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The wheel of age and pinning blame on Ghostcrawler

Junk Wolf·4/27/2018, 7:42:00 PM·3 votes·1,725 views

As league ages people will expect more, demand some kind of nostalgia from "glory" days. And they need a scapegoat. It's not riot that will kill league. it will be the unreasonable demands and expectations of the player base.

I was playing WoW when ghostcrawler was lead design. The game was in fact great, but a vocal minority wanted to throw tantrums in forums because they no longer had fun after X amount of years invested.

League is getting old, you've played through 8 seasons with many different metas. You try to grab on some kind of nostalgia that has been lost. Nothing is new in league, it's the same thing over and over again. They reinvent the wheel, change the meta constantly in an attempt to make everyone happy with a meta. But what happens when assassins are nerfed and tanks buffed? Or adcs nerfed and mages buffed? What's strong and what's not? Do you think that the assassin mains will be happy they got nerfed? Or the mages? or the adcs?

Riot and ghostcrawler both have done an amazing job with the game. While this opinion may anger a % of players in the community and will get tons of down votes I really don't care I'm just expressing my opinion. I've seen a lot of community posts trying to blame Ghostcrawler for their lack of fun. And really... that's just about as childish as it gets.

Instead of offering CONSTRUCTIVE criticism all i see is whining and crying very similar to world of warcraft. I guess that never changes and people don't like to hear the reality of it but I'm spelling it out for you. Grow up and critically think, if you're unhappy figure out the reasons, and provide a realistic way to potentially solve these issues. Developers listen, believe it or not and them taking you seriously depends on how you approach something. If you're just being like any child in the forums and go into a fit while offering no solution would you take them seriously if you were a developer?

TLDR: offer constructive criticism backed up by some kind of data, and analysis and offer a solution instead of baby-raging and pinning blame on one person. If you have facts and provide good criticism the game might be changed in a good way due to feedback. But when you're saying something along the lines of "holy shit camille is broken, oh my god I can't beat her in lane as teemo" or "zomg the reason why I can't climb out of low elo is because it's about the bot lane and not the fact that I go 0/10 in lane as mid rakan then at the 20 min mark have 70 cs, this game is stupid and i don't have fun anymore". What does that actually do?

5 Comments

Busty Demoness4/27/2018, 8:32:32 PM5 votes

Even though I disagree with many of Riot's design and balance choices, I still love the game for how it is structured and the characters within. There are also a number of design philosophies still present that keep me from turning to a different MOBA.

The other big problem I have with Riot is that they've gone back on a number of promises and philosophies that I feel made their game better not just in balance but in terms of being accessible.

Runes should have not been deleted (don't let Riot confuse you on this, they simply reworked mastery pages and renamed them to runes). At least as flat stat items, they offered a customization that let you tap into your champion in different ways. They also let you truly play your champion your way because the flat stat boosts given to all champions was based on what players typically took, and we all know that Bronze/Silver are going to be deciding that part.

XJ9lol4/28/2018, 8:22:42 AM2 votes

It wasn't a vocal minority throwing a fit on the forums because they no longer enjoyed WoW. It was the veterans of the game were being pushed out because the game they fell in love with was drastically changed in order to accommodate a vocal minority. This is why there's such a massive decline in players compared to Vanilla and TBC. It was little to do with Ghostcrawler and people blamed him because their classes got nerfed and the balance made little to zero sense, it was nothing to do with gameplay with Ghostcrawler.

WoW had carved out its own style and redefined the MMO genre from 2004 until 2008. After Wrath hit and it suddenly became socially acceptable to play WoW, you had a large influx of players who had no clue why the game was successful begging for dumb changes to accommodate their casual behavior. This is why raiding went from a ladder you climbed through the tiers and progressed through as a guild, to being "normal mode is a joke difficulty, clear heroic if you want to progress." This is also why if you look at a subscriber chart, while the game did peak during Wrath, it stagnated for the entire expansion. That's something people fail to take into account when they preach "WRATH HAD THE HIGHEST SUBS IT WAS THE BEST!" because Blizzard was losing their older fans in favor of a bunch of newer players.

