Riot and Stagnation: Why failing April Fools is actually a good thing.

I'm going to be presenting this from the PoV of someone who has played since season one, so if some of this doesn't make sense I'll do my best to explain. However, I'm actually very happy with the event because it showcased Riot actually trying something new/different, even if it failed. To understand why, I want to talk about what both is and used to be Riot's biggest problem: Stagnation.

If you remember champion design and releases from Season 1 and 2, they're some of the worst in the game. In fact, almost every major champion of problem comes from those eras. No, I'm not talking about "ugh kench is so broken" or "gg zed 2 stronk" as the boards complain. No I'm talking about something far more sinister: Repetition of design.

For all the jokes we make about three-stack procs and %HP Damage, Season 1 and 2 was far worse simply because of design stagnation. Anyone remember original Sejuani? Outside of her E, she was pound-for-pound the same as Amumu in almost every regard. She played the same, she did the same stuff, she brought little new to the table. How about Darius, who we joked about because he was an almost carbon copy of Garen. Original Fiora was Yi with breasts. Season 1-2 was the age of the metagolem and the flood of generalists that League is STILL dealing with. Because of this, Riot has to devote many resources they should be putting elsewhere to fixing these old problem children.

This is the error of stagnation: A moment of misjudgement in the past that makes the future harder to accomplish. However, this does not just apply to champion design. Event stagnation was also something Riot has been struggling with. April fools, outside of the last years, was simply an event to sell more skins. "Oh but what about-" No. I mean it. All they literally did was sell skins. URF Rider Corki and URFwick. Hell for all the complaining about Riot screwing with Halloween, they were events made to sell skins more than anything else. Only in the earliest of seasons did they do something and that was the icon changes/map recoloration (Side note: I'd like to see this back but I get that it was discontinued due to the map change).

As a company and as a game, Riot should always be willing to try and fail new things. It's why I wasn't upset during Burning Tides when GP was disabled for like a week. Yeah, it sucked and it was a bad idea, but they TRIED something new. They did something of impact for an event and, even if it didn't work out, they could move forward with new ideas. This is why I'm not upset with this event. Is it bad? Yeah, I'm pretty underwhelmed by the whole thing, but I'm glad they tried something else with it. Having URF yet again would be the easy way out, having URF would just be stagnation. I don't want stagnation, I want them to try new things even if it doesn't work.

I'm likely the minority on this but I'd rather see League evolve than stagnate. If anything I felt that the Winter event was a bigger disaster than April Fools because it was a copy-paste job of the previous event. Poro King. Skins. Only new thing was a shop with custom discounts. Ho hum. At the end of the day, I want Riot to fail in doing things like this so they can learn for the future. Asking for stagnation is worse than anything I could ever imagine.