A (Non-Comprehensive) List of Current Issues/Complaints I Have with League

If Meddler can do "Quick Gameplay Thoughts", I can do something similar too. You might think this would go over better as a forum post, but I don't generally come across well to most internet communities (also most of them are kids and don't like to think a lot; they would rather just post memes).

I would like to preface this by saying I'm glad something is being done about the bot accounts. However, there wouldn't be nearly as many of them if their incentive was removed. If Riot chose to sell level 30 accounts, it would reduce demand, since the accounts are safe from being banned as botted/sold accounts. It's something they could very easily do, but my only assumption is that they're not willing to sell it for a competitive price. Lowering the barrier of entry and grinding required is also something to consider. Obviously there could be some kind of requirement to purchasing an account, like linking it to another 30+ account in good standing or whatever, but it would still reduce botter demand, even a little, and then it would be less of an arms race.

I would like it if the bugs (or "unintended features") with runes were addressed soon. They've been on PBE for several weeks beforehand and on live for 3 weeks now, so a lot of the bugs should've been reported, but my guess is that they're more concerned with serious bugs that actually prevent choosing runes in champ select entirely (like that bug where you just get a blank window with an x and you can't pick your runes at all). It still sends me to the last preset page whenever I log in. Hide rune pages doesn't hide them in champion select. The secondary page doesn't show the stats you're getting from your primary tree unless you select it again (which should be visible at all times, since it's pretty important, even though you know what you're getting after making runes like 30+ times). Sometimes the bubbles on the secondary page look like they're not selected even though you already chose 2 runes and saved. That's just some of them, but I'm sure there's more too.

The leveling system is bad and so is the change to First Win. So you're guaranteed 810-1260 BE from leveling up right? Wrong. You're guaranteed that "Value" in the form of a champion shard, and that "Value" is actually not worth as much if you already own the champion in question. A 3150 Champion Shard only disenchants for 630 BE. Yes, there's a lot more 6300 champions, so you could potentially get 1260 BE as well, but that's only enough to upgrade a 450 or 1350 champion shard (which you have to have already). The champion shard simply isn't worth as much value as Riot thinks. You also need a ridiculous amount of BE to upgrade shards. Now you might say, well 60% of the value in store? That's a pretty good deal! But first you have to RNG the shard for a champion you like, then you have to RNG around 3-6 more shards to disenchant, so we're talking around 4 level ups best case, which is roughly 10000 XP best case. So congrats, you got your 1 champion, and it only took like ~20 first wins = 20 days of playing. On average you're going to have to disenchant 3x as many shards upgrade, so you can only upgrade about 1 out every 4. And it's not just that it's a psychological problem too, since some people are hoarders/collectors or just indecisive and don't know what to get rid of, so they'll just sit on all the shards and not be able to choose who to get rid of for BE. The BE drop rate from champion capsules should be like 50% or higher, or just let us choose if we want a random champion shard or BE when we open, or give like 100+ BE in addition to the shards if they're below 6300. Leveling up doesn't feel impactful at all because you just get 1 champion shard and that's it. my BE value doesn't change unless i forcibly disenchant the shard, and that means I have to decide I don't want that hero right now. That's not like Riot giving me a reward for leveling up, it's more like them asking me to make Sophie's Choice... (hopefully you get that reference) Anyway, I would like it if we got more raw BE somehow. The supply of shards is too high compared to the raw amount of BE we get (basically none, maybe 50 per day if you count First Win). Speaking of First Win, the change to it was awful, and let me explain why. Ok so you get first win unlocked by level 15, which only takes 1128 XP to level, so it skyrockets you right through to the next level. With the old value, you would get 575 XP towards level 16, which is a hefty reward of 500 BE, rather nice. That means first win was valued at around 255 BE, but now it's only 227 BE and you have to play another 28 minute bot game to get the same amount of XP. But you might be saying, well that's only a loss of 28 BE (11%), and that's only for low levels; it won't be that bad for higher levels (beyond 30). Well, that's where you'd be wrong. The First Win change is strictly worse in all scenarios. Suppose I'm level 45 going for level 46, which requires 3360 XP. The old First Win would give me 575 XP, or ~139-216 BE, while the new one gives me 146-200 BE. You might be saying, well that looks like more, you got 7 more BE on your minimum case!! Yeah, but it's not enough. You lost 16 BE on max case, and this is for a high amount of XP required. There aren't any levels that need more than ~3700 XP, so this is nearly max case, and it's still not even better on average. Nobody wanted this change, but you did it anyway. Unless First win is changed to 400XP+75BE or at least +60BE, it will be strictly worse in nearly all scenarios. Also, I'm not even sure why it needed to be decreased either. Couldn't you just have kept the 575 XP and added another 50 BE per win as a bonus? Or is that going to damage Riot's business model too much because people will buy all the champions too fast. Careful, after 3000 first wins they might be able to buy Urfwick! EVERYONE PANIC, SHUT IT DOWN!!!! I'm just kidding, but do you see where I'm going? It's just an unneeded change; people already dislike the system, and then Riot nerfs it even more instead of just making a power positive change to improve their likeability? User experience is plummeting. In Overwatch (another uncapped leveling model) You get a loot crate on every level up and it has 4 cosmetic/voice line items in it, but if you get a duplicate you just get currency. In league there's nothing like that to lower the variance, so you're just going to get a champ shard 90% of the time and have to disenchant it if you want to use it for anything else. It's like the same problem with gift cards ("$1 billion in gift cards go unused every year"). Riot is like saying here, go get yourself something nice with this champion shard... but what if I don't want that champion? Shouldn't I have the freedom to choose what I want? I'm the kid that just asks for money for christmas, but I guess that's just too bad mannered.

