Let's Talk Gameplay: Laning Phase

Before I begin, I'm going to preface this by saying that my overall goal here is to make a series of polls (they'll be covered as "Let's Talk Gameplay:" from here in, and I'll plan on posting one every two weeks) covering a broad spectrum of gameplay aspects, one segment at a time. The overall point of this is to gather as many poll votes as possible, as data which can be condensed, summarized, and hopefully useful to forward overall to Riot Game. (Actually...if TFT is gonna be a technically different game, I guess they technically are Riot Game_S_ with an S now. :P ) Anyway...I feel like the boards have already had quite a few people who gather to express most of these points - I'm certainly not bringing up anything that could be considered new - but I'd like to simplify the topic for it to be very transparent and easy to read, which I hope will make it easier for all of us very opinionated players to communicate what we want to, without having to turn the comments into a festival of arguments. With the introduction now formally concluded, let's move onto this week's topic: Laning Phase.

We're a little more than half-way through season 9, and one of the biggest topics I see in Gameplay relates to how players feel about Laning Phase. Particularly in Top lane, but still very much in general, people seem to complain heavily about how one-sided the game feels from the very beginning of the game onward. Many equate this to Flavor of the Patch champions that simply overperform in the meta. Others to Lack of decent itemization for certain matchups. Some, even with frequent changes over a few patches around MSI, still chalk it up to overperforming runes. And, as with plenty of issues, there are those who still complain that League simply has too much damage and not enough defense, even at this early stage of the game before you really manage to gain a lot of stats from items. Some don't think it's the lane, but the consistency of their junglers that impacts the map enough to tilt the game to a one-sided stomp.

To some, it's nothing to do with game mechanics, but with matchmaking or low-quality teams. While I will not be putting an option for "bad teammates" (that is not an aspect of the game that Riot has a say in - people will always have off games or days where they simply lose their collective shit, and Riot has no controls for that) I will stress that matchmaking will be on the list (as "I got an Iron 3 autofilled jungler in my silver promos!" has come up more than a few times during MSI, and that is definitely something Riot has controls for.)

In this poll, I'm going to place several of the issues I've seen posted across the boards that I feel correlate to why people can feel laning phase is just super one-sided, and I want you all to vote for what you think the biggest issue is. I know you likely have more than one issue, and that all of these tie into each other. But I want you guys to choose one that you believe must be dealt with immediately for the best impact possible upon the game. I thank you all for your time in participating, and do feel free to go into detail on why you selected the answer you did, if you'd like. But please keep it civil - sharing your answer is encouraged. Trying to flame/shame someone else's answer is not the point of this poll. Allow people to be entitled to their opinions, please.

[sg-ahri-2]

I will leave the 10th option for people who do not want to vote, but want to view the results of the poll. This is something I'm leaving so that if a member of Riot wants to view the poll without voting, they can "vote" to NOT vote, and still see the numbers. And also for those of you who honestly don't have/don't want to share your opinion, but are interested in everyone else's. I will of course take this option, to remove my own bias from this poll.

Thank you all again, I will review this in about a week or so, and start trying to summarize my information after seeing the numbers and comments.