Where is RIOT Games?
Going to post this via my smurf account, merely because my regular summoner name is completely unimportant to this, and should not cloud the issue. Let us merely state that I have been around long enough to have actually earned my Happy Elf Teemo.. when it was released... not found it in a box. Here is my question:
Where did RIOT Games go?
Does it feel, to anyone else, that RIOT is no longer owned by the same company, with the same goals and ideas, or does it indeed feel that there was a sale that we were not told about? Let us look at a bit of history, and compare it to today.
**1 - ** Damage vs Defense
Has anyone else felt very very squishy lately? Even as a tank. It is amazing the sheer auto-attack damage being dealt by the current incarnation of the ADC Champion Class. They hit harder than an assassin bursts, with pure auto attacks, and then stack skills on top of this. In fact, right here on these boards, someone posted today a video of what happens to a fully built LeBlanc when the ADC clicks on her one time... as she rifts over a wall. He died before he could rift back over it, catching a trailing auto attack. It lasted less than 3 seconds of combat, and Leblanc vanished - the ADC was missing a chunk but had to do nothing more than click on her.
Assassins were always rare champions (even when RIOT went through that phase around the creation of Talon where they were turning out Assassins regularly). There were numerous releases and talks about WHY this would always be the case - Assassins exploded people in extremely short amounts of times. Now the ADC does this - no matter how tough you are.
Hrm.
**2 - ** Old Promises vs New Realities
Most of you may not remember, but the RIOT Dev staff went on a six month long tirade about the problems inherent in True Damage in a game. They stripped it completely down, ditching items and champion skills left and right, to narrow down True Damage to 3 champions (one regrettably being Vayne, but we were promised a rework since she was new.). Take a look around now days... it's quite literally everywhere.
There are many other such promises, long arguments between playerbase and the Dev staff, wherein the players caved to the Dev's extremely valid points... that a few short years later they completely swap their position on... despite having very very good reasons behind them initially. Then we all look around and go 'WTF RIOT' as those problems stand out in very stark contrast.
3 - Customer Service
Let's just admit that, compared to RIOT's original approach to customer service... this is now basically dead. Email them and wait a week for an automated response.
4 - Oversimplification
Does anyone else remember the rather stark learning curve this game used to have? There were champions that were good for new players, and then there were the rest of the champions that everybody else used. Over the past couple of years RIOT has single mindedly massacred the complications inherent in many champion designs to make them universally playable. While granted this has had the side effect of we old players simply beating down new players so bad that they often quit the game - it also has taken most of the challenge out. You can statistically sort out the end of the game in under 10 minutes now, for the most part. No more true clutches, no insane last minute ditch pushes that pay off... the game has been streamlined to make tournament matches quicker, and nothing more.
This game has become about making streamed tournaments look flashy, fast, and easy to watch. This has, sadly, decimated aspects of game play that render the non-tournament players either in a constant state of irritation - directly contributing to the assholery that is chat 90% of the time - or simply made the long term players quit. I had friends on my friends list who I had played with since Beta... and my friends list is empty... all for the reasons above, and a myriad of other small reasons that just....
Make it seem that RIOT is not in charge any more, and we are playing a Sony or EA game.
