Random meta game mode
The meta can be described as the set of champions, builds, and strategies that the playerbase thinks are optimal given characteristics a of the game on a given patch (ie. item stats and price, champion buffs and nerfs, death timers, turret strength, global gold, innovations in the LCS).
New patches can be interesting both because they can shift the meta (which adds variety) and because it is fun thinking about how to exploit changes in the patches (exe., spirit visage and banshees will have a huge nerf with the mage update. Maybe I should bring back rumble top?).
But league players are very quick to learn the new meta when a patch shifts it and in large part because league players watch streamers, lcs games, read guides, etc. to teach them what they should be doing instead of thinking for themselves. ** An interesting game mode be one that, each game, randomly buffs certain classes, items, stats, etc, and tells you what the random buff is during champ select. **
For example, the random buffs could be any one (or several) of the following:
-
bonus armor increased by 20%
-
mana regen increased by 100% base regen for all champions
-
crits deal 300% damage rather than 200%, ie increases crit damage to 350%
-
void staff provides 50% magic pen
-
juggernauts gain 40 base movespeed
-
aoe damage increased by 20%
-
bonus health reduced by 20%
-
price of lifesteal items reduced by 30%
-
number of vision wards that can be placed is not limited
-
deathcap base ap increased by 100, combine price increased by 1500
-
crit chance and crit modifies increase bonus ad rather than causing crits
The point of this game mode would not be to create balance between classes or strategies. It would be the opposite -- create imbalance between classes and strategies so the best players are those who can best exploit these imbalances on-the-fly.
This would be fun for two reasons: 1) Some of the fun of league is showing that you can come up with clever champion picks and builds or clever strategies. But people learn the meta so quickly after a patch that there is not much room to do this normally. 2) If you are sick of a given meta, where a class of champions is blatently op and so every game has several champions from this class, and it has grown quite stale, well, this game mode would allow you to escape that. The random buffs would completely disrupt the meta. Does the random buff include bonus armor increase, mana regen increase, void staff buff, juggernaut buff, aoe damage increase, etc? Then that game will not have a marksman meta.
What other random buffs/nerfs would be interesting for such a game mode?