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In general...League of Legends

KZiLLa··4 votes·824 views

I've been playing since beta. Things have started to trend toward the WOW syndrome. Seasons 1 & 2 were by far the greatest. Riot was not as big of a company yet and we got all the nice pampering like maps ( harrowing / Snow SR). Now when I look at LoL in a nutshell. It's all about LCS / WCS / events that bring revenue and attention. While in the past I have found it pretty entertaining. The last worlds I was really excited about was worlds season 2. Each and every year it's another borefest. One sided stomp. Why? Because the game changes TOO much. It's not always about who's the best now, it's about pick / ban phase. Not which team picks strategically, it's who has the same top picks first. And you've heard it all before, but theres a reason why the same champs were picked / banned in worlds aside from the few niche here and there, Each patch just brings a different limelight (you've said it yourself.. Why I'm still trying to understand your logic. Yes some champions don't see much play,. But there CANNOT be a rotation of who you think needs to see play, you overbuff, nerf to shit, whatever. All that does is create what we hope you're trying to combat. Power creep. So far it's been nothing but that, power can be in anything. Dmg, heal,shield, cc, hard cc, seige. I mean in reality nobody knows where you're wanting to go with this game. But you NEED to know if you want people to keep playing because you have something that started amazing. Too many items added / removed / new champs / reworks. I kinda like the direction you're taking this new season BUT. You're drastically changing the game yet again. For the 50th time, I mean every single change you make, makes a swing in the game. Changes should be across the board if you are going to make them. Sure there's always going to be a "meta" created by players, especially now with streaming being readily available but, all you're doing is making a vicious cycle that will keep repeating itself.

Snapping back to reality tho, I feel you've forgotten where you've come from. Where you started? Why are the holidays, the little things that really matter to the customers (your playerbase) slowly fading? Why is the game balanced around the 1%? Why are you running this great game into the ground? Please for the love of god, don't pull a blizzard. I played WOW since vanilla too and after cataclysm, I was done. The game had changed TOO much. Nestalgia aside, I miss season 2. Enough rambling, heed the warning / plea.

Wall of text crit over 9000

Zilla

7 Comments

Kouga3 votes

Hey Zilla,

I'm also a beta player, although over the years I've faded in and out of my regular LoL play. I just thought I'd pitch in my two cents.

I actually like the changes. I mean, I don't personally favor every single balance change that comes through, but the overall trend of changing things up and being willing to make some larger scale changes to update old Champions, as well as new/old/updated/deleted items - I'm totally down for it.

Because in the end what I am sitting down for is a 5v5 match that rarely takes more than an hour. Even for as many years as I've played I have no aspirations of Pro-level play, I'm here to have fun, and I think that is true for the vast majority of players out there. In that case, there is no way I'd still be entertained and coming back to this came if it was still basically the same since Season 2.

Some of it is inevitable. When they started they had fewer staff, fewer resources, but also just didn't have the time & experience to make the kinds of things they do today. Across the board everything has gone up in terms of pure production value - the art, the models, the animations & particles, the maps, the monsters, the minions, the complexity of kit designs, the depth and variation of Champ design. Other than the tangled clusterfuck that is balance, everything in the game in terms of assets and production value has gone way, way up since League was first launched.

Have they made a lot of changes? Yes. Have they always done it right? Not at all - but I love them for trying. And with 120+ Champions and 27,000,000 regular players, I'm willing to continue giving them the benefit of the doubt. I'll voice my concerns and issues on specific topics when they arise, but I'm still playing League of Legends in 2015 because it looks nothing like the game I first tried out in the beta.

Now that said, there are a few things I do take very strong issue with. I feel like instead of letting the meta naturally evolve and change over time they have tried to strongarm their vision of the meta - Champions used to be released as "oh this Champ can do anything but will probably want to do X and Y" but more recently they've released, "This champ is a jungler", etc. This is partly because of how strongly they supported the unique item paths for the meta roles (Jungle items getting a lot of attention, reworks, and polish along with support items) and other things like giving Morde an XP handout purely to force him into a bot lane role. Those things leave a sour taste because they feel like they remove agency from the player to make their own meaningful choices and limit Champions into specific roles.

So yeah it's not all perfect, but overall I'm totally in support of Riot rattling the cages every now and then to keep me interested.

But hey, that's just me [slayer-pantheon-thumbs]

KZiLLa1 votes

So you were satisfied with worlds? Also the harrowing? I mean this year harrowing happened AFTER halloween was over

Kouga1 votes

I'll admit I don't pay much attention to tournament play. I'll watch them eventually but rarely in order. On the topic of balancing & LCS though, Riot has made various changes specifically targeting higher or lower tiers of play - they buffed Lee Sin's ultimate to make it feel better when you're not using it to Insec your way to victory, opening him up a little bit on the lower end. They may need to look more at it, but I don't think one could fairly say they ignore the "average" playerbase completely.

The Harrowing.. yes and no. I mean sure it started out as a more literal translation of real-world holidays but was also very NA-centric. Harrowing/Halloween and Snowdown/Christmas aren't necessarily universal holidays. Over time they started acknowledging global holidays (as well as other cultural keystones) via skin themes such as the skins designed for the Chinese New Year, and the Blood Moon skins themselves are a strong homage to Japanese heritage.

But as the Lore team has finally started to step up to the plate and delivering some real quality material and content, I don't think its a bad thing to separate real-world holiday tributes and canonical lore events. Despite all the controversy over it, I thought that disabling GP when he "died" was an awesome touch (although the thing that China did with Spooky GP was a stroke of genius).

So I think that they dropped the ball by not releasing the Slayer skins earlier, but I'm more okay with them changing up the lore "events".

Shosuko2 votes

I gotta call BS. Faker dominated on Ryze, not a single other player had Ryze on their roster...

It's 100% NOT about the OP picks.

The biggest problem was just the Morde / GP issue. Having to add these two bans kept the jg bans from forcing diversity there. Besides jg, every where else had diversity.

Shad0w Cipher1 votes

Amen. [slayer-pantheon-rainbows]

BluePolarizer1 votes

I loved season 4 where every class had a clear role and you could flexibly pick any class without feeling like a troll. Rammus and Shyvana used to be pick or ban as a result of the meta alone (Rammus as a snowballing ganker that can win all lanes then counter Tristana late game, Shyvana as THE late game frontliner), not because of a power item that said "If Rammus or Shyvana gets this you autowin the game". You could actually tank back then since not every champ had %HP true damage. Late game carries actually had a weak early game and bot lane actually had lane bullies who could bully, while late game carries could actually carry.

SlytherinUmbreon1 votes

https://youtu.be/zpOULjyy-n8?t=1m31s

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