You screwed up, but the sooner you admit your mistakes the sooner we get our beloved game back

People make mistakes. Entire companies make mistakes. EA shat the bed recently with Battlefront 2's lootboxes, and got huge backlash for it, and Riot's getting a similar level of disdain right now too, from casual players to pros. But unlike EA, you can save face, Riot. Because unlike EA, your road to hell was paved with good intentions.

Preseason is always an experiment; some things work, some things don't. Season 3 had one of the best preseasons of all, but even that had silly stuff slip through the cracks like Black Cleaver. However, runes reforged was a fundamental change to game's core, an undertaking so massive that it should never have been done all at once. However, to move forward it was the only feasible way, short of removing old runes entirely for some time before bringing in runes reforged, which would have been good for testing purposes but dull for players.

Fuck ups were inevitable. However, in a time like this, the absolute worst thing you can do is continue to make new changes while fundamental issues haven't been addressed. Big item changes on the PBE and knee-jerk nerfs are the wrong way to go about things.

Let's look at the removal of sightstone for example. As a Bard main who for a long time has enjoyed a heavy AP build on him with the intent of transitioning to a secondary AP carry in the lategame, I initially found this change to be good - it helped accelerate my build massively! No more buying sightstone or upgrading to frost queen's claim necessary. However, it quickly became apparent that AP midlaners can do the exact same thing as my Bard, except they'll be ACTUAL carries. AP supports have been made obsolete by this one change, because the big gate that stopped this happening before has now gone. Combined with the new runes, this has completely thrown the balance of botlane even further off.

You NEED to address the existing issues before changing anything else. The worst thing you can possibly do is try to cover up problems by introducing new things that circumvent the problems, rather than solving them at the root cause. Introducing new items is just going to make the problems even more unclear.

Let's give you a starting idea. Kleptomancy Ezreal is still a thing, despite the massive nerf to ranged attacks it had. This is a recurring problem of Ezreal breaking things because of his Q, and those problems have always gone away by nerfing the problematic item or effect so that he can't abuse it. Sometimes the problem is the effect itself, but this time it's Ezreal's abuse case. No other ranged units were abusing it, and now it's useless on them. Ezreal is the problem. The way you fix this? Simple.

Ezreal: Q - Mystic Shot

• No longer applies all on-hit effects.
• Can now trigger lifesteal and spellblade effects.

BOOM! Fixed. Ezreal can no longer abuse certain items, and none of his builds are affected. He can use triforce and iceborn gauntlet, and manamune will trigger once from the Q itself without requiring some Ezreal-specific condition in the code.

Another idea would probably be to just remove stopwatch entirely. This item is negatively impacting the speed of the game. It was an experiment that went wrong. It is fine as a purchase-able item that builds into the useful things later on, but all it does now is reduce the incentive to do stuff like tower diving. Tower dives being too easy was an issue, but all stopwatch does is force people to use it as a solution, rather than fixing the game at its core. There's a middle ground that doesn't shoehorn people into taking Inspiration just to get hold of that rune.

Just hang fire on introducing big new item changes and stuff. Figure out root causes, talk to players of all skill levels (bronze and challenger opinions are equally valid when it comes to defining what is fun), and listen to the community. We might not have all the answers, but there are some good suggestions out there, and we speak out because we care. It's why I'm writing this post, because the state of the game is saddening because it feels like it's in one of its worst states ever, and I've been playing since 2009. Sort it out!

tl;dr: Don't try to cover up problems by adding new stuff/changing items. The root cause of issues persist, and your focus should be on this. Balance the runes, speak to your community, and focus on making the meta diverse and removing abusive play patterns.