Five months ago, I suggested gating mechanics behind stat purchases...

And now here we are:

##Living Weapon: Kai’Sa’s symbiote-suit adapts to her chosen attack style, evolving her abilities based on permanent stats gained from shop items and experience level.

With enough bonus Attack Damage, Icathian Rain fires significantly more missiles.

With enough bonus Ability Power, Void Seeker deals more damage and partially refunds the cooldown on champion hit.

With enough bonus Attack Speed, Supercharger briefly grants true invisibility while charging up.

For reference, here is the thread in question where I made the suggestion. I'm not pretentious enough to claim that thread influenced Kai'Sa's design, but I do think there are takeaways to be had from this nonetheless:

• Predict/suggest enough shit, and eventually one of your ideas will come true: This applies to everyone here, as well as players who go on C&C. There are so many ideas flying around in these spaces that Riot's actions are bound to coincide with at least some of them from time to time. In some cases, particularly with fantastic skin suggestions (e.g. Bee Keeper Singed, Dragon Master Swain), I genuinely do believe those proposals directly influence Riot's production.
• Don't pretend you know the game enough to categorically dismiss someone else's ideas: If you look at that thread, there was a variety of reactions to the notion of stat-gated effects. Quite a few were positive, and expressed at least curiosity towards trying it out. Others, however, weren't, and while that in itself is okay, what struck me then about those responses is that they expressed complete confidence that such an idea would never happen. More generally, I've seen far too many suggestions, proposals, etc. get dismissed out of hand on the grounds that those ideas couldn't possibly work in League. If you truly believe this, you probably do not know League nearly as well as you think, as the game evolves and tries out new things all the time. To claim that any idea will never get implemented at all is to set yourself up to be proven wrong, so try to keep an open mind instead and give new ideas the benefit of the doubt.
• Kai'Sa could be the beginning of much more build diversity in League: It's too early to say how successful the design Kai'Sa, the new champion, will be, but what is for certain is that she will test the waters for a mechanic that would allow build variations to produce meaningful alterations to her gameplay. What we all need to look out for is how her stat-based bonuses generate playstyle diversity, and if they do so meaningfully, as well as how these variations affect how she plays, and how it feels to play against her (e.g. how interactive and complex she feels for her opponent). If this works, and Kai'Sa gets to meaningfully alter her gameplay in ways that are fun and manageable for both her and her opponents, then I predict/hope we will see more developments on such a system in view of other champions. If not... well, at least Riot tried.

TL;DR: Let's treat each other and our ideas in a less reactionary manner, even if we dislike them, because whichever feature you just said would never happen just might end up in the game!