I'm taking a vacation. (How the developers of the game I love are trying to keep me from playing it)
Before you say Teal Deer and yull be back, actually read what I have to say.
Don't know if it's temporary or permanent, that falls on Riot's actions to decide. But at the moment, I physically cannot play League anymore.
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What I used to consider charming quirks of amateur mistakes from a company "starin from teh bottem now wur here" have turned into nagging flaws, and are now so much at the forefront of this game that I cannot enjoy the actual benefits it does have.
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The community has gotten so unbelievably toxic that I have yet to experience ONE GAME that has not had someone ruin someone's gameplay experience for whatever reason (talking between both teams, not just my specific cases), for like 2 months. Supposedly the new report system was supposed to fix that (yeah, that's worked out well). I'll give it two months and see where it goes, but my gut feeling and my logic is telling me that it's not going to change anything at best and make it worse at worst.
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Riot has pretty much destroyed everything that I really enjoyed about the game. The lore has gone from an extremely interesting story of intrigue from a mysterious governing agency to a sloppily thrown together trope fest that was sloppily retconned, and now just gone. A roster of colorful characters that had their own niches and unique gameplay elements have now been dropped in favor of twitchy faceroll fests for the #LC$BIGPLAYZ. Riot has shown time and time again that they're much more interested in making a game that's fun to watch rather than fun to play. They're perfectly ok with disregarding 99.98% of the playerbase for the 0.02% of the pro players.
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Riot has also refused to address the horrid state of Solo Queue. Because of extremely poor matchmaking based off of a bad measurement scale for team based gameplay, some players are allowed to skate onto Gold+ because of pure luck while others are stuck in "planes of ELO hell" because of the same reason: luck. When your system of determining skill is based on luck instead of skill until you hit the highest levels of play (Platinum+) it's time to implement a new system. Yet despite the community seemingly being fully aware of how bad it is, they still treat it like a damn religion, literally tripping over themselves to insult Bronze players and telling them that their opinions matter on absolutely nothing. You don't like the lore? Well, you're just a bronze scrub, get gud m8, and den u can complain.
If you asked me why I played League in Season 3, I would have said because it was my first MOBA, with gameplay elements that combined some of my favorite aspects of multiple different genres with a colorful cast of characters that were tied together by a lore so expansive and thought provoking that it was pretty much second to only huge name RPGs like WoW and TES.
If you asked me why I played League in Season 4, I would have said because it offers unique gameplay experiences different from other MOBAs, and that despite its many flaws, it is fun enough to still play and be enjoyable, and can be actually a really good pro eSport if you can balance it properly.
If you ask me why I play League now, I really don't have an answer.
It isn't the lore because the lore doesn't exist anymore. It's like going from the Pokemon multiverse now to the original Pokemon universe without the neat little multiverse theory to make the world's greatest retcon and just saying, yeah that big war that happened in X and Y and Delta Episode, it just never happened, weird huh? Literally I cannot stress enough how poorly the lore team handled the retcon. Out of everything that you could've done: corruption in the IOW, time traveling champions wreaking havoc (FFS you have Zilean and now Ekko), multiverse theory, you simply just say that it never existed. Not even some bad drug trip or something, it just never happened.
It's not the community. When I originally started playing this game we had a functioning community based policing system. I was a member of the Tribunal, and we got together and stood up for what we believed in. If you were sitting around calling people a variety of racial and sexist slurs, you'd get banned. If you told people to kill themselves or wished deaths upon their families, you were banned. The community actively sought out to better themselves. Now the people who go around telling others to uninstall and kill themselves are the norm, not the exception. People who have to experience this environment are forced to stay in it. People are forced to stay in games with people who do everything in their power to just make them feel like absolute shit, and put their own accounts at risk if they tell them off or simply leave. If a player never connects, Riot says the game is just as important and valid as if there was a full lobby, but will tell you that leaving an uneven match is wrong. From the beginning this system was a petri-dish for trolls and intentionally toxic players. Now they've become aware and are using this to their advantage. People in pre game lobbies are being intentionally unsportsmanlike and are threatening to ruin the experience of the entire team unless they get the role and champion that they call. Riot says that they're just a couple of bad examples that slipped through the cracks, but from my standpoint and the evidence at my disposal (bookmarked names of summoners never connecting to games at all, or flat out intentionally feeding or flaming teammates for literally hundreds of games on end) the "couple" of bad examples are a rather large percentage of the playerbase (if one player is poisoning the entire game for everyone every match I play, that would probably put the amount at about 5-10%, not a huge percentage, but an INSANE amount for a community as large as LoL's), and the "cracks" are actually gaping loopholes in the system.
It's not the game balance. Top lane has always been a mess. Mid lane has always been relegated to a 
of champions that completely outclass every other mid lane champion. Same goes for junglers. Bot lane sustain supports have been made pretty much worthless while tank kill lane supports relegate bot lane to one style of play. ADCs are either oppressive or completely ignorable, there's no middle ground. These issues have been exasperated in Season 5 where mana based champions that don't have extremely negligible costs or bloated damage for mana ratios are getting completely dumpstered by resourceless or energy based champions. Flashy assassins are allowed to pubstomp till the cows come home but a caster with an AOE instant ring stun are dumpstered under the guise of a "compensation buff" to a removed item that was core to his kit. Lee Sin was allowed to be the greatest champion in League of Legends since his release until just recently, but Skarner got kneecapped after he became viable for one patch. There is no subjective case for the game balance at this point. Riot is objectively playing favorites to what they want to see in pro play because that's where their real money is. The people that got them to that point be damned, WE NEED MOAR LC$ BIG PLAYS!
I'd really encourage Riot to think about their design decisions really hard. The "LoL killer" has been a long running joke in League since it really took off, but MOBAs are a saturated market now. Everyone's seeing how lucrative ARTS can be. DOTA's playerbase and pro play has been established for quite some time now, and Smite's Championships are quickly gaining steam ever since its official release. Not to mention there's HOTS for the casual market of newer players that Riot's been actively pushing away from League by refusing to do anything about the smurf accounts brutally abusing new players by taking advantage of their lack of skill and verbally abusing them.
I get that Riot needs to make money, I'm not such a sobbing liberal that I can't see that. But doing it at the expense of the people that got you to the point where you can reap all the cozy rewards of being the most popular video game in the world and being considered a legitimate sport is just completely low. It's really betrayal to the people that believed in you back when you didn't know where this road was going to go.
Until you guys get some 
and {{summoner:2}} on the situation at hand here and actually really actively work on the giant ball of problems that has been snowballing over the years and is finally getting to the point where you can't just give a PR release and brush it off, I'm going to be sticking to 
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Teal Deer, I poured my heart out into this post. If you really don't have the time or simply don't care enough to read the entire thing, then go back to Memes and Games.
