Goodbye League

I'm not quitting due to balance. This is primarily due to work and college but I want to thank Riot and maybe give some feedback on what I've seen from my experience. Norms are really fun but life > games.

I'm not going to say "Morello", "Brandon Webnan", "Ghostcrawler", etc. Those 3 are main victims of social coercion from the community but also pretty good. I just want the Boards to address their mistakes better and avoid trying to force extremes of absolute good/evil between parties.

I also want to thank Riot for:

• Greatest player support ever
• Amazing artists
• Fine writing
• Awesome community discussion
• Responsiveness
• Kickass merch

The only literal flaw is numbers in the game.

I played League mainly to admire skilled players like Faker and Gosu. I liked the logarithmic progression of skill but now it feels more of a luck fest. 70% of my games are meh and the 30% are hardcore destruction but that impacts ranked a lot because it keeps me stuck a bit. Especially in promotions.

I'll check it out in 2019 hopefully because it's conceptually good. Just not executed right right now.

• Streamers quit thus less popularity and relevancy
• Streamers are part of Twitch, a growing market Riot is not encouraging
• Market feels bad with prices
• Less value for player retention
• Better game content stemming from other companies

Now, this isn't at Riot but at the balance team.

The music, art, and many other teams are A1. Love them. Balance team - you guys aren't doing good right now. There were many ways to address botlane and toplane. There were also many ways to integrate nerfs into the Runes Reforged system and a balanced state quite easily if pre-season was addressed right. It was the only reason the week patch party was accepted. Every other team delivered except one to three since we don't have too much insight on Riot HQ's innerworkings. I just feel you guys tried to address too many new stuff while ignoring old things. It's like building a social media site without addressing its security issues first that you could've setup but were too worried about customer retention to do so.

There was a promise to make big patches in pre-season and slowly decrement their magnitude as the game left pre-season but this whole season is a pre-season in 2019.

I loved this game for sure.

League is dying a bit. It just will stagnate like Runescape if it doesn't regenerate from this. My friends hardly play and the skill discrepancy is absurd. I wonder why a Silver I player can beat a Diamond simply because they were fed or a Diamond dropping to Gold in 2 weeks due to a patch.

I just hope Riot - specifically teams for balance - find a better way to address these issues.

TL;DR - I'm quitting because I have a life and League, despite being fun conceptually, isn't too engaging right now to sacrifice some of my stress to relieve myself. I use it for fun and distraction but it's more of a game in beta right now.

Thank you for the experience.

P.S:

• For a week Riot, try just disabling your API for sites like op.gg etc. It would be a fun experiment to see how the game changes from "try-hard" to a more casual experience where people work together with the community possibly. I heard comments on it even from a Rioter pondering about it [they weren't part of a team that handled that tho lol].