The REAL Reasons For The Fall of League of Legends

it is not an abstract idea to say that this game has changed a lot over the last 10 years something as common as actually playing the real game is of course complaining about it reddit posts about balance esports skins cosmetics riot's internal problems anything and everything about this game is open to scrutiny including videos like this one i am far from the first person to make a video about this topic typically they're titled why league of legends is dying why it hasn't yet what's wrong with the game or whatever happened to it i've recently went back and watched almost all of these videos and there were a lot of good points that i aligned with but the thing that inspired me to make this video and wanting to give my two cents is because i kind of noticed something almost all of the videos take the same approach and the generalized issues about the game these videos are typically made by league of legends veterans and long time players and say something along the lines of the game just isn't what it used to be the game isn't as fun as it was back in the day people take the game and themselves too seriously everybody is a tryhard you get the idea do i fundamentally agree with this yeah i absolutely do though in 2020 and as someone who is still actively playing the game and playing ranked quite a bit i don't think that's the biggest problem nor do i think that's what most league players care about right now i believe that the majority of league of legends players have accepted that the glory days are not coming back i'm just here to try to explain why let's look at how league of legends developed into what it is today because change is not always bad in fact to be fair the game has changed in many ways that are for the better objectively there have been quite a few improvements things like the process of champion select is upgraded substantially from where it used to be it used to be all about pick order and the first pick on your team did all of the banning got to pick first and got to play whatever role they wanted to play it's something that we take for granted in season 10 because it was changed a couple years back but getting to most of the time player role highlight your champion and getting to ban a champion of your choosing every game is huge if you don't ever want to play against katarina again you don't have to the current rune system is far from perfect but it is infinitely better for one major reason runes are free and can be altered in champion select making only one rune page technically necessary it used to cost you a small fortune to complete just one rune page and you needed multiple pages which were a metric crapload of influence points for new players you could potentially hit level 30 and be ready to play ranked before even completing a single rune page which is just absurd there have been some great reworks like warwick poppy and tariq as they revive these terrible dead champions from their horribly designed state something not directly related to riot but third-party websites and applications are better than ever before to help you out as a player op gg u.g whatever you like to use we have everything at our disposal for you veterans out there do you remember the days of using lol king it was a laggy buggy mess that barely worked and made your eyes bleed but even still it's pretty nostalgic the professional scene has come a long way with higher production quality franchising for the organizations sponsorships pros having actual facilities to practice in all of that helps advance the esport and the game how about tools for league editors like the creator suite downloadable replays in client with a proper replay system better develop techniques for getting the editing that you want like green screen effects keyframe camera motion and setting up scenarios in the practice tool to get that perfect shot dio is the master of this and he works for the lec and has made their production quality insane over the last couple of splits if you haven't seen his work please go check it out it'll be in the description down below he's probably one of the best league editors i've seen so with all that being said and being fair to the game let's now transition to the bad the question is what parts of the actual game have made it feel like each year is getting worse i'd like to continue where voyboy left off i'm sure that many of you have seen this by now the community response was off the charts with more than a million views and tons of league players reacted to it but he did not go as deep as he could have he didn't hit many of the pain points for players who are still playing this game every day and the game ruining behavior in trolling and rage quits we will definitely get into but let's piece together a little bit of history and a sort of timeline of how we got here [Music] let's go back to 2016 with the introduction of a new champion select system before you can even begin to talk about balancing this game the first thing that you have to do is play it and already we've hit a problem most other games matchmaking is pretty simple you pick the mode you want you queue up and in less than a minute or two you're in the action playing the game the thing is for those games without a dedicated ranking system say call of duty it's not really fair to compare it to league because skill based matchmaking should always take longer to find games of course back in the day of modern warfare 2 you could play round after round after round because there was no guarantee that you just wouldn't be pummeled every single time by better players but even with games like rocket league having a very similar ranking system it's just so much faster to get into a game two minutes maximum to get in and start playing even for ranked queues right now for league you wait anywhere between 5 minutes to get into a game all the way up to more than 1 hour depending on your rank the higher rank you are the longer you will typically have to wait the clear bottleneck is champion select and it's something that riot has always tried to clean up and streamline the process so i shouldn't say that i have all of the answers or even a solution but here's what i do know once you're in champion select there's a decent chance that somebody will dodge or be forced to dodge because of champ select trolls which means that you'll usually have to go through multiple selects then you won't always get your role on that second or third champion select despite the fact that you did in the first one somebody just had to dodge if it's your promos you do have autofill protection but you can never dodge because for some reason dodging one game of your promos causes you to lose a whole match despite the fact that dodging a game normally is only a fraction of the punishment of losing a full one so while you're already on the edge from the fact that promos are stressful and annoying to deal with and you need to win those games you also know during that time that for all of the drafts upcoming you're completely forced to deal with whatever nonsense happens and then after all