What attracted me to LoL, and why I'm not happy with it now.

I was introduced to LoL by a friend of mine who liked to play it fairly often; his main champion was Rammus, and he liked diving into the enemy team formations an 1v5ing them till they killed themselves. I enjoyed watching sort of the audacity of his playstyle - the Rammus taunt as he called it was him running in to the enemy base by himself and punching their inhibitor from the inner side of it. The number of times that sort of thing worked was pretty hilarious.

That said, the game itself didn't seem all that great - it was just 5 guys in a forest beating up five other guys in a forest until one sides' gem thingy broke. Fundamentally the concept of the game didn't look particularly interesting to me.

It wasn't until I saw a video of someone playing Lulu jungle as a random YouTube suggesting that I began to be intrigued by the game; this was a character which, to me, looked like a squishy mage type, yet they were playing in a position which apparently that champion did not normally perform, and the person acquitted himself quite admirably.

Upon reading information about LoL, I learned about how the characters are set up, with item builds, runes and masteries; in theory you could configure champions in such a way to perform a multitude of different roles. As someone who really likes rpg's and can spend hours working on building a character, this looked very compelling. I decided to try the game, and I had a good deal of fun running around on the map farming minions, and to some extent dueling people. I was quite happy when I bought my first champion, Kassadin; I liked him cause I like Lovecraftian fiction, and he has much of the same kind of a vibe as those characters - plus he was just cool, as a melee mage. I enjoyed playing him, and would switch to free champions whenever I wanted to try out someone new. I liked messing with my masteries and

Some time later, Kassadin got nerfed; I understand this is a common thing in online games, but I had not played much in the way of online games before LoL, and to me this was a relatively new concept. It seemed (and still does) disconcerting to me that a champion that performed well would be penalized for doing so. Still, there were other champions, and other ways to play those champions, and I bounced around trying out different champions and trying to play them in different ways. Sometimes it worked, and many times it went horribly.

Over time I followed the patch notes of the game, and saw a somewhat disconcerting trend - first, that champions that were performing well and considered good were often nerfed, but more importantly, many champions were changed in ways that made them less diverse. Looking at the wiki and the histories of the characters, it seemed that, most champions which were played in a way outside the original purpose they had, and had any amount of success in that role, was summarily nerfed and changed such that it became difficult or impossible to play in this different way, like AP Yi, for instance. Even across the board changes were made which looked good at first, but were really bad, like the %base health regen as a regen mechanic - I thought it was cool that you could have regen builds remain relevant throughout the game by having the regen scale, but Riot went across the board nerfing base regens for many different champions, effectively locking characters out of regen builds.

What I enjoy about the game is trying out fun builds for characters, or sometimes just pointless fighting. I'm not interested in ranked play, nor am I interested in massive team fights. I don't care about "competitive balance", since the very notion of an e-sport is dubious to me. I just want to have fun playing fun characters.

However, it seems that what I liked the most is not a priority; it looks like the goal is to have champions do less, and have less individual impact, and to pigeonhole characters into specific roles where they can never leave. Perhaps I'm wrong, but somehow I doubt it.

"As we move forward, we're going to be creating more distinct uses for new and old champions, especially trending away from generalists. This means some of the things you expect to do on a champion will be missing on some champs (Azir, Soraka)" - Morello