Oh, I almost forgot to add my spiel about missions.

First [Win], won't count unless you had it available before you started the game (and some people even say before you start the queue). Pretty frustrating if your schedule only permits you to play varying times and you have to wait for it to be fully available before you can start the queue. I guess I just sit on my thumbs for 10-15 minutes now.

Second, event missions where you HAVE to wear the icon. I really hate how this is a thing. Why are you FORCED to change your cosmetics to participate. Can't I just wear whatever icon I want and join in anyway? It just makes me not want to participate since I like my current icon and would rather not change it just for the mission...

Third, missions for specific champions just enable toxicity. Sure people are already going to be toxic, but now they're flaming if the champ gets banned, begging for people to first pick it, to play a new champion that they don't know what they're doing with. Yes, I know that they can just play bot games to finish the missions, but I don't think they do... Having a Zoe in the game is not a fun experience for anyone, except maybe the person playing it (I'm not going to bother going in on CertainlyT champions here, not the time or the place), but on top of that, Riot is incentivizing people to want to pick her more. This is just fueling people who were already on edge to be mad "OMG WHY DID YOU BAN ZOE I TROLL/FEED NOW" instead of "Oh damn, I guess someone doesn't want Zoe in their game because its a new champ that requires high execution to do well with and I should probably just stick to bots or go play blind pick where there's always a Zoe on both teams." The majority of the league community ain't the sharpest tools in the shed, but i guess it's the internet so everyone is 12. Seriously, these missions aren't good for anyone. I get it, Riot wants people to spend their RP to buy the new champion, but you could just make the missions available on anyone as long as you've unlocked the champion; why does Zoe have to be in the game? It's just really frustrating for everyone involved, and adds a lot of unneeded stress. It's a similar vein to the missions from last even where you had to pick all melee champions or run 5 Teleports. It wasn't very clear to people that you had to be in a 5stack of premades to complete the missions, and they were basically akin to trolling. If Riot is going to do something like that again, they should just make the missions either hideable or invisible until you join a lobby with 4 other people in it, and it should very clearly state (in simple english because we're all 12 years old) "Only completable in 5man premade." Actually, can Riot just run everything by me first so I can check it before they release something everyone hates again? I'm just kidding, obviously that won't happen and I doubt i'd be qualified for a job there, but a lot of stuff is pretty easy to catch with common sense, so I'm not sure who is checking these changes before they are shipped. It's not a problem that the devs don't play the game, so I'm not sure if it's the in-culture or what, but intent only counts for so much, people don't read into design that hard, they take everything at face value.

