Balance, Toxicity, and Trolls - The League of Legends Trifecta
Warning: I apologize in advance for the very long read. Solutions offered are in additional posts since it is too long.
Balance would be nice. The fear of tanks seems that a tank also does high damage, from what I am reading here and other places? The hatred of current meta is that everything does insane damage (including too much true damage)? So basically.... damage is the problem?
Perhaps making things require setup and timing and leaving them vulnerable when you do so.
We have kits that are inherently not good for the game. Rengar is a good example. Ridiculous damage, stealth, CC breaking, and mobility. Very little chance for counter-play here. That is then used to focus anyone that could kill your team. LeBlanc can dash into the backline or over a wall and completely delete any squishy (and even some tanky people) and teleport back without any way of fighting back because it is so fast. The "difficulty" of playing her at that point is pushing a few buttons in the right order. And there are others. Assassins are definitely a problem here but not the only ones. Burst mages, such as Brand, can be as well. Then you have the semi-tanky bruisers that have umpteen million dashes and engage tools that you cannot escape from, do %health damage and/or true damage, and the idea of counter play consists of if you are hiding in your fountain or not? Assuming they know what they are doing.
The type of meta created by the multi-dash champions with insane damage and very little way of punishing them is the real problem from what I can tell here. Previously, in the hated "tank meta" it was because tanks could kill you while tanking all of your damage and CCing you. Now, if as someone mentioned this took a prolonged period of time, it makes sense. That is the purpose of a tank (to fight for a long time). And that would be an issue on the carry that was in that fight for such a long period of time. Especially with say... Zed? Who has a shadow, shuriken, ulti, etc. Or Ekko who has escapes. And so on. A tank that has you in a fight for that long means you have seriously messed up. That deserves to be punished.
However, in this meta, even the tanks die almost instantly and are not able to protect anyone from anything. The idea that someone should be able to walk into a tank and damage dealer, ignore the tank, ignore the cc and instantly kill the damage dealer without being stopped is a problem with the way they view balance, not with the role of a tank and damage dealer.
If it is a one on one encounter, there are escape options for hyper-mobile characters if they do not have enough damage to kill the tank. That is the penalty of burst versus sustained damage. Why should a class be able to kill every other class without any chance of counterplay or any counters to that character?
On the other hand, most mages and adcs are even more vulnerable to burst than assassins and a lot of brusiers because of the mobility options. That is the price they pay for having sustained damage or more options in battle. The idea of game balance is that there are costs for each thing you have. However, CC does not matter when death is the ultimate cc. QSS stops even suppression with a brusier or assassin. But nothing a control mage does stops you from being over-the-wall-one-shot by a LeBlanc.
Mix in with the continually decrease of vision options in the game, this type of no-counterplay is escalated. The upcoming changes to the JG are going to further increase this because the JG camps will be worth even less than now and ganking will be even more continuous. The meta is being sculpted into a seriously flawed state that will cause a lot of toxicity in games and will drive away a lot of new players.
Many of the nerfs that were handed out come directly from incorrectly handling a problem that was caused by nerfs and buffs from before. A good example of this is Teleport bot lane. Teleport on ADCs is not because teleport was op. It is because Heal was nerfed and Ignite was buffed. Also, the sustain runes and items were nerfed and the damage was so high from burst and ganks that it was safer to TP back to lane rather than risk losing out on too much exp and farm. This causes a much bigger issue with the game than sustained farming does.
The desire for a "more exciting game" is causing the game to become tedious and unfun for a lot of people. The idea of making the game more exciting increases viewers of eSports is fine. However, if you drive away new and old players this will result in a net-loss to viewers and thus a decrease in revenue overall. Worse though, this will make the game unplayable for most people.
New players specifically can get free kills once they learn a few button combinations with some high-burst champions. However, being deleted 20 times in a game tends to drive people away rather than making them want to stay. I have seen a lot of new players go away because of this.
Patches that drastically change the game are too frequent, as has been pointed out by oodles of people. However, it is worth reiterating here. This also adds confusion to new players and resentment from old players. Lots of people dislike champion reworks, for example. However, some kits are serious issues that cannot be fixed with number tweaks (either too strong to be balanced or too weak to play). On the other hand, some reworks could have been monetized as new champions and left the previous champion in the game. This would make the players of the old version of the champion happy and would also create a chance for a new story and more sales.
Another common thing I see discussed and complained about is the banning/reporting system. This, I feel, is the biggest offender in League of Legends. Specifically, people are banned or reprimanded for chat violations far more often than people are reprimanded for in-game behavior. It is not uncommon at all for games to have people go AFK (even say so in chat something like, "Oh, I have to leave in 15 minutes" just as the game starts. This is a deliberate act as they know there is little-to-no chance of the game ending that quickly. They could have watched a video instead. Or maybe played Nexus Blitz if they were desperate for League of Legends (if they started five minutes earlier). Yet, even when admitting they are going afk in chat for basically no reason, they are rarely punished. Another excuse that is given is that they are high or drunk. They started the game and die in the first 2 minutes to Darius because they walk under turret at level 1 and somehow are too drunk to know it? They proceed to go 0/7 and disconnect saying "I'm too drunk for this." or stay in the game and feed all game. Again, not punished for this. However, they made the deliberate choice to play knowing they were hindered. Other things such as claiming "Its only norms" or "its only a game (in ranked)" as they build AP Kayn with Guardian, despite being ML 7, gold or platinum and level 150+ (meaning they now for a fact how the champion works and know that they are trolling their team as he does not have a single AP scaling ability). Again, deliberate. When the enemy team is given free kills over and over and you are doing very well, this can be very demoralizing. Lots of people it seems feel the need to go a little crazy in chat and yell and call people names when dealing with this and tend to get reprimanded themselves rather than the person who was (most likely deliberately trolling them with the intention of getting someone banned). Worse though, they do not get banned at first and they go into another game very tilted. Said tilted person proceeds to feed because they are tilted. This, in turn, tilts others. Someone pings them. They say something snarky about the ping. It gets heated. Further toxicity is created by this. And this continues until that person decides to take a break from the game, gets banned, or quits in rage. I have seen all of these happen and many times it is because someone was trolling them rather than they themselves being a troll or toxic player to begin with.
When more focus is put on chat logs than on people who deliberately make the game unbearable to play or not fun, this causes even more toxicity and people tend to believe they have no recourse except to quit playing. This is not good for business.
Another thing to consider along these same lines is that people feel even more powerless when the issue with patches and game balance is mixed with the truly toxic players (trolls) in the game getting away with this behavior. Not only do players tend to feel that they are not being heard but worse, outright ignored or treated poorly out of spite. The game designers have every right to handle the game how they want. However, that comes with consequences. Bad reputations, decrease or loss in profits, etc. And I do not want that. I genuinely enjoy League of Legends. Or I did until the last half a year or so.
The bad meta decisions, crushing ADCs, lowering overall skill and knowledge needed to play the game, promoting toxic behavior and attitudes in games and refusing to punish those that are obviously intent on destroying the fun of the game for other people. These things are making the game decline in fun-factor. And I hope they improve. I really enjoy the concept of the game and what it could be. Slowly (not so slowly?) it is going from a game about strategic choices and team play to who can click their win-button faster. And that is not good for anyone.
I know this is long-winded and sounds like more of a rant but I do not want this to come across as only a complaint. I truly feel the game can improve in a lot of ways and I have solutions to offer for this.