A Compilation of Preseason Problems (Warning, It's long)
This is going to be long-winded because I want my reasoning to get across more readily than the complaint in order to emphasize the importance of these issues to me as an average, yet unique, player.
Runes I know there is a multitude of posts complaining about different things with runes so I’ll just touch on a problem I’ve only seen once or twice or just buried in other posts plus my reasoning behind the complaint. The refund on runes wasn’t enough to compensate for the way runes are now. I’m much more inclined to refer to the new runes as masteries since they resemble masteries more closely. We were able to accumulate a lot of different mastery pages since it was necessary for the variety of champs and matchups that league promotes. Everyone is still trying to figure out the new runes and I know the 5 page cap I personally have is enough for me to personalize them for maybe 2 role types and, even then, with the specificity of the new runes I feel an inclination to change those pages based on the specific champion I’m playing. All of this doesn’t even affect me personally as much as it must other players because I’m a one trick support Nami, I hardly have any variation in the champs I play or the style in which I play them outside of Nami and other very similar e-girl supports.
Honorable Mentions: No defensive runes for carries. Allow deletion of preset rune pages. Just list the detailed info Riot, just give us all the information, I promise we can handle it in champ select. Mages don’t have great options (I use the mage tree for supports in case that says anything about it), potentially pushing more champs out of meta.
Specifically Mana Band: So, as a Nami one trick with dank mana costs I absolutely love this rune. I love this rune so much that it’s the only one I have enough experience with at this point to comment on specifically. I would love to see either an indicator of some sort for when the active will come up and/or a more noticeable indicator for the active being up. Specifically for the indicator, an easy fix would just be adding a motion, since eyes are drawn to motion, to the lit up mana bar on the UI. (I’d love to see other similar comments on other runes if anyone has them and I can add and credit here appropriately)
Rewards I think this topic has also been touched on enough so I’ll just drop a quick summary. For the amount of time I put into the game, I just don’t feel rewarded, pretty much at all compared to before. I don’t play enough to get from lvl 30 to lvl 31 in one day and that feels pretty bad compared to regularly getting IP for every game. On a side note, as a one trick, I’m sitting on_ 9 keys riot_, I don’t appreciate being forced onto champs, or forced to buy champs, to be able to use your loot system outside of events. I get that I could play arams but I honestly don’t own a lot of champs because I was saving my IP (rip) for a name change, and now that blue essence is a rare commodity and the champ(s) awarded from level ups are random putting time into the game for the sake of rewards is just not a viable way to enjoy the game. I was already at a point where I pretty much only play with friends anyway and this new reward system has made even that less enjoyable.
RP It seems like a prevailing concern is Riot’s encouragement, through reward mechanics, of players to buy RP in order to buy champs now that runes are free. I personally find it hard to believe that Riot made all that much on people buying champs with rp since I’ve seen quite a few players express that they used their IP to buy champs and just screwed runes once they got a set they could work with. I honestly don’t know anyone personally that bought any champions with RP, the numbers are probably different but, with the kind of skins Riot is releasing (lots of 1350’s) I don’t think they’re scraping the bottom of any barrels because of the rune change.
Scaling Games are too snowbally. I’ll explain, I pretty much only play with at least one other person, an adc main. I spend the vast majority of my time on summoner’s rift in the bot lane. Never before have the two of us snowballed so hard in my memory. We’re pretty consistent, before if we got an early lead we’d have some confidence depending on the lead but now, if we get just about any semblance of a lead we can go in, balls to the walls, and get doubles over and over as long as the jungler doesn't come down pre 7min. I have, as support Nami, regularly output more damage than the enemy jungler and or adc when I and my adc have gotten ahead in lane. I know this is another topic that gets brought up a lot but I really can’t emphasize enough how bad it feels for a support Nami, building full support, to out damage anyone, especially more than one member, on the enemy team consistently. Also, almost every game I played last night was a ~20 minute surrender, something I rarely saw before preseason.
General Appeal I’ve seen this touched on a bit, but mostly from one perspective or the other and since this is already long af might as well throw both here. Longtime players got screwed with the (lack of) rewards and ‘refunds’ and new players face the daunting task of learning the new runes on top of everything else that is League of Legends (champs, skills, items, matchups, etc).
Final Thoughts I don’t want this thread of complaints to undermine my appreciation for everything that Riot does to keep the game fresh and new to longtime players and appeal to new crowds. Their teams do a lot of work. Because of all that work they put in, I honestly can’t imagine anything worse than putting something out that clearly isn’t as thought through or as tested as it should have been. You have resources to test all of this, to make sure the product you put out to your entire player base is something that they will enjoy. It’s understandable to have a few kinks to work out here and there, you can’t exactly test for everything but, looking through the community boards and the subreddit, how could a company as resourceful as Riot Games put out an update this negatively received.
TL;DR Riot screwed up, and whoever let this update through with either such a poor level of testing or such a high level of indifference to public opinion should feel bad.
If anyone has any suggestions or more thorough analysis’ I’d like to add them in with credits just to have a post with a lot of opinions in one place since the boards are overflowing with posts pertaining to just one or two topics. Maybe putting everything in one place would make Riot’s job a little easier if the problem was actually a poor level of testing rather than indifference.
