*these are my opinions, they aren’t absolute and should encourage discussion, but it is the equivalent of an NBA player discussing basketball with a high school athlete*
1. The game is not bad.
- If you feel like playing is a chore, genuinely ask yourself why you continue to play the game. If your answer is: “because I just always have,” then I think you know what to do. Take a break, come back, and you’ll probably love it more than ever. It will always be here.
- It was released in 2009 and has only gained in popularity, maintaining its yearly status as one of the most popular games on the planet. Statistics speak for themselves. If you thought a food was bad you wouldn’t eat it, but you choose to eat League, which is also why you’re morbidly obese.
- To some people it may not appeal, it’s a competitive multiplayer game, of course! But, if you have 5,000 hours in it don’t even start on how it’s a bad game…
(TL;DR if playing feels like a chore, ask yourself why you play. The game’s popularity and consistency speaks for itself in terms of effectivness as a medium of entertainment)
2. The game is pretty balanced, stop harassing its developers.
(I’ll be honest, I fell into this bad habit of permanently complaining about the game’s balance as well as criticizing the people in charge of its decisions. But I came to this realization the better I got at the game, and every time I see people complaining a champion is broken on this subreddit, I will proceed to watch the clip or read their rant, and recognize, wow, you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Here’s what I realized:)
- I’ve said some pretty questionable things in my life, and acted extremely immaturely, but the amount of harassment I’ve seen toward Phreak and league developers in general is ridiculous. First of all, if you’re in a lower rank, most changes don’t even matter with the sheer amount of mistakes being made that just go completely unpunished. For higher-elo players, this frustration makes sense, but never should we ever be legitimately harassing nor insulting them to this degree. It is childish and embarassing to our community. In addition, what makes you think a developer, because they’re a, key word, PERSON, will be incentivized to pour their heart into improving the game when its players are constantly harassing them? Particularly when most of you, have no idea what the hell you’re talking about!! Yeah, they’re being paid to work on it, but they’re f***ing people just like you and me.
- Firstly, there are 165 champions as of this post’s creation. Each champion has 5 abilities (including passive), and there are over 200 items in the game. That means there are 1025 “things” in the game, excluding champion interactions which become more complex, that need to be in near perfect balance at all times. League is not a gun game, it’s not that simple.
- Assuming it is played perfectly, there are champions that are designed to beat you, particularly early game. It’s like saying pantheon is overpowered; I check your match history and you were playing kayle and died 5 times before minute 8, and your team surrendered before he reached his weakest point, midgame. He’s overpowered because you didn’t realize after the first 4 deaths that you can’t walk up to farm against a champion that’s particularly strong early game. It’s the reaction of a toddler doing the same thing over and over again with tears in his eyes, because that’s probably exactly what you did: you tried to play League like it was a first person shooter, and it’s not.
- But foj, there’s some champions I can’t EVER fight in lane no matter what point in the game I’m in! This took me a while to understand and feel, but lane isn’t everything. And, welcome to the importance of understanding the game. Will a Riven ever be able to 1 v 1 a Renekton? No. I could lose to an Emerald Renekton in a 1 v 1 at 20 minutes if he has the mental capacity to press QWER. What separates a good and an average player is understanding its design. Hey, I have 4 f**king dashes and build hydra first, meaning I have good wave clear and solid roaming potential; I just need to minimize my losses in lane and gap him in teamfights with my AOE. Because, that is what I am designed to do!! I am designed to be able to roam!! When you say a champion is overpowered, chances are its not. Champions like Garen and Illaoi are overpowered in lane relative to other meta toplaners, but are they overpowered in general? No. These two champions rely directly on their ability to splitpush and bait enemies into falling for it. If you clear the wave and proxy, they become USELESS. They are designed to be strong in lane as there are serious counterplay measures. Lane isn’t everything. In addition, perspectives of one tricks on other champions are often heavily biased. Imagine trying to play Illaoi into a syndra, it is unplayable.
- But I’m low elo!! [insert champion name] is so broken down here! Oh, look. The developers you so hate are the ones that are even catering to your lack of understanding and providing elo-specific nerfs to things that seem to be strong to you, when in reality, you have no idea what you are doing, and could fix the misconception with a clear mind and an outside perspective. It is the equivalent of complaining about a shotgun in an FPS when you’re so close to the enemy you can smell they haven’t showered in a few months.
