Jaded veteran player with one request - Please read these heartfelt words, Riot.

TLDR; Riot has great concepts and ideas, but poor execution. I’m also losing all interest to play League. Send help.

I've been dreading commenting on boards for awhile about my opinion of this, but I guess now is a good time. I've been playing since 2012 (season 3) with my fiancé (back then we were bf/gf) and we both fell hard in-love with the game. It was super challenging, fun, dynamic, and the characters were wonderful. I first jumped into league playing the shit out of Sona, she was my main and I absolutely love her to death and still do. I was also part of the community and I was honestly super proud of the positive side that created so many great things and helped others.

I cosplayed League characters, helped get friends into the game, even taught them how to play step by step and helped them get into ranked. I even met some really good friends through league that I still talk to this day. The game even helped me spend more time with my brothers who I don’t see as often anymore since we’ve all grown up and are living on our own. This community and game means a lot to me because of how much time, money (like $2k over the 4 years I’ve played) and love I’ve put into it. These characters and their stories are amazing and I could read their stories over and over. Their designs are beautiful and have become some of my all-time favorite characters (Sona waifu for laifu <3). When it came to Ranked, I was terrified of it because I saw that queue as intimidating and that only the best would battle it out in there. I think it took me a good year before I tried doing ranked with my fiancé because I was so nervous and terrified that I wasn't good enough. Eventually we both practiced really hard and fought our way to gold (took two seasons but we made it!). It was a great feeling because back then you really had to rely on yourself but still try to work with your team to win. Granted we ran into the typical shit teams (AFKs, Trolls, Toxic players, etc), but we still managed to win and get placed high enough to reach gold.

But things changes the season after we reached gold.

We started caring a bit less about Ranked (although we still tried our best to practice in normal), until eventually we stopped caring about the game in general. Gone were the nights were we both stayed up until 4am grinding out normals with our friends and testing out new build paths and strategies. Eventually we only started playing every now and then whenever our friends invited us to play. And now we barely get on anymore and would rather play other games than boot up league. I think it's been a few weeks since I last played, and that's honestly a very heart breaking feeling to feel so disconnected with a game I once loved so dearly.

I don't know why my love for the game is dying, whether it be the company decisions, the game's health, or perhaps waning interest, but it's a terrible feeling to have.

I want to love this game again, but so many of these changes and content feel so dis-genuine that it's almost frustrating to watch.

These are just my opinions, but the current changes and decisions have left such a sour taste in my mouth that it's hard to gain interest in the game again.

1: New characters. These new characters coming out, while thematically they are amazing, gameplay wise they feel forced and awkward. They either come out super bad, super OP, or just meh. They no longer feel simplistic, easy to grasp, yet hard to master. They instead feel complicated and difficult, but not in a rewarding way. For example: Aurelion Sol. His character design and idea is beautiful. I love dragons and his design made me excited enough to buy him day 1. But playing him was frustrating. Not because he had a high skill curve or because I couldn't figure him out, but because his playstyle was the complete opposite of every other champion and how I was taught to play the game (younger brother is Diamond ranked so he actually taught me how to play). Instead of moving constantly and setting up, you're more so forced to plant your butt and try to get your stars to hit. He didn't feel satisfying and he didn't really fit his theme. I thought he was going to be this awe-striking powerful dragon on the battle field, either chucking stars at you or roaring fiercely in your face. Instead I was met with a stationary "mage" whose damage relied solely on his rotating stars. He felt boring and unrewarding, and when you managed to get a kill as him it didn't feel "awesome" like it did with other mages (i.e. Ahri, Veigar, etc.). Other new champions also suffered this fate (not all the new releases have, but many have fallen off quickly), and it's very disappointing to see this trend. Especially with such an evolving meta, some of these champions no longer become viable to play because they eventually fall into a niche category. I may be wrong on this, but this is purely my opinion on this matter. I wanted to be excited about new champions, but seeing the recent releases and how they're "super complicated over the top mechanics with tons of passives" it doesn't make me as excited as I used to be. I miss the simple champions like Tryndamere, Garen, Lux, and even slightly difficult ones like Thresh and Gnar. Champions no longer feel straight forward, they feel like a mess of ideas that fall flat in comparison to their appearance and design. Again, this is solely my opinion, but I felt like sharing it.