of that waiting sometimes nearly 20 minutes even for the lower ranks somebody afk's trolls intentionally feeds 20 minutes to get into a game and it will take you 20 minutes to surrender that game you end up having somewhere in the ballpark of 40 minutes of bad gaming experience held hostage by the system when you could have played plenty of games of rocket league run through a raid on runescape or some games of nba my career instead you lose 40 minutes of your life to the system and to troll players not to mention you lost your promos or lose the full lp of the game that you just lost but here's the thing everybody deals with this every league player trying to climb the ladder has had this happen to them a bunch of times this isn't an elo hell excuse anymore or an elo hell argument instead it's just low quality gaming winning on this game has unfortunately become way more of a short-term relief rather than an actual satisfaction you raise your hands in the air saying thank god when you finally win and promote but you don't really get excited or all that happy when this system makes you waste so much time and grind your way through champion select after champion select poor matchmaking after poor matchmaking it feels almost just like a relief to finally get through it rather than a situation where you should feel happy rewarded and satisfied again people do generally end up exactly where they belong that's the reason that i'm diamond 3 right now and that's the reason for the most part that in every season that's pretty much where i am in no season did i randomly hit challenger or randomly drop back to gold but my problem is that i wouldn't even consider attempting to climb higher to diamond 2 or diamond 1 right now even though in every other season of league i always tried and that's because i used to be excited about climbing excited about improving and giving my all but because of the egregious experience i've had this season the quality of games being unbelievably bad it's kind of impossible for me right now let's get back to the overall state of ranked in a second and let's just have one section about autofill autofill is a huge part of this game and is a pain point for most players and it's something that every season is brought to the attention of riot and to be fair in the current system i don't even know what they should do how do you balance the fact that autofill makes your queue times faster but also can completely ruin the quality of games that you get to play quicker it's a complete teeter-totter you get a quicker game but it's of a lower quality if you want a higher quality game you have to wait longer the old ranking system back in the day had tons of flaws but the thing is it had autofill every single game it was all down to luck whether or not you got your roll if you were last pick you were not getting your zed mid lane you were most likely playing support and there was nothing you could do about it the pick order system came with one major benefit that we do not see today and that's the fact that it forced you to have a grasp of every role you simply could not climb if your mid lane skills were diamond but your support or jungle skills were bronze because you probably would have to play a decent amount of those roles on your way to the top nowadays people avoid their autofill like the plague which you cannot blame them for because if it means that they're forced to play top lane when they haven't seen that lane in three years of course they're gonna run it down against a fiora power creep is an issue that any long-running franchise or game will struggle with osrs constantly battles power creep from brand new content the community ends up contributing to the effort of slowing down how powerful new stuff is by voting on whether or not they either want to see it or how powerful it will be if it's implemented mmos typically struggle with it because how do you introduce new and unique content for a game without each new thing becoming stronger than the last there is no logical reason to release dead content that isn't worth your time when you make new stuff you want it to be able to compete with all other stuff in the game already for this reason most games have a power graph that looks something like this it's a gradual progression over the years leading to more and more powerful stuff but what is so interesting about league of legends is that it looks more like this during the beta stages back in 2009 in early 2010 we did not have weak champions or underpowered items in fact we've never reached where the beta was in terms of powerful stuff for example annie had a 5 second point-and-click stun twisted fate's ultimate was completely global and by ultimate i mean his e it was a basic ability that you could take at level 1 if you wanted oh and his gold card was an area of effect stunned kassadin would not just gain mana but actually steal your mana dodge was still in the game so beta jax could dive any tower he wanted including the fountain and kill you in your own base riot overshot the mark with how they wanted champions to function when they first made the game because they could not have predicted it would become the global success that it did so they spent the next several years tuning down everything items champions summoner spells all had to be nerfed in seasons three through four wright started removing silences from champion's kit to give them more counter play leblanc kassadin and talon silences removed other champions had their windows to punish them increased riven shield duration was reduced by a whole second zed was given a delay to snap back on his ultimate to let the player have a chance to cc him during those years from around 2012 to 2015 a time in which the majority of league veterans still consider the golden age for this game is arguably when champion power was at its weakest there were no keystone runes or masteries supports didn't have items like arden censor passive gold was significantly lower than it is now there was no turret plating baron did not buff up your minions there was no infernal soul there was no elder drake buff every item didn't give cooldown reduction like it does today don't get me wrong there were crazy champions back in the day things like jungle nasus season 3 kassadin ap gragas release orianna alistar toplane and all of those assassins but in general the power level of everything was lower power creep in this game has been trending upwards for a while now and with no signs of slowing down if you've seen the newest champion samira you'll know what i'm talking about it should come as no surprise that after releasing kiana affilio senna yumi zoe and all of these other lovely champions riot's next goal was to take everything to a whole nother level the jokes at this point are starting to write themselves people don't like wind wall make it aoe and make it move but why does this keep happening well if you think about it wright doesn't really have a reason to release champions that aren't broken i guess there's not really an incentive to make an underloaded and underpowered champion that nobody uses very similar