly, sometimes RIOT denied their existence until they were so common place as to almost be a game mechanic themselves, but they fixed them and moved on. We were all the better for it, and everyone was happy. After playing a few matches with a champion who goes invulnerable in two different stages, and being murdered while invulnerable (32ms latency, no one else seems to be lagging either) repeatedly... I stopped to take a look. The exact same game, the same two players are killing people twice their effective range away, hitting for full power against even the tanks, and their AS was maxed at 2.5 with no AS items.
Asking after the match, the only statement was "It's not like RIOT bans for this," and they left. After a quick search around some seedy websites, there are 37... let me say that again, 37, different, unique hack programs for League of Legends right now. War Rock is a junk game, forgotten by it's makers, and IT has 4. Seriously RIOT?
2: Damage Scaling
Is it just me or does every champion now do much more damage than previous? Even with 200+ MR a mage punches holes in you like you don't exist, and the same is true for AD/Armor. What happened here? It was never -completely- balanced, but the game also wasn't a "Hack and Slash" massacre game.
3: Quick Cast/Smart Cast
This is the default setting now? I came back and had to figure out why my skills were flying off in random directions - because some fool thought I wanted to use Quick Cast, and I have refused to use it since it came out as an OPTIONAL FEATURE OF BOT GAMES. Are you kidding me? Skill Shots were called Skill Shots because it took skill. Timing, leading your target, and knowing when to conserve a shot were all simply basics in trying to use champions with Skill Shots. Now they are the norm, because they hit harder than click-fire champions, and your odds of missing are very low. Why are they low? The Computer will always have better reflexes than a player.
Examples of What Used To Be Impossible:
- Catching a player mid flash animation.
- Hitting a player with all four abilities at the exact same time. (Not quickly after one another, but animations stacking at the same time.)
- Killing someone while you are stunned, because occasionally the system screws up and lets your abilities go off anyway because it is overloaded with input.
- Getting a Quad or Penta kill merely by holding down a button.
Where did the idea of skill go, RIOT, or do players want to 'be like the pros' so much that you decided to give them the illusion of skill? This isn't an equalizer, it's a crutch that is being used to beat the concepts of the game over the head.
About it for now, however I also have to add a couple of remarks. Towers were buffed, buffed again, and are now nearly worthless again. You broke Armor Pen (Now Lethality), which was already vaguely broken on many champions. Your focus on E-Sports is leaving the rest of your players in the dirt, while you fix Tournament issues, and leave broken things in the game broken. When y'all changed your name to RIOT games, and came out with your Motto and so forth, this was the precise kind of crap you guys swore to always watch for, and fix immediately, and for years you did.
I've been on these boards since 2011, the game since 2009, and this is the WORST experience I have had so far.