(TL;DR This continual harassment of developers will only further destroy the community’s relations with developers, developers’ intrinsic motivation to improve the game, and our community’s reputation to newer players. There is an unfamothable amount of factors that interact in ways that can’t be expected whether it be bugs or overtuned items; league is exponentially harder to balance than an FPS. Understand the roles of champions and that being a better player includes acceptance of certain matchups as unwinnable.)
2. Elo hell and loser’s queue do not exist.
- I have played in every elo and felt stuck at every elo at one point. There is not a single rank in which the term elo hell applies. These two concepts are attempts to rationalize one’s emotional response, often of their own inadequacy. What seems like loser’s Q is the work of a team game at play. Due to the nature of a 5 v 5 match, it is a complex system with the goal being to maximize the probability of success; there have been games I have lost in Silver due to severe unluckiness and champion specific interactions. If you hate it, realize that a Radiant in Valorant with 10,000 hours could get run and gunned by a drunk Iron player out of sheer luck.
(TL;DR elo hell and loser’s q are rationalizations of emotional responses to inadequacy. League is a complex system as a team game, you being better than the other players should only increase probability of winning, not guarantee it. Radiant’s in Valorant can get rng-ed by a 7-year old by pure luck; if a challenger gets solo-killed by an iron it’s time to reconsider the ranking system.)
3. In any competitive setting, there will be unavoidable negative emotion and toxicity.
- In any professional sport, and look at any, there will be always be controversy and minor feuds between players in the heat of the moment. This is also worsened by the isolated nature of gaming as well as League being a multiplayer and quite competitive game. Toxicity in League is appears to be more severe than other games because simply put, there are more players and just more of everything.
- However, there are issues that specifically come with the nature of gaming. In League, as lots of focused is required, we will generally be playing by ourselves, and as humans are social creatures, this can often have negative side-effects when playing for extended periods of time. It’s very easy to project one’s issues onto others through the form of toxicity, especially when we forget there are humans just like us on the other end. It is so easy to dissociate consequences from our actions particularly online. I have issues with this myself, I will not pretend I don’t, but it’s something I work on.
- How could we fix EXTREME toxicity? I’m not really sure, nor am I really qualified to speak on this, but I may consider attaching some form of real identity with one’s account similar to Korea or China. That way, there is some form of true accountability and real consequences to players actions. Some may say it removes the appeal of playing in the first place (anonymity), but I think that’s also the issue.
(TL;DR if toxicity scares you, a competitive game to this degree is not for you. Reactions ike toxicity occur in response to being invested in something you care about; it’s seen in professional sports since their invention. League’s toxicity seems exacerbated due to the isolated nature of gaming and its anonymous feature.)
4. Anyone can hit challenger, but you must be playing to win rather than simply playing for enjoyment.
- But, it takes people years to hit challenger! Yeah, but this is the difference between playing with intent and playing for fun. You will never hit it as a casual unless you’re able to play 10 games a day for an eternity. People play for 7 years and remain gold, and others can hit challenger in 2. Time does not necessarily equate to skill, but over time, intentional playing will directly correlate to skill. In addition, in physical sports, coaching is extremely normalized if not just flat-out necessary, in esports it is not as common for individual players or looked down upon (in my opinion).
- Simply put, there is no way a casual player will ever outclass a player who is obsessed with the game no matter what rank they may be. A more talented player may beat a less talented player initially, but if the other player has an obsession for perfection, he will eventually become inferior. Obsession can become talent itself. A player who thinks about the game more will not only have more repititions in matches, but will also create a habit of processing situations in the game, and that means more thoughtful repititions. Enough thoughtful repetition will lead to near perfection.
(TL;DR if you want to hit challenger, stop playing as a casual and play a lot of games with a lot of intent. Even if you have barely any talent, obsession can amount for a lack of initial skill.)
1: The game and its state being good is subjective and not entirely true.
-To be subjective myself; I agree that the game could be good, if the devs put as much thought into tightening matchmaking and cleaning up overloaded designs and modernizing dated ones as they did with fancy skins and event passes. We’ve watched ability creep, mobility creep, builds be increasingly codified into one ‘right’ way to avoid a guaranteed loss. The ability and mobility creep are somewhat subjective as well, but I think it can be agreed that mobility does not need to be on a checklist on nearly every champ that is released.
-Of course, do not mistake popularity for being good; smoking was incredibly popular, morphine and cocaine were/are incredibly popular. Those of course are more hyperbolic, so let’s make a better comparison: Fortnite is a massively popular battle royale game, which has taken its place by a combination of being the most accessible and and least janky option available, plus an massive amount of advertising via actual ads to having musicians host concerts and crossover events. League is in the same boat, except that the field of MOBA games is arguably narrower than battle royale and that it spends a lot more on advertising the game via books, spinoffs and esports. For another comparison, look at the looter shooter genre; there is Warframe, Destiny and not a lot else that matches the level of polish. This is a genre where the options for what one can play are pretty slim and even if none of the options are that great, people will still flock to the shiniest ball of dirt.