to the runescape example if they're going to spend months or even a year creating a champion with splash art teams involved with music teams involved developing a theme and all these abilities they need to sell skins they need to sell the champion and people want to see that new champion in professional play i absolutely love what stonewall told me about this a league veteran of 10 years and one of the original content creators for this game he said it perfectly we are a far cry from when orianna had the best ultimate in the game [Music] okay wait that dodges abilities too on me wait that's kind of absurd let's do let's do a demonstration okay let's do a demonstration here alistar abilities all right so this is alistar okay there we go that's my cue that's my w look at my sick ass w oh yeah oh yeah there's my whole kit in two seconds okay samira let's check out samira i actually haven't seen this yet holy her passive is a two paragraphs the thing is power creep doesn't end with just champion design right now next season they're looking to adding in these mythic items these are items that you're only allowed to have one of but they're meant to be very powerful these ones for adcs are crazy so far it's a stronger phantom dancer to help you survive assassins and give you lifesteal this one gives you true damage and this one gives a dash to a mobile adcs they've really raised the bar over the last couple of years to implement more and more crazy ideas to the game i believe the biggest creative flaw that riot has is that they've been willing to put things in the game without thinking about how it interacts to the entire game and without thinking about the consequences of certain interactions let's take yumi a champion that has been infamous since her release for being hated but why is that we've heard the argument that yumi fundamentally breaks the game in a way that makes her very hard to get right it's because yumi is an enchanter which is a class of champions that most of the time can be described by a couple of characteristics things like late game scaling sustain wanting to have drawn out fights minimal but effective crowd control and a weakness to being focused down in a team fight sona is a much older champion to be fair but yumi is kind of a modern sona in a lot of ways so let's compare their kits both of them have healing both of them have a small amount of crowd control but it's quite effective when it's used right both are very squishy late game scaling enchanters that thrive when they can stall out a fight and keep people alive the game breaking difference between the two is that sona much like every other enchanter can be focused down in a fight significantly reducing her effectiveness sona and the other enchanters must stay in the backline of a fight and play front to back they can never really dive with their other diving champions like a hecarim if you want to beat sona you can camp her in lane throw hooks at her and blow her flash making escaping nearly impossible yumi on the other hand is literally just a ticking time bomb with very little counter play yumi has as much mobility as the champion she attaches to yumi is given stealth when her allies have stealth there is nothing stopping yumi from attaching to ezreal who can never really be hooked or killed meaning that the enchanter can never be hooked or killed herself there's also nothing stopping yumi late game from attaching to a hecarim and normally when no other champions on his team can keep up with him and dive the backline she has no problem buffing him up very deep into a fight yumi is a pseudo soraka or sona that you cannot focus first which is the clear and definite counter play to their class of champions she's an enchanter that is not restricted to playing front to back like janna because as long as the hecarim she attaches to is unkillable so is she the entire class of champions known as the hyper carries have one true piece of counterplay things like blitz hooks you could be the most fed jinx and reach your full potential late game but because of your kit not having any mobility one blitz hook and you're a goner jinx is designed to not have mobility the entire game is designed around the fact that jynx and other hyper carries typically have very low or no mobility that's why it's so important to blow their flash and blow their sums so the question is why are they designing items to fix these flaws in the champion now keep in mind before you get ready to say that you've tried it on pbe or somebody's done the math and the item is very weak in terms of numbers that's exactly the point whether the item is strong is kind of irrelevant to what we're saying remember you have a limited number of item slots and a limited number of gold if the only way to make the item not overpowered is to give it low numbers adcs just won't build it this will just have them default to one of the other mythic items which isn't really any better i believe the new design philosophy ends up sticking them in an impossible situation where champions like you me or items that give adc's mobility either exist in a state of underpowered or overpowered with barely a chance to find a middle ground then you run into the problem of how does this interact with the rest of the game we've seen these adc mythic items but what are the bruiser mythic items going to look like are we going to give spear of sojourn back to those bruisers and try again with that is that really the process that we want to start all over again is this really the direction we want to have spear of sojourn had a whole host of problems but certainly it doesn't seem that ridiculous if adcs are going to be buying true damage on an item or an even more powerful phantom dancer have we been asking to have samiras running around kog'maws with true damage and jacks with no cooldowns everyone makes mistakes it is impossible to satisfy everyone or make millions of people always agree with you i'm sure that plenty of you right now don't even agree with half the things i've said in this video and that's okay because what makes somebody smart is not always having the right answer but being able to accept that you don't always know everything your response to finding out that you did something people don't like is what shows your true character not the fact that you made the original mistake this is something i think riot used to do very well but they've made almost a complete 180. their responses to community feedback has progressively become worse one of them was so bad they got memed for months 200 years became a meme because it was kind of an arrogant and strange way to word what he was trying to say but actions speak a lot louder than words let's talk about aurelian soul one year ago on patch 9.17 aurelian soul was given a mini rework and this was intended to only help the champion as he's had a couple of problems since day one of his release he has been the ultimate niche champion loved by those who main him and a very powerful and underrated champion at no point in his history has he ever really been a terrible champion just hard to master and learn his unique