2: Game/Client changes. This covers a lot, so I'll try to condense it to a few that bothered me the most which were: Hextech Crafting, Dynamic Queue, and Character Ranking. Okay so, for Hextech crafting, I think it's a good idea, but a terrible execution. The drop rate of keys is straight out awful. When I was still trying to play the game a lot when it released I would maybe get one key fragment once every week or two if I was lucky. And this was from playing multiple games in a row. I don't know what the drop rate for keys was, but it was extremely frustrating to never be able to open the 4 boxes I have because I was missing key fragments to even make a single key. The fact that this option was provided to add more to the game yet extremely difficult to even use was frustrating. And when I did manage to open the box? It was usually disappointing. Getting 1 item per box (that usually took FOREVER to open) was the most disheartening feeling ever considering you needed dust to unlock it, and if you didn't like the item or already had it you had to either disenchant it or wait till you managed to open (and pray to RNGJesus) two more of the same item you wanted to reroll. The key drop rate wouldn't be an issue if the boxes actually meant something. But it's not rewarding at all and more so a nuisance than a reward. But because the drop rates and the lack of content you get from the boxes is so poorly balanced and executed, it seems more like a waste of content and a waste of what could have been an amazing idea to help casual players get into the game, and keep veteran players interested. Another issue for Hextech: Limited skins. The fact that 2 skins and a ward are now Hextech exclusive is mind boggling. I get the idea for the cool incentive to participate in Hextech, but the fact that the drop rate is abysmal, and you only have two ways to unlock it is honestly a poor decision. Again, this all relates to the absolute poor drop rate of these boxes and key fragments. This doesn't make me want to play or even care about Hextech. Instead this makes me want to avoid it at all cost.

For Dynamic queue, it's more of a love/hate relationship. I love it for the fact that I usually play with 3-4 friends whenever I do manage to get on, but I hate it for the fact that it's now "mandatory". I won’t complain and say it's utterly terrible, I think it was a great idea and I like how it evolved greatly from Team Builder. But I don't like how it alienated part of the community. Even if I'm not a part of the hardcore crowd anymore (gave up on ranked awhile ago), it still sucks to see a part of the community get cast aside that don't play with friends like I do, and prefer the competitiveness of soloQ. It's perfect for friends playing together, but horrible for playing alone. I like the laning queue and the fact that it got implemented into Ranked (most frustrating part of ranked seasons prior was the calling positions and instalocking). I hate that it became mandatory and alienated a very important part of the community. I understand not everyone can be pleased, but to make promises of a SoloQ, and then to turn around and break that promise is hurtful not only to that part of the community, but to others on the sidelines who care about the community as a whole. I care about the game and the community, but to see it take the "casual friendly" route is scary and worrisome considering I used to be a part of the WoW community (played since Vanilla/BC, took a break and came back to the utter horror that was WoD). I'm not saying this change was horrible, but I will say that in my opinion is this was poorly handled and might hurt Riot in the end when it comes to its veteran/competitive playerbase.

Lastly of part 2, the character rankings. More so a frustration with the inconsistencies of getting an S rank. I feel like the algorithms for this are very off and not calculated properly. For example, if a team surrenders at 20, how does the game expect anyone to get an S rank when the most amount of kills someone has averagely is 3-5. Even then by 20 minutes team fighting hasn't happened consistently, so trying to get high enough kills and assists are neigh impossible, or even a good CS score depending on your lane/champ. This gets frustrating when you have 3-5 games in a row with the enemy team surrendering and the highest you can manage is a B+. As for games that do manage to make it to the 30 or 40 minute mark, the scoring still seems off for the individual level. Which in turn, makes getting Hextech boxes harder to get. Perhaps this should be tuned a bit to put into consideration of games that end at 20 minutes, or at least give a good guide/example of what kind of game is considered an S rank compared to an A rank. I understand S games are supposed to be rare, but when you go 17/3 as Caitlyn and get an A+ it's extremely frustrating and makes no sense. This is just my frustration about the ranking, I could be wrong, but it's still frustrating nonetheless.

