I’ve been playing LoL from time to time since Season 1. I’ve quit each time after level of “toxins” in my blood started to rise past a certain threshold.
Recently I started to play some LoL again, but on a much more casual level. I don’t even play on Summoner’s Rift, unless it’s a Rotating Game Mode.
So, compared to Season 1, did things improve? Overall - not by much.
We don’t have these constant login queues anymore, that’s a plus. This itself is a result of splitting servers into regions, which also should’ve improved pings for some players. However, there are still de-facto 3 “main” servers: NA, EUW and KR. Everything else is pretty much crap.
Champion Select
Champion select certainly improved over the years. Back in the day you could pretty accurately predict the outcome of a ranked match simply by reading lobby chat. It was like a 50/50 chance that you’ll end up with 2 players going mid or someone being AFK or feeding. Why did it have to take so many years before these improvements happened? Not really sure. But this alone was one of the biggest contributors to the toxicity of the user-base overall. And with toxicity being contagious, LoL evolved into one of the most toxic communities out there.
Report System
This brings up a question, what about report system? Report system was there as long as I can remember. Was it ever effective? No. However it acted (and still is) as a fuel for an additional flame. “Report {him} for {that}” and so on. What they should do is to scrap the system completely and make not only chat with enemy team to be disabled by default, but a chat with allies as well. And those who will enable chats should be prepared to face the “wall of flame”, but no one should ever be punished for text-based interactions anymore. You turned it on yourself - deal with it yourself. This is similar to “mute everyone at the start of the game” practice, which is the most effective solution to this date. Needless to say it took them years to implement a way to disable pings…
General Content
About content… In general LoL’s standards are much higher now with everything receiving high quality art, voices, animations etc. And the amount of copy-pasta champions they were producing is decreased. This is a good thing. However balance… it doesn’t exist anymore. Instead of sticking to a verified formula, they keep shuffling things around, trying to keep the game “fresh”. But all it does - alienates new-ish players who can’t keep up with all these changes.
Bot-lane Roles
Back in the day they ruined support role, which could be described as a healer
or tank that walks around providing vision and trying to make allied ADC fed.
Yes it wasn’t a popular role and it was a problem when we had that original and
absolutely awful champ-select. But instead of fixing the root of the problem
they decided to delete the identity of that role and spread its responsibilities
among all the team. We ended up with a hole in place of a support position that
can be plugged in by literally any champion. It was some years ago though…
Right now they seem to be decided to repeat their mistake, but with ADC.The
first thing I’ve noticed after my recent comeback is that there isn’t really an
ADC role anymore and champions that play as “ADC” may not even be AD-based…
Hextech Crafting
At some point Hextech system was introduced. I think this is a great idea in general, but Riot’s greediness acts as a bottleneck, not allowing this system to show all it’s potential. Mainly an absolute inability to acquire cosmetics using in-game currency (that does NOT come from real-money investments). This is a major issue. Some people will never invest real money in the game and they just want to be able to earn a skin or two they always wanted for their main champ. But all we have is a rigged RNG system. Riot doesn’t want to understand that random (often shitty) skins for a champ you will never play don’t feel rewarding at all to the point of being frustrating.
Runes Reforged
Things got worse with the removal of old runes and masteries. By itself this is
not a bad change. They should have never existed to begin with! But what it
brought with itself can be called a “nerf” to the new champion acquisition.
Before it was pretty realistic to earn enough IP in one week to buy a highest
cost champion (without spending all-day playing). Right now, time increased to
about a month. The other way to acquire champs is to craft them from champion
shards, but this as well turned into RNG. And it is rigged as well, since the
probability of getting new champions is clearly much lower than getting some
cheepo-ones. By my calculations so far, the chance of getting a champ with
6300BE price tag is about 2.75%. Add to that the amount of champions… with
that getting the champ you want in a reasonable time-frame is impossible.
League is Dying?
All in all, people start to speculate that the game is dying. I am inclined to
agree, especially knowing that Riot founders ditched their CEO positions. But I
also think this is partially due to bad decisions old and new management keeps
making.
On a final note, while browsing the Internet I found references to Riot founders
being frustrated due to average game developers not listening to fans. What a
bullshit. They don’t listen to fans either. And no, cherry-picking what you want
to hear and sometimes even implementing things that are totally opposite of what
community asked does not qualify as “listening”.
In any case, I don’t think there are reasons to worry. League is too big to just
disappear, so it will stay around for some years to come.