It made sense in TBC when they actually kept attunements in the game on how raiding worked. You cleared tier 4, you got to do tier 5. You cleared tier 5, you got to see tier 6. Aside from how alt unfriendly it was, and how vague some attunements were, it worked quite well. For example, you needed to kill Nightbane to attune to SSC. Well, summoning Nightbane in itself was an attunement with literally no indication on how to do it. You just followed a very vague questline to get a journal and run around the world, do some dungeons and now you could summon Nightbane. Now the game is only as big raid-wise as the latest tier and it has four difficulties. Two of which are a complete joke, one of them literally buffing you for failing to kill bosses and cutting out half of the mechanics of the fight so monkeys can do it. Normal isn't that much harder than Loot For Retards difficulty, Heroic has a bit of a challenge comparatively but ultimately isn't that much harder. Now the game is literally pushed into "If you want a challenge, it HAS to be Mythic."

While League isn't making their game easier as time goes on because it's already an oversimplified game, their main problem is they insist on doing stupid gimmicks every season when they don't need to happen. Seasons 3 and 4 were near perfect with how everything played out in lanes and jungling as well as itemization with maybe a few balance tweaks. Season 5 they decided for no real reason to scrap Spirit / Razor items for junglers in favor of gimmicky smite swords and making you have to smite specific camps for specific buffs. Or adding flowers to the jungle for no actual purpose other than making getting caught out less risky because you can bomb plant over walls.

Dragons are another change that made no sense. They were fine being an objective that rewarded everyone global gold. Then they suddenly decided that wasn't good enough and made them a stacking buff system, and now they're what we have now where the game boils down to RNG on what dragon decides to spawn. No reason a competitive game should cater in part to some RNG because Riot decided "We want to see more fights over the dragons!" Baron Nashor used to be a buff with good stats if you took it and it was almost a guaranteed game ender. Now they shifted the buff to the minions to the point Nashor for a large part doesn't matter and mostly is a "Well we can get this and pressure them I suppose." rather than a game decider.

Champion design is senseless because you have half of the champions with simple kits from older designs. Like for example Hecarim and Nocturne. To champions like Zed where it's about being flashy and for some reason he's not only able to deal a load of damage, he's able to escape unscathed generally unless you stunlock him. Or Fizz. Too many assassin champions have the ability to be way too safe for their damage output, too many tanks are capable of dishing out unreal amounts of damage for how beefy they are. Hecarim is a prime example of this where he's way too tanky for how much damage he's able to deal late game. Then to top it off, I mean Hecarim is my main and favorite champion, but they BUFFED HIS SELF HEALING because "Hecarim players tend to build squishy assassin." It's like THAT'S WHAT YOU WANT. THEY TRADE DEFENSE FOR OFFENSE, YOU'RE GIVING THEM BOTH!

Eagleheart4/28/2018, 9:46:40 AM2 votes

I haven't played League frequently since Runes rework.

  • With new runes, I feel like a lot of champions are irrelevant because they don't sync well with the new stuff. Old runes applied to everyone.

  • I can't grind for champions reliably anymore. I have to go and spam games to get a loot box to maybe get the champion shards I want and hope that if I don't get a shard I want I get enough BE from smashing shards to get a champion. Prior to this I could see constant progression from every game. Overwatch at least lets you use every hero.

  • Everyone's damage feels insane.

Overall, I just don't like it. I've started to try and learn how to play DOTA 2 because League has become that annoying to play. Heroes of the Storm is also appealing and I already know how to play it. League used to be the "I want to put my skills to the test" MOBA with HotS being my "I just wanna have fun" MOBA due to the lack of items and more casual focused talents. But now DOTA 2 is my "I want to put my skills to the test" in place of league due to the insanity that's going on with balance.

... Also gimmie back my frickin mana regen runes Riot. I wanna spam spells vs the low CD no resource midlaners too.