3: Cosmetics (includes client appearance, skins, etc). This is more so my gripes about the "skin sales" and questioning of the skin design choices, as well as the client appearance choices. Firstly, removing the first release sales on 1350 and 1820 skins was honestly disappointing to me. While I still bought them, I hated it at the same time. I liked being able to save some money when the skin first comes out (because I still want to support the company, but not go broke doing it), but now I either have to pay full price or wait for God knows when for it to go on sale. This was a poor move to me and really shouldn't have been done. I get Riot is still a company and has to make money, I have never complained about that and would never be upset about that, but to change something that honestly was never a problem is concerning. Perhaps this is a decision that we’ll never understand why it happened, but as someone who spent A LOT of money on this game, it’s disheartening to see those sales disappear in order to make back the full price of the skin.

Secondly, while the skin content is definitely improving overtime, I feel like the need of constantly pumping out 750 skins kind of waters down the quality. While I enjoy the cheaper options for cool “costume changes”, the amount of these that come out is a bit crazy. Generally I like to purchase the more expensive skins because they feel more bang for my buck. Granted there have been a few 750 skins I did love (Beasthunter Sej was great), I still felt like these skins could have been made better or not even needed. Most of the time the skins aren’t that great in the game, they’re just a Great Value version of a name brand you wish you could have bought, but didn’t have enough at the time. It’s not a bad thing, but my issue is the amount of these that came out for awhile compared to the usual 975+ skins I was used to seeing every other patch. Lately it seems like a few better quality skins are coming out, but with the lack of day 1/week 1 sales I don’t care as much to get them the minute they become available. Purely my opinion again, but it’s how I honestly feel. Perhaps someone could help enlighten me on this and maybe give more information. But for now it’s whatever.

Lastly, the choice of the client style is kind of irksome. Not a major reason why I’m losing interest in the game, but the alpha client and the new shop seem so disorganized and clustered that it gets confusing really quick. The old client, while not great to look at, still made sense and was easy to navigate. Whereas the new one feels like a clusterfuck of panels and images that don’t really tell me much. It’s also painful on the eyes if you stare at it too long because of the color choice (dark colored client in a dark room is no fun). Just more of an artistic opinion, not entirely game breaking but it didn’t feel like a great choice to me. Queue lobbies look great though. Everything else feels “ew”.

In conclusion, I’ve grown tired and worn of the game. It hasn’t been able to hold my interest lately, and I feel the direction it is going is becoming more alienating and less welcoming to long-time players like me. It seems League is trying to compete with all the different games and companies out there, which generally is a natural progression of a company, but it feels like it’s being done in a poor manner without much thought of the community outside of the pros and/or new players. This is purely how I feel and solely my opinion (I really feel the need to consistently repeat this haha), but it just doesn’t feel fun for me to play anymore. The ideas that come out are great in concept, but generally tend to be poorly executed in order to compete with other games and other ideas. I really hope Riot does listen to its community more, and perhaps errs on the side of waiting until something is fully complete and tested, rather than pushing something to meet a deadline or to compete.

I loved League back in the day because it felt unique and special as well as challenging, but now it feels like any other game. Perhaps I’ve just naturally lost interest because of the length of time I’ve played the game, but I don’t know. I feel confused and sad that I no longer have that itch to play 5 or 6 games of league a night, but maybe this is just me.

Thanks for reading this is you managed to get to the bottom~