An explanation for snowballing and towers, and the Rune issue.

Something the boards is missing from a lot of the posts I'm seeing is that the primary reason you'd ever lose tower is from you not even being at the actual tower. Not even involving you dying necessarily, just being forced out is impactful enough to take you out for 8 seconds on recall--further lengthened if you pick a bad spot and the enemy stops you--then some time to build your HP/MP back up, and then walking to the actual lane which takes about 30 seconds without homeguards.

This is almost an entire minute where you're not in the lane. Supports are not waveclearers and you will not have a support in top or mid. Your jungler isn't going to cover the wave for you every single game, let alone pay attention to the fact the enemy wave is pushing into your tower. It'd be great if it were predictable as to how the waves are handled, but it's player-oriented and also based on the champ. You can screw up a wave without even realizing that you screwed yourself. Now add onto the fact that a jungler can't cover for 2 or more losing lanes easily and you have a snowball going on for the enemy that is extremely hard to stop without them screwing up royally (this actually happens in lower elo, but you will see less and less of it as you climb up).

Naturally, you can have this kind of snowballing for your team as well. The "smash or be smashed" scenario.

Given that this is league and team compositions aren't being told to people for what works best, what hurts your team, what it'll be good at/weak at, etc. except in pro play practically, people are not going to make optimal decisions for team comps every game. That hurts your ability to work against the enemy's snowballing by default. You could say that adding speed-ups or weaker homeguards will lessen the issue, but it wouldn't solve everything there is simply because of the issue that sometimes comes up with team comp issues.

I want to note however, longer games are not impossible even without involving the enemy's screw ups.

If you successfully sustain through the lane phase, for example with things like Fleet Footwork and Relic Shield, you can completely avoid people snowballing on you. Things like Kleptomancy allow for heavy recovery even when you are behind. These are not bad when everyone has an access to them, but it's because not every champ has these options that it becomes downright abusable for whenever one case or the other is present. This is unless of course you nerf the overall effectiveness of these strategies so that they impact the game less, making them ultra-specific because of the better users. That, or the strategy is effectively dead. We've seen this issue happen already.

It cannot be denied that keystones are simply designed better for some champions compared to others.

If we try to make "everything viable" or open Pandora's box to be able to make Bard ADC playable as an example, it'd be no different than making the Caitlyns and the Tristanas more powerful than the Bard simply because they are optimized for the role in question. That is where the mistake was made in general. Runes are substitutes for base stats, and ironically the concept of it hasn't changed. Yes you are limiting how the base stats are applied by making it conditional, but the majority of these keystones are runes have easily fulfilled conditions. This is to "increase impact and satisfaction" while "avoiding invisible impact."

The problem is that the items are what allow a champion to do their intended job more often than not. A keystone is merely a means to an end so that you can unlock these items and therefore the champion's potential that you are trying to bring out. The game has also evolved over time to involve more specialized champions tailored to a role, and therefore can optimize on the items that they are meant to buy along with the rune in question.

The older runes and masteries (talking like S2-S3ish) were boring yes, but they didn't make any one champion bring out the "full potential" of a rune and quite literally dominate others who do not or cannot use said rune if the person is of the same role (exception of something like Dodge on Jax). We play League for the CHAMPIONS, not for the rune or mastery systems. I honestly think that the new rune system has forgotten that in the hustle and bustle of making a new system for the game. I will say though that snowballing was immense back in the day with certain champions and that it's nothing strange for people to be complaining that it happens at all.

Anyway my solution in general is to nerf the effectiveness of runes so that they are more windowed than they are now. Ironically Predator is one of the better examples of a windowed keystone, and it is underused as of this post exactly for this reason. Why use a windowed keystone when every other keystone does not require a true window of time to activate? This has also been the case with Grasp which has become one of the most outdated keystones due to the current keystone meta's basis. It was actually one of the only keystones to stay pretty much the same, and look where it is now. It basically proves how easy it is to utilize and cycle the other runes for the majority of the game.

How about making Electrocute actually need all of your basic abilities be on cooldown before it can actually proc, making it an actual all-in keystone? Toning Aery down by making it available 3 times every 30 seconds? Making Fleet Flootwork require more time and attacks to proc it until later stages into the game? Making Press the Attack have a max duration per instance that it is activated? Klepto cooldown and increased rewards to allow higher efficiency to a broader range of champs? And so forth. As a disclaimer, these are merely suggestions, not necessarily the things that SHOULD be done.

TL;DR

1. Not being able to sustain the lane phase causes towers to get pushed in early, and it takes a very long time to get back into lane. It's very easy to snowball off of mistakes in the laning phase. Bad team comps make this issue worse, and it is common for solo queue teams to not care about composition.

2. Currently there is no such thing as a keystone with windowed power unless it's something like Predator which has a powerful effect with a severely long cooldown, or something like Grasp which has become laughably outdated for some champions. This leads to heavy advantages being applied either to rubber banding or snowballing, one or the other. Champions that can't use either better than other champs effectively get screwed.

3. Tone down runes by giving the user an actual window of time where they can make use of the keystone, as it will greatly lessen the damage creep and general abuse of keystones when in the hands of optimal users, while opening it up to a lot more champions since you will actually be given more time to make use of said keystone.