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The lack of Consistency from Riot makes LoL so hard to continue loving+playing. (TL;DR at end)

EinarUlfar·6/17/2018, 10:42:47 AM·122 votes·24,193 views

There's no clear direction in Riot's design, and hasn't been (IMO) for some time. You had this beautifully balanced game, spanning typically 30-45 minute matches, with a slow build-up and satisfying power curves. You really felt your Champion become stronger as the game would drag on, none of this "ouch that kinda hurts" to "welp. das a two-shot" so quickly.Turrets were worth a $1.50 as opposed to the current $0.10, and the Jungle had more depth (smite buffs may not have been perfect, but imo it made Jungling deeper and more satisfying). Seemingly near-everyone was viable, and Keystones (These alleged power-fantasy fulfillers, because clearly a champion's kit and personality could never give us such a feeling!) didn't exist.

But then we ran in the opposite direction, hoping to appeal more to the internet-cafe players. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this happened around the time TenCent got their hands in Riot. After a few seasons of a fiesta and a questionable attempt to "balance", we've started to see the results of tearing apart the substance setting atop a smooth foundation that was rough for many years - but was eventually rounded out quite nicely. Enter GhostCrawler; whom I am not implying is fully to blame for any of what LoL is today - but rather, he was a voice for Riot to us players. Spoke of change within League rather frequently, and how these changes were viewed from the design team.

But Change is how we got here. Ironically, the one (rather easy to recall) time Riot has avoided delivering on their philosophy (at the time) that relatively frequent change was good, it was during a time in which we arguably had a Balance Nightmare; the Ardent Censer meta. It stuck around for MONTHS. Some argue that it wasn't "the meta" during those months, that it took weeks upon weeks to discover, but I assure you {even in Silver-Gold} I hopped on the Censer train long before Worlds; amping up my Marksman Carry for freelo.

But fast-forward to being months into Season 8. Half of the year is up, and we've officially received an apology for the massive mid-season scale changes to the game every other patch. LoL has incoming changes to attempt to finally restore some length to Laning Phase. Turrets are going to be worth less to reduce snowball; still gonna be paper towels, but they'll be worth less(hah). Gold distribution is being tweaked to reduce snowball/slowdown games. And finally, back to the point of this whole post -

  • TL;DR: We're not consistently settling on One Design Philosophy and that needs. to. stop. The fluctuation in how League flows and overall feels in terms of risk VS reward is not fun to experience. Players want a relatively steady game - with some changes here and there - but until a solid and steady approach can be decided on, players cannot fall in love and stay in love with this game.

85 Comments

Smug Diana OTP6/17/2018, 12:13:19 PM60 votes

Honestly I think it's a doomed game at this point. Riot seem to only care about LCS and balance and change the game in that regard, while the rest of the game suffers horribly. The community is beyond rotten and toxic and I see no way of turning it around, the meta at this point is simply get into game and hope your team doesn't have the first timing player who saw a video from SoloSmurfInGoldOnly of something that literally only works when a D1/Masters player smurfs in low elo, who goes 0/10 at 15 minutes then if you're lucky will just afk, but more often than not they just int or autopilot afterwards. The state of NA is essentially; Everyone just plays what they want for fun, not what they're good at, no one is trying to win, and everyone gives up 5 minutes into the game and just autopilots/ints and afk cause they know there's very small chance they will get punished.

It's a huge combination of both everything you said, and the fact the community is beyond saving. Until Riot actually figure out how to deal with the rampant, out of control toxicity that is destroying the game, and the fact you are entirely powerless most of the time to influence the game and then have to suffer for 15-20 minutes, or god forbid its a duo who will just lock you into the game for 40 minutes, nothing will change.

Like patch 8.11 and 8.12 were a tiny baby step in the right direction, but something needs to be done seriously soon. The current state of the NA community combined with the insanely stupid meta that's spreading like wildfire (taking random ass champions botlane as adc) is making for one of the least fun times I've ever had playing a video game and I'm seriously considering just not playing at all, which I really don't want to have to do because I've been playing since Season 3 and used to deeply love this game, and only just started playing ranked last season and this season, but honestly trying to solo climb in Gold V at this point is less fun than literally getting hit by a semitruck going 120mph.

Please fix your game Riot.

