So this will almost be certainly unpopular but...
Riot hated the invisible gold of aura items and champions like yet reworked an objective to provide more invisible gold than it ever provided in real gold (Dragon).
Objective "invisible" =/= Item invisible. What Riot hated was the fact that you could dump a lot of gold into an item and get an invisible effect from it. That all the gold you funneled into an object was an aura. Also comparatively (While still "invisible"), the effects are much stronger and far more noticeable. A boost to out-of-combat movement speed or neutral objective damage is far more noticeable than the old aura items such at +10% Mana regen or +15 MR to your entire team.
They disliked early advantages rolling out of control (First blood bounty) yet make first tower gold much higher which only incentivizes cheese strats.
They don't want lane swaps yet constantly weaken towers.
These two things are entirely unrelated. As it's been pointed out before, advantage wasn't exactly exploding when they added tower FB. (Also labeling something a "cheese strategy" isn't really fair when you consider that things that are cheese loop around to being full-blown strategies, ala lane swapping).
On the note of lane swaps, a weak tower does not incentivize lane swaps. What made lane-swaps good was the fact that you could pick a champion with a weak laning phase and circumvent the problem by swapping lanes and shoving down the tower ASAP, giving them a valuable advantage and a safer lane. A weak tower isn't a catalyst to it. (Side note: lane swaps still aren't as viable even if you weaken the towers due to the first brick gold.)
They want to increase champion diversity yet make the jungle brutally punishing, skew itemization, and play blatant favoritism. They dole out reworks that do little to help the champions they're targeting and instead just either make them needlessly more complicated or give them a gimmick they're allowed to be viable with for like 2 weeks before smashing back down into the dust.
To achieve actual champion diversity, you'd have to do things the playerbase hates. AKA Balancing around the pro play. But we don't want that so we make excuses. Your argument also fails when you consider many champions who have had reworks now see more play than they previously did. Graves still finds play, as does Poppy, Taric, even Sion is being played top despite your accusation that he's trash tier. Reworked ADCs all saw play even as the meta shifted and rotated, albeit not every ADC is played in the ADC position. Most reworks see some level of play even beyond their initial rework.
But, as I said, you have to balance around pro play if we want actual diversity. AKA: Buffing weaker champs like Yi and Garen. God forbid that happens right?
Keystones just blatantly break some champions and classes and rather than scrapping the idea in favor of a simpler one to make balancing easier they just keep giving themselves more levers to play with. There are way too many, you don't need more.
Pretty sure they already said they want to rework the mastery system to divide the trees up into shorter and cleaer choices. It's also funny how you argue for simpler choices when the old trees were even more bloated with needless wrong choices (Yah sure I'll take oppression said nobody ever). If anything, the new trees have become simplier.
But let's be real:
#For all the criticism levied at Riot, the playerbase has not evolved in the slightest.
I remember back in Season 1 or so where someone asked Riot if they were going to nerf Annie. I believe it was Morello who said "Naw, we're going to let people learn to play around her". Surprise surprise, they did. Fast forward to 2017 and now look what we're dealing with.
- People don't learn to play around champions. They call them "cancer" and "toxic" while asking for Riot to nerf them.
- People don rose-tinted goggles as they ask for reversions to champions who saw even less play or were more problematic.
- People argue that Riot should balance for the masses when the masses aren't all that good at the game (myself included).
- People accuse Riot of bias yet regurgitate the same complaints for the same champions, regardless of their actual strength. (Yasuo anyone?)
- People stay blind to their own bias or inadequacy because they hide behind the shield of "choice", "Nostalgia" or otherwise.
And you know what? I wouldn't have a problem with this...but as someone who has played and gotten incrementally better (though not by much), it makes me sick to see people taking these hypocritical stances and arguing that it's all Riot's fault for breaking the game when actual change is met with screeching and flailing. Even if Riot does have a good point (Regardless of how you feel about plants, Smite buffs -were- a system that didn't offer much choice.) The game, as I often argue, is a byproduct of the community's stance toward Riot and League.
Riot's got problems that they need to fix, absolutely, but let's not sit here and pretend that people would welcome fixes made. If every champion was optimal to the point of being worth picking, the top complaint on the boards would argue that there's too much to ban and Riot should nerf everything.
yet reworked an objective to provide more invisible gold than it ever provided in real gold (Dragon). The way the mechanics work are so much better for the people already ahead so, given they're in a position to take it more liberally, it leads to some lopsided snowballing.