playstyle as well as micromanaging his stars ends up scaring away a lot of people when they could just play a champion that doesn't require such a commitment his rework was meant to close the gap between the dedicated one-tricks who made him look kind of overpowered and the new aurelian sole players that couldn't grasp the kid and didn't want to give him a chance so how did it turn out one year later and i'm happy to say it has been a complete failure aurelian soul's rework has not increased his overall play rate it has not made him competitively viable it has not made him more popular with hilo mid laners and it hasn't even been well received by those who main him in fact if you go to their subreddit over the last year it's been a complete mess with half of all of the posts just complaining about the rework so what is riot's response to this rework that they gave him that didn't work by any reasonable metric pretty much dead silence a response here and there at best but the champion was just thrown under the bus all that they effectively accomplished was dividing the aurelian soul mains and keep them fighting with each other driving them away from their favorite champion with no revert or other changes coming who could guess what they plan to do with him this attitude of screwing over your players is something that riot tried to avoid in the past with the rengar rework being the best example of that the rengar players did not like the swim q and were just as outspoken as the aurelian soul players and sure enough he was given a revert but the crazy thing is that in that situation they actually did succeed in making rengar competitively viable he was a top tier jungler but even still they aired on the side of caution and gave him a revert let's pick back up on how the quality of games have been this season the biggest problem in the game right now for me is that leaving a ranked game has really no punishment i've noticed an extra amount of afks and rage quits this season and i think it's because players have figured out there's not a punishment for it i reached out to my discord server for help on this one to see if they've run into similar issues and they sent me so many examples of it happening i don't even have enough time to go through them all players leave the game after a level 1 invade went wrong and still play every single day players ragequit because they don't like laning with their lane partner and still play weeks later you can ragequit two games in a row and have no punishment the only way punishments are consistently given out in this game anymore is because of typing in chat which serves two ironies at the same time it's funny how the one thing you can change about your teammates which is the typing is the only thing that's truly bannable consistently you can mute people you can in fact make people stop flaming with the mute button but you cannot mute somebody from afk the other ironic thing is that you're actually more likely to end up getting banned by staying in the game rather than leaving if you're already upset because if you end up typing something that the automated system detects as bad you're screwed you may as well leave the game if you're pissed off because you might prevent yourself from typing something so you don't get banned what kind of system is that take this game i had everything was going perfectly fine my silas jungle helped secure first blood and it was my diamond 3 promos nobody said anything no one flamed anyone and the game was more or less playing out normally all of a sudden this guy says i'm going to go play among us sorry guys i'm afk he just straight up leaves the game and i ended up losing my series i'm not even that upset about losing my series though as i am the fact that he played two more games later that same night also the detection system for trolling is completely worthless take this duo that i found who do nothing but troll games they get no kill participation do no damage don't farm minions and don't buy any other items they do everything they can to lose games and then they restart new accounts after they get banned shockingly their record seems to be 26 games this account is zero in 26 they buy no items don't farm any minions they don't even attempt to play the game yet it took 26 games of every other person in the game probably reporting them to eventually flag this as trolling just as with the beginning of the video where i pointed out all the things that riot has done correct and improved over the years i have to say one more thing the fact that this game isn't in its prime anymore is not even necessarily the fault of them because everything in life will slow down because of a novelty factor here's the sad thing you'll never be able to experience that first month of learning to play this game ever again you will never experience the emergence of the moba genre again you will never be able to get that first season of playing ever again or the days of faker vs ryu the novelty factor of anything in life can make it seem better at the time league now has an established universe in a global esport but unless you have a time machine there will never be another season 3. the purpose of this video was to talk about the systems that were in place during the glory days that made the game feel nicer to play riot's willingness to listen to us lowering the power levels of champions and items the tribunal system that actually worked for reporting people releasing new champions that don't fundamentally break the game making us happy to specialize in one tricking a champion not punish us for pushing back against all of these ideas but just understand this that does not mean that riot games as a company is completely doomed not every riot employee is responsible for this game there are back end systems teams there are artists music teams riot's campus in santa monica has thousands of employees the balance team in the gameplay team are some of the departments that you might want to point your fingers to but again they're not the only ones calling the shots the company is completely owned by tencent at this point so we as consumers on the outside have no idea what's happening on the inside i would argue that there's a big portion of riot employees that care way more and are more passionate about this game improving and returning to its glory days than you and i do most riot employees probably join because they love this game they love the league of legends universe and this game is their job just as much as it's our addiction i've met quite a few rioters personally and i've been to the campus they are some of the most passionate and hardworking people in the industry and they've come together to make a game that hundreds of millions of people around the world have loved for a very long time so here's hoping you guys and riot can take this video in a constructive way because tearing down my favorite game is the last thing that i want to see happen i want more than anything for this game to thrive again but maybe that's just not possible maybe the novelty factor has already dried up i don't know anyway thanks for watching

