Constructive Feedback on Preseason Changes

We are now about a week into preseason and for my first post ever on this forum, I'd like to give some constructive feedback on the new rune system and all the updates seen this season from the point of view of someone who plays this game casually. I got fed up seeing all the "this sucks" posts that offer nothing in making League a better game; its was just a lot of whiny nonsense. So from the eyes of a single casual gamer, here are my thoughts. For each start I will say what I like, what I dislike, and ways I think it can be improved upon or changed. (For what it matters as I know some players will question it, I am a Gold player. So keep your bronze shaming ways out of here)

Runes I ADORE the ideas and concepts these new runes bring forth. It is a really creative way to expand upon the ability of a player to enhance their personal play styles and strategies. My personal favorite is Kleptomancy on my beloved Twisted Fate, I think its an extremely fun keystone (that albeit may need a tad bit tweaking for balance). Given the old system did not really add much to the game, I am completely on board for this change. I think that the runes and mastery system overall took a step in the right direction and gave us as players a lot more options on how we want to adapt to a game in terms of build paths. For example (and I will be using TF a lot in my examples as he is my beau) I can keep the same runes for a game as Twisted Fate but use different builds without my rune choice hurting my chances of winning lane and trades. If I need to build AD instead of AP for a game, my rune page allows the flexibility and does not punish or hinder me.

Now, what I do not like about this system is a two point problem.

1. My biggest problem is that some of these new runes reward snowballing too heavily and make it next to impossible to catch up once you fall behind. For the first time since I started playing the game like 5 years ago, I find myself sitting in a position where I find a losing game more unfun than ever before. It isn't just a loss, its a complete and utter stomp, where as a tank I can't even sit under my tower because that level 4 Udyr got one early kill and now he can tower dive me and complete shred my HP using "Press the Attack", kill me, then walk out without even losing half of his health bar. Or when a Twitch can now 2v5 and entire enemy team with his tank support thanks to "Lethal Tempo", where he would just stealth in and before you can even react your entire team is dead. Snowballing from skill is one thing, and it isn't something that can really be stopped. But to reward snowballing and thus making it harder to stop said snowball? It just makes entire games utterly unpleasant and headache inducing. In the vast majority of games I have played since the update, with the exception of 2 maybe 3 games, it has always been a complete stomp one way or the other. To me at least, it isn't fun to win when I keep making mistakes but the game is still rewarding me due to that lucky kill I got at the start, and it sure as hell isn't fun to be on the other end of that ass kicking. Some of these rewards are taking away from the skill based aspect of this game and turned it into a game of chance: "Who will get that first kill?".

2. Then secondly, from the technical stand point involving the offensive runes vs the defensive ones. I know I am not the first to mention this, but it is still worth mentioning. From my point of view at least, I am finding that the offensive runes are just relatively better than the defensive ones, as in my experience so far that tanks can't really get the speed they need to become tank enough to fight off someone using offensive runes. If I play Yorick, why should I take anything from Resolve when taking runes in Precision will just make me win no matter what? I would like to see a rebalance of these runes for tanks, and while it will probably take a few patches top get right I am sure a good balance will be found in time.

Essence and Post 30 Leveling I like the idea. I think gutting Orange Essence was a bad idea, plain and simple. Skin shards haven't become more common as far as I am aware, so why are we gutting Orange Essence? To me this makes relatively no sense. As for Blue Essence and its new relation to leveling, I think this has a problem with a relatively simple and easy fix. I understand that Riot has a business model and it wants players to play more to get the champions and items they want, this makes sense and I am not here to bash it. However, I think limiting the acquisition of Blue Essence solely through leveling up was a poor decision given how long it takes to actually get a level up. I would not have this problem as much if there was a set amount you could be assured to get on a level up, but because the system for capsules is a randomly generated system, you can spend many hours and get very little Blue Essence in return, and it just feels like a back hand when it happens. I think this could be fixed by assuring a certain amount of BE as a minimum would help stifle part of the problem while allowing an RNG system to provide more than this minimum. But for someone like me, who already owns every champion and has bought what they wanted from the Essence Store, spending 20-30+ hours to level up and get less than 1k Blue Essence is extremely, EXTREMELY, EXTREMELY, frustrating. Since I can't reasonably save up for the expensive items that I would like or the Mastery level ups on my champions.

These are my thoughts so far. I more than willing to help in whatever way to help better the game because I do not want it staying where it currently is as in this condition I am seriously contemplating for the only time in 5 years of seriously quitting this game because of the issues I've listed. I know I am one person and this game doesn't pander to me, but I am apparently not the only person having these same issues and I just wanted to air these concerns.