Why League of Legends may seem "worse" to some people

warning: long post.

So I often see people say things like "league is so bad now, I'm thinking of switching over to dota". In reality, EVERY game has it's bad points, but it takes playing that game for a long time to see it.

I see lots of threads about how "league is totally unbalanced" and "what are the designers thinking". But actually, is you go on the forums for other games like Dota, starcraft, hearthstone, smite, you will see that ALL of them have threads like these. If you think switching to a 'more balanced' game will help....it won't. Because after playing for a long time, you will start to see the bad aspects of that game.

I actually started playing Dota 2 about a year ago, in fact I've also experimented with starcraft and hearthstone, not because I hated league but because I wanted to try something new. And you know, after having put in a TON of hours into Dota, learning all the champions and watching pro games, and spending time reading other people's thoughts on the forums, I realized that the same thing that happens to league players also happens to Dota players. And starcraft players.

You see, when you first start playing a game, you are so enraptured by all the possibilities. You can play any champion you want and it doesn't matter that much if you lose, it's more about having fun. I mean, that's how it was when I first started playing League, I just went about discovering new champions. And that's also how it was when I started Dota a year ago, every hero I played it was like "lol this is too op".

And it was all fun and exciting. But as time passes, you start to learn what strategies don't work, what champions not to play, and games tend to become more boring. Eventually, you start to see only certain champions, you start to play the game in only one way. And that's why I think for some people League has gotten "worse", in the sense that it's not as good as it used to seem, or how we remembered it being.

I think that no matter what game you play, this sensation is always going to happen. Take chess for example: there's so many openings to play, literally hundreds, and yet at the highest level only a few openings are played, and each game starts to feel like you've seen it a hundred times before. Why do some people quit after playing chess for so many years? Because it just stops being fun, it starts getting repetitive, there stops being creativity in how you play the game. Chess is a great example because we know that the rules and pieces haven't changed for hundreds of years, and yet that slow process of the game getting "worse" as you play it, even for professionals, is present. I mean, that's the whole reason fischer-random-chess became a thing (comparable to all-random mode in league) and why Bobby Fischer during the end of his career played exclusively this type of chess: because the original game had become boring, and players wanted something new.

So really, if you think that League is worse than it used to be, it's probably just because you've played it for so long and you understand it to the point that you can see the game's pitfalls. I mean, of course not everything about League is perfect, and yes we should still complain about these things so that they become better, but if you think that simply switching to another more "balanced" game is going to help, you're wrong.

If you feel like league is getting boring, maybe switch to another game for while, have some fun in other games, then come back with the creative energy you built up. It will give you a whole new perspective on league or any game you play. Also, try new champions, a lot of the time they are a lot more fun than you remember them being :p