Why League Punishes The Good & Rewards The Bad

To get things out of the way, lets start off with the disclaimer. This isn't negative talk. This is about the in game gold system that rewards bad players and punishes good players, as well as a fix to the problem. Now first off, you must be wondering what I mean by this. Well, let me give you a great example of what this is about. As the ADC you manage to get 5 kills under 7 minuets, obtain perfect CS, deny half of the enemy's CS and help out with your first dragon. Immediately you are hard stuck in a lane for at most 2-5 more minuets and slip up ONCE. The enemy ADC gets the gold and closes the gap with your death, your support's death, and pushing the tower for 3 plates and the enemy support purposely excludes themselves so the gold isn't split. This immediately puts the enemy back into the game and you're forced to contest them once again. Turret plating goes down and your team gets first turret and another dragon. Because you won lane, you rotate mid lane because top lost their tower right after you got first tower. Meanwhile, the enemy lanner who lost bot side catches up on CS without pushing the lane as you team fight and push for other objectives. Right at that moment, your team is losing out on gold and solo XP. The ADC that was once behind is now ahead in many ways which ends up being the reason why the game was lost. This is the problem with the system. If you get ahead and have only 1 slip up, it shouldn't dictate the worth of your skill. Being good shouldn't mean that you fall off in the long run. Being good should mean that you have more influence to win the game harder and faster. Just like how being bad shouldn't mean you that you can come back without changing anything. Being bad should mean that you can't hold out as long as they could.

Now look, the only reason why they were able to gain and get ahead like that was because they were left alone to get farm LATER in the game and the enemy team was able to sustain the abuse long enough for it to happen while your team had to split everything from gold and XP. The other reason is because having a higher level- which is typically your advantage, you are grey screened for a longer period of time. To fix this issue, here's the simple answer. Grey screens should be influenced by death amount and a game's time span. Forcing a 65 second wait for level 18 and only a 12 second timer at level 5 is not beneficial or effective for either side because the lead opportunity fades hard early game and inevitably grows potential later game. The whole point of a kill is to stop their ability from "growing" while also growing yourself, so the sacrifice of other things weren't a waste. Because of how a bounty over your head increases and gold you gain by killing more enemies decreases, killing the enemy becomes a burden. While having a gold reset is abuseable, it is not a healthy game mechanic due to how the "death timer" works. There is less incentive to get ahead and stay there due to other in game mechanics holding you back. For example, tower buffs, minion buffs, and other fed enemies. This is why snowballing also sucks pretty hard.