Teridax686/17/2018, 1:57:05 PM29 votes

I completely agree with this. When I joined (Preseason 3), one of the things that got me to love Riot so much was that they had this clear, unified and pretty revolutionary vision, so even if League wasn't quite perfect, at least it was heading towards a solid direction. This is also what defined the design changes then for me: since I had joined, Riot had made it their mission to add more diversity, reduce snowballing, and generally make for a game that tried to give its players as many options and interesting strategies as possible. This is also why I personally think Season 5 was, for most of its run, the most successful in League's history, because it was the culmination of years' worth of developer work towards a precise, easily understandable goal.

By that same token, this is also why I very much dislike Seasons 6 and onwards, because many of the changes that happened then started making a lot less sense: until then, Riot had heavily criticized snowballing, and had worked to make their game more prone to comebacks. All of a sudden, games started ending much sooner, and the smallest leads early on could turn into inescapable, game-crushing advantages. This felt like a complete step back from all of the good work that had been done so far. Additionally, the increased pace of major updates came at a serious cost in quality: one day Riot wanted to encourage a certain meta (e.g. Ardent Censer and OP support defenses), and the next they wanted to do the opposite (e.g. the current meta with huge buffs to AD assassins). All of this over time has accumulated a ton of problems that are now requiring entire updates of their own to solve, which has led me to feel that an immense amount of time and resources has been completely wasted on changes that ended up bringing no net positive contribution to League, let alone any kind of durable change. It does not feel like League is going in any clear direction, and this is at a time when there is increasingly little room for the game to avoid solving its core problems.

In many ways, this reminds me of another game I used to play, by the name of Firefall: the game was a third-person, sci-fi MMO with an open world, and a ton of cool ideas. When I played it during its closed beta, to this day I had some of my favorite experiences in any videogame ever. The game looked like it was going to be the next big thing, and had already by then accumulated a very large fanbase. Over time, though, players started noticing one major problem: the game kept changing its core systems every few months. One day, the game was centered around an XP-based progression tree, another we had this entirely new customization system with resource allocation, and the update after we started getting gear that permanently degraded over time. We ended up having almost an entirely new game with every large update, and this turned off a lot of players, who felt like the game was wasting time and resources during a period where they really needed to pick a direction and commit to it. Sure enough, when the game went into open beta, it also came fresh out of yet another overhaul, and the resulting lack of polish meant it lost a ton of player retention. From then on, lack of resources, and an increasing amount of excessive control from its parent company caused the game to die a slow, painful death. The game, and the amazing promise it had made, died because it tried too hard to make itself perfect, when it could've succeeded far better if it had just settled on one design philosophy, even a flawed one. League is well beyond its growth phase at this point, but it's nonetheless at a stage where it needs to consolidate by refining its existing gameplay. Instead, it's been trying to completely reinvent itself, often with updates that completely fail to touch upon what they're meant to address. The game is nine years old at this point, and it is still immensely unbalanced and unpolished. This worries me a lot, as I think it's had an undeniable negative impact upon the game's ongoing success, one I think may worsen if it continues.

Wadu Hek Man6/17/2018, 7:14:26 PM14 votes

They are consistently killing the game with every change. Before it was more simple, top lanes were primarily fighters, bruisers, and tanks. Fighters did a lot of damage but had little defensive stats, bruisers were a mixture of damage and tankiness, and tanks were low damage, sponges for their carries. Now we have tanks one shotting people, with fighters getting heavily out traded by people with no damage items. We had adcs that could carefully dominate a fight, but had to carefully position as to not get easily caught. Now we have champs like xayah who is an ADC with an AOE stun, and a moveable untargetable. Its like they are trying to make every champion be an "extreme outplay high skill character" but are instead just plugging in overkitted champions one after another, example: Pyke.

Captainn Ginyu6/18/2018, 12:33:41 AM8 votes

While im SURE someone will pop in an get mad at me but i dont trust Ghostcrawler after his fiasco with mages in Cataclysm but thats just me

EDIT: im talking about world of warcraft btw for those of you who dont know

THE RlVER KlNG6/17/2018, 9:44:55 PM7 votes

remove keystones

they are 100% the worst decision riot has ever implemented. game balance started going downhill as soon as they were introduced.

It Hertz When IP6/18/2018, 4:33:27 AM7 votes

Honestly, I blame TenCent for everything that's wrong with LoL right now. I can solidly point to their acquisition of Riot and subsequent hand in policy changes as being the moment when League started to go downhill.