2: The game is not as balanced as you want to believe. It is also not as imbalanced as you think.
-You’re challenger, up there in the golden castle and pretty close to the people playing at worlds, relatively speaking. Of course the game is going to feel balanced to you; you’re playing at the level that the balance team absolutely cannot allow to fall into any semblance of being unbalanced, lest they court very public blowback. On the other hand, the lower one is on the ladder, I’d argue that balance is less of an essential goal apart from curtailing outliers; after all, no gold or silver is going to rack up huge twitch viewership or a place in worlds. When top tier players complain en masse about issues, they get fixed. When a new champ is released before a major event, they’re disabled in that until they get past a balance patch.
-The not unexpected part of your statement is that a chunk of your statement on balance has the subtext of “if you’re lower ranked, your opinion on balance has zero value”. Frankly, I’m not surprised to see it here, and I’m not going to make any other points on it other than it being a pretty childish way to throw aside complaints about the game without actually listening to them.
-The argument of being weak in the midgame means nothing if the early game strength allows enough gold income to outrun the lane opponent. If a champion is strong in the early game, then one has to put oneself at a disadvantage in order to not fall victim, and thus end up with less gold to go into the middle game than the champ that is weak early on. The game is designed to snowball leads; regardless of whether one hits the middle or late game, the early game decides how the game will end about 60-70% of the time.
-There are 165 champions currently, correct. So why not push back a release for a few months to spend some actual time to work on balancing in that complex web? Well, I can’t guess at why, but they have chosen to not allot their resources on doing so. I have every right to be mocked when I spend more time having fun when I should be doing something that I actually need to be doing.
-For a much more visible example of jank that has remained unfixed, consider how skillshots function when crossing into or out of river, base, or anywhere else where the z-axis of the map changes.
3: Does Elo hell exist (Numbers are not going to match from here going forward, OP had 2 twice)
-I have yet to see sufficient evidence to either disprove or prove the infamous ‘elo hell’. My personal take on it is due to shoddy matchmaking controls even in ranked and matchmaking really not trying to match equally ranked players in positions. Until matchmaking improves, the only judgement I will pass is that matchmaking is very poor in normals and marginally better in ranked. From personally collected data, I will say that silver players should expect to see matches where there are both gold and bronze players present in the same game on a regular basis and having a skill range that wide is a recipe for trouble.
-Claiming that elo hell is used to rationalize and hide personally bad performance assumes that only people who perform poorly use it as an excuse. If the devs and players actually are interested in disproving the existence of such a thing effectively, then there needs to be some very thorough evidence shown.
4: Toxicity is inevitable
-I agree; competitive segments of games inevitably garner some level of toxicity, especially when both the veil of anonymity is available and where one person doing poorly or doing very well has an outsize effect on the game.
-One argument I would like to make is that shortcomings in the core of the game likely do contribute to toxicity. If a player is placed on a team due to lackluster matchmaking and as a result does poorly and drags their team toward a loss, they will likely become a target for toxicity from their teammates and may lash out in kind. Similarly, a player placed above the others on their team may lash out at them for perceived intentionally poor performance. League and MOBA games in general have a much larger issue with this than Halo and shooter games due to the smaller team sizes and the core mechanics of the game.
-I do not agree that attaching some form of actual identity is the best way of fighting toxicity; I would argue that more active policing of toxic behaviors and more visible punishments are a more effective means of deterring others, in keeping with how real world crime reduction actually has been found to work. As said; “it is not the severity of the punishment that dissuades, it is the certainty that it will not go unnoticed”.
5: The idea that anyone can hit challenger is a delusion
-Ignoring the fact that challenger is a limited set of slots, there are actual practical considerations to consider: how much time does one have to spend, what role is picked to climb in, where the climb starts in, and to an extent when one plays. Different people will have different ceilings of reflexes, ability to extrapolate positions of unseen foes, and to take silent cues from allies on what their course of action will be to ensure an ideal outcome. On the more luck based side, there’s the things we don’t like to admit as much; want to play only support? Best hope for competent teams and to get that essential early lead. Can’t adapt to the shifts in how the players play or the essential champ pool at higher levels, tough luck. And then there’s just the people who don’t want to be condescended to by higher ranked players as they try to climb.