Channel: Exil

Views: 1,699,961

Keywords:

Id: 0GETcaFWT8g

Length: 27min 33sec (1653 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/LoL_is_pepega_BIA]

They're "fundamentally breaking the game" with each hero release, while in dota literally every hero is designed to be game breaking in a way, but is balanced because they do less in others.. riot literally has to pack their chimps with bfg 50k kits relative to older chimps otherwise nobody buys or plays them smh..

the "novelty factor" is what keeps dota alive.. I've never felt that way about literally any other game i've played.. the rewarding feeling is there after every single match because i'm trying to solve each match in a different way, using my skills and items to create a solution that i didnt think was possible. Playing dota has never been a chore (unless u pick viper ugh..). The lows are depressing and the highs are divine.. your losses are (usually) deeply instructional since you can just watch the replay and understand where you went wrong, then you just que again to fix your mistakes, but the next match is a completely different challenge because the lineups are different, and it's all back to square one.

why people are still playing league of FUBAR, while Defense of the SNAFU exists is probably the greatest mystery of them all.. maybe i'll understand why once i'm done with researching both games in detail over the next few months.. (i doubt it)

[u/LoL_is_pepega_BIA]

This video by the same guy has a decent take on the game evolved as it did, while highlighting their design strategies with respect to one of the champs..

Also this video is a good summary of some of the issues with the game..

Nostalgia video.. guy looking back on the "good old days of league"..

Riot's balance philosophy.. biweekly balance sounds good, but it just doesn't do much when you're putting broken unfixable garbage into the game so often smh

IGNs 'excellent' "review" of LoL

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Content creators getting frustrated

1. Redmercy

2. Skooch

I LEGIT CANNOT FIND A GOOD, POSITIVE VIDEO ABOUT THIS GAME JEEZYS HECKIN CRYST

Even when I search "lol is good" I get "lol is trash" results

Even this "Jhin is perfect" (well made) video is mostly negative, and the other half is just general stuff about the hero that just sounds neutral and ordinary..

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Humourous take on LoL

I needed that bcos my experience with lol content until now has been mostly awful