Congratulations Riot you listened to the wrong people!

Anyone remember Dunkey's "I'm done with League of Legends" video? The key part of his angry rambling video was: **"Laning Phase: The other guy sits under his turret and farms creeps for 20 minutes. Then the rest of the game, both team walking around the map, accomplishing nothing until some dumbass gets caught; that's every match in a nutshell. The death timers are too short. The bounty system punishes you from doing good. The turrets are fucking annoying. The rank system doesn't work at all. Most of this is just the game constantly inhibiting how good you can actually do, and any great competitive video game-there are so many techniques and opportunities for a great player to just whoop some ass." ** and later on he says "The matches just go on for way too long EVERY time"

Since he quite Riot tried increasing death timers. (It sucked) Creating dynamic queue. (it really sucked) Encouraging early ganking/roaming and teamfights. (Snowball central reporting) Changing up the bounty system repeatedly. (Snowball!) Adding more "high skill cap" champions. ( ) nerfing towers and pushing for early wins.

Turns out that a toxic, burned out, frustrated youtuber hard-stuck in platinum doesn't actually know how to design or balance the game.

Now I don't think Dunkey was the only person that Riot took influence from; but it feels like they tried to address all the things he brought up in that widely circulated video. Damage and snowball have been getting worse since season 5. Making pure damage keystones in Runes reforged was the tipping point. The game wasn't perfect in seasons 1-5. Maybe too many games were decided with a team fight at 40 minuets. But at least there was give and take. At least you had some dynamic situations.

Whatever the source of Riot's shift in design direction it has failed. We need to return to the days where tanks were hard to kill and had low damage. We need to return to the days when team fights lasted more that 3-5 seconds. We need to return to 30-40 minuet games being the norm. We need to return to the days when there was actually a difference between burst and sustained damage.