Jungler skill gap breaks the game
There is this hypothesis I've had for years now that I want to share and ask what is wrong in the thought process.
I feel like the difference of skill between your jungler and the ennemy team's jungle contributes too heavily to the % chances of winning a game. But more importantly, it also contributes too heavily to the amount of fun that can be had in a game. I am NOT saying jungle is OP. I'm saying that if your team has a bad jungler, and the ennemy team has a bad jungler, then the game will be even. Two good junglers = an even game with a lot of interesting stuff going on and some great shotcalls. But even the slightest difference of skill totally breaks the game, and the influence they have is nuts compared to a skill gap between two top laners / mid laners / supports / adcs.
**Losing is not really a problem, even in ranked the chances of you having a bad jungler being equal to everybody else's makes it perfectly ok.
What is not though, is that it has so much influence (at least from plat to D2 wich is what i played last 3 years) on the game's mood, how interesting it is, and how fun the overall experience becomes.**
Indeed, if your jungler sucks, then you know for a fact pushing is out of the question, and even 2v2's/3v3's become very risky. But even playing safe becomes very dangerous if you are playing champions like kassadin that can be pushed in for hours and have no response other than being able to set up perfect ganks. First turret dives become a reality and you feel completely traped. If your jungler has no pressure or gave buffs dying, things that normally stop champions from going out of control aren't there anymore, and the whole experience becomes broken. Even the ennemy support, if he is good, will take advantage of this, roam freely, and make your game a complete misery. Basically, everything becomes grim and your options become extremely limited to reverse the course of the game.
Likewise, if your jungler is amazing and the ennemy team's jungler is bad, there will be this strange state of "flow", where everything seems to go perfectly well, from ganks to shotcalling objectives to perfect rotations where coordination and mechanical skill completely crush the ennemy team in a steamroll of clutch plays where your jungler gave the team just enough edge to make plays happen that should normally result in a stalemate.
One team's flowing game is another team's "report tf jungle" "you died on red buff don't do this in ranked" "why are you farmining they are pushing mid" "Seju apply pressure you're useless" "Ryze been perma pushing for 10 minutes straight and you don't come"** "better jungler wins" **"why would you take blue" "top getting camped at least take dragon?" "did you just give double buff to my worse counter ?" "we were winning bot, then yi tried to solo dive them"...
This is my perspective as a main midlaner. I have a lot of respect for junglers, who have to work with game knowledge, laner's mood swings, map vision and mechanical skills to compensate for a "meh" jungle creep income, and much more thought and higher skill cap in a meta dominated by mindless ardent censor spams.
Tl;dr : Jungle is not OP, but the skill difference between junglers leads to too many broken game situations.
Please correct me where I'm wrong.