DNFVixen6/17/2018, 5:19:14 PM7 votes

{quoted}

There's no clear direction in Riot's design, and hasn't been (IMO) for some time. You had this beautifully balanced game, spanning typically 30-45 minute matches, with a slow build-up and satisfying power curves. You really felt your Champion become stronger as the game would drag on, none of this "ouch that kinda hurts" to "welp. das a two-shot" so quickly.Turrets were worth a $1.50 as opposed to the current $0.10, and the Jungle had more depth (smite buffs may not have been perfect, but imo it made Jungling deeper and more satisfying). Seemingly near-everyone was viable, and Keystones (These alleged power-fantasy fulfillers, because clearly a champion's kit and personality could never give us such a feeling!) didn't exist.

But then we ran in the opposite direction, hoping to appeal more to the internet-cafe players. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this happened around the time TenCent got their hands in Riot. After a few seasons of a fiesta and a questionable attempt to "balance", we've started to see the results of tearing apart the substance setting atop a smooth foundation that was rough for many years - but was eventually rounded out quite nicely. Enter GhostCrawler; whom I am not implying is fully to blame for any of what LoL is today - but rather, he was a voice for Riot to us players. Spoke of change within League rather frequently, and how these changes were viewed from the design team.

But Change is how we got here. Ironically, the one (rather easy to recall) time Riot has avoided delivering on their philosophy (at the time) that relatively frequent change was good, it was during a time in which we arguably had a Balance Nightmare; the Ardent Censer meta. It stuck around for MONTHS. Some argue that it wasn't "the meta" during those months, that it took weeks upon weeks to discover, but I assure you {even in Silver-Gold} I hopped on the Censer train long before Worlds; amping up my Marksman Carry for freelo.

But fast-forward to being months into Season 8. Half of the year is up, and we've officially received an apology for the massive mid-season scale changes to the game every other patch. LoL has incoming changes to attempt to finally restore some length to Laning Phase. Turrets are going to be worth less to reduce snowball; still gonna be paper towels, but they'll be worth less(hah). Gold distribution is being tweaked to reduce snowball/slowdown games. And finally, back to the point of this whole post -

  • TL;DR: We're not consistently settling on One Design Philosophy and that needs. to. stop. The fluctuation in how League flows and overall feels in terms of risk VS reward is not fun to experience. Players want a relatively steady game - with some changes here and there - but until a solid and steady approach can be decided on, players cannot fall in love and stay in love with this game.

The game started losing it's light in season 6, now the light is gone except a small little glimmer of hope that remains. I remember when I joined MANY years ago, this game was so much fun and for 4 years I LOVED this game then in season 7 I started not having as much fun and some games I hated, this season I HATE most of my matches even if I am winning. Anyone else remember the 10-15 sometimes 20 minutes of mostly farming and once in a while getting a kill called laning phase? Laning phase is now what? 4 maybe 5 min? The sheer ramp up of damage is ruining this game.

apollö6/17/2018, 6:55:37 PM7 votes

This game feels like absolute shit now i hate it.

Cowgirl Ed6/17/2018, 5:54:29 PM6 votes

I do like that games don't last so much; what I don't like is that I don't have fun anymore, even when I win. Most of the time it's a stomp on one side or the other. There's huge imbalance in the game. Keystones were not needed, like many other changes made to the game. Right now there's too much difference between "normal" picks and "current meta" picks. You get a huge disadvantage not playing the OP champs, and apparently they managed to add more bans but even now 10 is not enough: something will always slip past the ban phase.

10Tickler6/17/2018, 4:44:25 PM6 votes

Ghostcrawler's a good guy, trying to put out an inferno with a bucket of salt, unfortunately. Really, I think the worst issue is CertainlyT's champion designs. Really the only one that's been great was the Warwick Rework, and the rest were gamebreaking when they first arrived.

Ugly Alien6/18/2018, 3:31:23 PM5 votes

I am losing interest now, it's like a circus. Everyone is playing any champ anywhere. There is a lack of skill, it's more of people playing Meta/OP champs.

LolMoneyGrab6/18/2018, 12:25:05 AM5 votes

Yes. The game went to shit soon after TenCent. RiotLyte also mad the game shitty. It's be downhill for the last 3-4 seasons.

Saibbo6/17/2018, 4:23:57 PM3 votes

so hard to continue loving+playing.

just stop playing? easy as that..

Shiki Ryougi6/17/2018, 12:12:24 PM1 votes

You're wrong. Tencent started buying up Riot in 2011. Long before smite buffs were a thing. Those were added in the patch that shouldn't exist by their own numbering schema an its release date, 4.20.