Not really related but your matchmaking algorithm for normal games is pretty horrendous. I'd rather sit in queue for 5 more minutes to get a game that's not a one-sided stomp, thanks. I know it's preseason and damn everything is gonna be a snowbally mess, but normal games are really imbalanced and have been for ages. It's pretty much like playing roulette. Rather than getting to have fun or attempting to win, the game is pretty much decided by which jungler gets more fed before 5 minutes. Your laners are 100% guaranteed to die to him no matter what, then he just snowballs and shits on the enemy jungler, and walks around the map getting more kills. Yeah, I know people don't tryhard in normals, and yeah I know "ranked and normal mmr are separate," you can spare me the speech. This matchmaking just isn't a fun experience for the losing team. You might say well if you want balanced games, just play ranked! and while it is true that solo/duo has a much more balanced experience, I only currently have 20 champions, so it would require me to pay a lot of money. If i want most of the remaining champions, that's around 87k RP. If I want half of that, that's 43k RP, which is ~$300. If I buy them all on sale, that's still ~$150 and I have to wait for the champions I want to go on sale, which rotates every 3-4 days (twice a week). Yes, I know the game is free and a lot of revenue comes from purchasing champions and skins and such, but to be forced to jump into ranked at a low level with few champions to get fair games, or be forced to purchase champions, or just stop playing altogether; none of these choices seem particularly appealing to me, to be honest. It doesn't really matter though, everyone gives me the same response, "just submit your response to the matchmaking feedback bot" who will give you an automated response saying, "mhmm we heard you and we are constantly improving our formula for better games thanks for playing bye." But I guess sometimes companies can only do so much to 'pander to'/appease their playerbase before they decide it's not worth the effort. Why bother evaluating user experience when we can just make more fun new runes!!! oh damn we broke a bunch of stuff adding the new runes, so time to spend like 4 patches cleaning up bugs... Ok, now time to do our fortnightly patch where we give a small buff to champions who we think are good but aren't being played so that it pushes them into the meta, nerf a couple of picks that are op in solo queue, nerf maybe 1 or 2 champions that are grossly overpowered in competitive, leave a bunch of op champions (pantheon, jayce) untouched for years, and call it a day. Yes, I know that balance is a work in progress, you don't always get it right, and obviously if the game was "perfectly balanced" and "every champion had 50% win rate" then the game would be boring/stale because a meta would form and be cemented, and obviously Riot deliberately/forces changes metas with the patches. But really some champions just keep getting forgotten about (maybe there's too many champions now? Can you name all 136 League Champions? What about all 151 original Pokemon? Or were you too distracted to notice that there's actually 138 released champions? I know riot has playtesters, but it just seems like the right changes aren't being made to benefit the playerbase, and it's rather frustrating to me as a longtime player who has invested tens of thousands of hours and probably 8000+ games to see almost none of my concerns ever be addressed. Obviously it's hard to filter out reasonable suggestions from the millions of 12 year olds who play this game and got upset because they went 0/12/0 on yasuo or whatever, but even the most harshly-worded complaints usually have some merit of truth to them. If someone is complaining about something, you can either ignore it, or see if it costs few enough resources to reasonably fix it in a short amount of time. We got Master Yi's dance to speed up with movement speed and we got Graves' cigar back, all it takes is a large amount of community action.

Now let me talk about Zoe. This champion. Incredibly overloaded kit. It doesn't matter if she's overloaded or not, she is just incredibly unfun to play against, and if you get her on your team she's probably going to feed. Let's talk about her abilties. Q is a long range poke tool and it's her only waveclear. It is dodgeable, but getting hit by one chunks really hard. The damage or cooldown (later in the game with a lot of AP and CDR) should probably come down a little bit, but otherwise it's ok. W honestly should not have ever been put in the game at all. You shouldn't be able to get items or spells from minions either, at least for the first 10+ minutes. I don't care that she doesn't have a W ability, it's just stupid. She can flash after you, pick up your flash, and flash again... she can pick up gunblade or redemption or ignite, heal, barrier, teleport... like there's just way too much power. And she can hold the spells for so long. Honestly, make the spell timeout like 3 seconds after picking it up, make you unable to get healing/gunblade early on, and lower the frequency of the drops, and maybe it will be passable. E yes it is blocked by minions, but the zoning is way too much, and you barely have to put your little toe in the zone to pick it up. Remove the bonus damage from E when slept, she doesn't need any more damage, her Q already nearly 1shots people, lower the slow from the drowsy effect a little bit, and make it QSSable if you're drowsy (not put you to sleep). R is kinda dumb that you can dodge CC but honestly it's fine. It's really easy for skillshot champs like Xerath to know exactly where you're going to be if you cast this, and they can hit their skillshots 100%. I feel like cancelling cc like Lee Sin kick for example on cast is a little strong, but it doesn't need to be nerfed immediately. So what did I propose in total? Nerf Q cd a little, gut W because it's dumb, nerf E so that it doesnt slow as much and can be QSS'd, and leave R untouched for now. Even if this champ has a terrible winrate she will still be antifun to play against. It's basically just AP Yasuo. A lot of stuff is going to have to be gutted from her overloaded kit, but I guess Riot is like "CertainlyT makes fun champs" so what we're gonna do is let him make whatever he wants, we playtest it, as long as she doesnt have absurd winrate in playtests, we release it. Then people buy the new champ because she's fun and broken (some with RP) and for the missions too (because those are a thing now), and then as people get better at her we'll slowly nerf her. Right? Hopefully they realize she's actually just a really dumb champion and probably shouldn't have been made (at least her W), but at the very least recognize that her kit is just really antifun.

Ok this is all I can think of for now, so I'm gonna leave it here. God bless anyone who manages to read it, as it clocks in at just over 3200 words.