As a long time League player, its been both wholly disheartening and exhilarating to watch the game’s eleventh season come into its own. The game has been both simplified for newer players and also janked up so much that very few players really know what’s going on with the game.

There’s far less mechanical demand from the items, and far more damage, meaning there’s less opportunity to make a mistake for new players and far more punishment for when such a thing happens against a competent opponent. It’s a weird dichotomy, but Riot is obviously not too keen on keeping their game stale, so I understand their sentiment towards these changes.

That said, I can’t help but feel a little pity towards them during these trying times. After all, it’s become very apparent that Riot is beholden, in some sense, to their most prominent of playerbase, which according to their advertising / writing style is weeb-infested. lol.

Because of this, I can’t help but feel like Riot is on a sure track to becoming a corporate version of Steve Buscemi asking how his fellow kids are doing.

“And we have all new items, and a brand new anime coming out! Wicked!”

It hurts to think about, but all the same I love the game for what it is. That said, I do have some concerns about where the game is heading and what it means for the nature of the competition as a whole. To be quite blunt, I feel as though the community is more at fault for this than Riot is.

With the new items introduced, and Riot doubling down on the changes they made to the game, its clear that they were trying to address some concerns regarding one’s ability to ‘hyper-carry’ and subsequently decided to just throw the damage in-game through the damn roof as a way to give players that option back. The problem being that the issue was never the amount of damage in the game to begin with, in fact, it may have already been too high.

The issue, really, is that the playerbase just knows more about the game and it’s good-practices than it used to. Players can draft, communicate, play from behind, and stall games out more effectively on average. And because of this, its a lot harder to hyper carry as even the best player in the match. In fact, the carry of the game isn’t decided by the best player these days, it’s decided by the worst.

If you’re the second least-skilled player in the game, but you’re facing the only player who’s worse than you, you’re very likely going to run Riot for that game unless your lane opponent receives sufficient help. That’s just how the game works, gold lead > skill in most situations, and season 11’s changes only serve to drive that point into the ground further. Its a big change that’s been complimented (or cursed) with the retirement of Bjergsen and Doublelift. It’s a whole new age for the game, really.

So whatever, I like the game for what it is, as I said. This stuff, beyond Bjerg and lift, doesn’t matter much to me anyway. So what else?

VALORANT has been seeing some good success in shouldering its way into the fps genre, Legends of Runeterra is slowly becoming the “Hearthstone, but actually free” game it always wanted to be, and Riot’s well hidden MMO is still in the works along with a literal anime.

For all the poor ideas Riot tends to have that show themselves through League, it’s clear they make usually take more steps forward than backwards, and its undeniable to say that everything they touch turns to gold (or something like it, anyway.) And if you think that’s being a little generous because of the budget Riot has these days, I want to point you to my friend EA: Rich as a dick, and just as useful.

No, Riot does deserve some credit. I’m unsure if they’re the Mcdonalds of the game development world or something better, but so far they’re carrying their successes with a sure grip, so I guess I don’t have too much to complain about right now, despite this article starting out as a rant against them.

Except for Samira, please nerf Samira, rito.