Started in season 3 and had the pleasure of experiencing kassadin, AP yi, invincible fiora and a the horror of pre change full AP gragas.
My memory of when certain things were added is a lil shaky but hopefully I'm a lil accurate.
I feel objectives come too easily when ahead and are too difficult to take when behind. In this game, if you can't win a team fight, objectives are all you have to fall back on. But champs are so fast, their damage so high that you barely have enough time to tickle a tower/shove the wave before someone shows up. If that doesn't happen, your entire team just got collapsed on and you're just lucky to not have been there.
In season 3/4, I had the most fun. The game was fresh, I found my love for jungling and utility tanks, and I could carry in my own way. Tank junglers saw love in a new spirit of the ancient golem/quill coat, dragons were just as valuable as towers and despite my picks not being at the top of the food chain, I still saw success and enjoyed every last minute of it. But the absolute best time was flutterfly kog maw and fiora duo bot, I built 5 blood thirsters and beserkers and my bud built 5 ravenous hydras thinking they would stack XD. Good times, because we'd suicide early for a double kill with my passive.
Season 5 was good, as my tanks reigned supreme for most of it and man.... it felt good being at the top of the food chain for once. I had heaps of flexibility to try different tanks in the jungle that usually didn't work and all of my IRL friends started playing. We all loved the game, we played daily as a 5 rocking our wombo combo of darius/naut/zed/sivir/karma. We were total plebs and completely up ourselves, but we felt like bronze league gods ruling the game through vision and objective control (man I loved those trinkets). Dragons died a matter of minutes after they spawned, and then mere seconds after every other consecutive spawn. Nothing could stand up to 3 pink trinkets, 2 upgraded yellow trinkets, SoTaG an a ruby sightstone surrounding baron.
When we faced defeat, we were usually counter-picked blindly (we never had draft pick) but it was fun, we enjoyed losing because it was such a rush of intensity, just thinking if they stuff up just once, we could be back in it
Given the sheer flexibility of the season, we did soooooooooo many troll compositions and they worked a surprisingly number of times. Twats bmed our yordel power, but then they let us hit completed full AP builds
. The wombo combo was absolutely glorious.
Season 6 is when everything went down hill for us all. The marksman update crushed the game for us. No tank I picked could deal with graves, and none of us were particularly fond of ADC (we usually had a kill lane bot). The snowball meta that has plagued the game decimated the very way we played league. Vision, objectives, stalling for power spikes. None of that mattered anymore. All of us got wrecked on a regular basis until we started locking in Mal/Sej/annie/retarded bot combo. It felt like shit being forced to play differently to such a degree.
It wasn't that my playstyle changed, or that our plan was simply more difficult to pull off. It was that the way we love to play this game, was absolutely crushed in one patch. The game wasn't fun anymore, we didn't like the champions we had to pick when we played together (granted I tried to force my picks into ranked), but we still played because we didn't have an alternative FtP game that we could all agree on.
The new mastery system and item changes injected an NaCl concentration I had never felt before. The favouritism towards marksman was so blatantly obvious that it hurt. The train wreck that was a year of marksman domination and sated devourer hell removed all but one IRL bud from this game. The fix was so obvious, revert and try again.
Now I'm the only one left, there were 19 of us. The 5 we kept daily were close, we were besties for lack of a better word. But they grew sick of the game. Sick of knowing how great the game could be and sick of being forced off their favourite champions and roles. I only keep playing because of the university group that provides more friends to play with, if I didn't have that this game'd gone already.
.
I doubt we will ever see anything as good as seasons 345 post yi/kass nerfs. I can only hope another f2p multiplayer game comes along that me and my buds agree on before this game becomes completely foreign to me.