EB24 #1 Community thoughts - Subjective opinion about the current state of game

(The resume was written by a booster named Sloth.)

Ah where to begin, The LoL community has changed so much throughout the years. For good and for the worse. League used to be a lot of fun, doesn't matter if it was a solo play or playing with friends, League always had an aspect of fun and laughter. Now in later days while it can still be a fun game to play, it is a lot more frustrating. Even before recent the patch(9.14) that has created a ton of bugs and issues. Whether you log in to play some normals or ranked. 

The majority of the games are filled with at least one team member feeding, intentionally or unintentionally, one or multiple players being toxic, and the rest just trying to play the game maybe not doing amazing but at least still doing good. A large majority comes from the ranked system, based on what rank you currently are. One of the most common things I personally hear most often to those within gold, “ You’re only gold your no different, your trash. “ The big issue with this is, the community has stayed at an Iron to Silver rank at slightly over 50% of the player base. And the large vast majority of them fail every season to climb past these ranks. A recent number released from Mobalystics states, " A whopping 46.5% of players in bronze will ever climb out of bronze ". So even if someone is, “ Just only gold “, then they have already surpassed 50% of the player base. This is an astonishing number, but quite true if you look at rank standing throughout the years. 

The community is filled with players who play every day, for hours on end. Filled with toxicity and rage over failing to improve, complaining about their rank, or most commonly...their team. Yet few will actually ever take the steps to learn from their mistakes and errors, and then proceed to actually work on overcoming them and growing to be a better player. So much of the player base much rathers to spend time spamming a champ to obsessively high mastery points and games played, but make very little progress from actually playing with the intent to learn. And nowadays with social media such as youtube being such a large outlet and effect on the community. YouTubers who post LoL content, claiming this champ, or this build, or whatever is "busted" it just fills the community with nothing but false information. The vast majority of these Youtubers are for simply just entertainment. Not for learning or explaining strong picks. Even the few in the community sharing viable information to help the community grow stronger. Very few of the audiences who actually watch these more educational videos, truly understand that a lot of why they still can't make it work is due to lack of a lot of other skill sets. We're in Season 9 of this game. And players still lack a basic function such as CS'ing regardless of the changes to make CS'ing a bit easier over the years. Between players lacking the ability to play with the intent to learn and not just expecting to spam games and suddenly be good, and players lacking basic skills components besides CS’ing. Such as proper vision, what objective to go for, or even which lane to go to later on in the game from not knowing where to be.

 The community will never grow to be in a good state. On top of the many flaws within the community. Riot just makes things a lot more challenging, failing endlessly to test many aspects of patches and just proceed to ruin the game a bit more every patch. And with new champions continuing to be released, Patching what's busted just becomes harder. Newer champions being released, their playstyle, their mechanics, and many aspects of them in every way outshines old champions. Trying to balance a game with such a large variety of champion styles, mechanics, and kits will never work. Nowadays so many types of champions within separate classes use the same general items. Making item patches vastly harder without ruining a different set of champions unintendedly. Remedies such as then changing those champions to fit can work. But then where does the cycle end? It becomes an endless state of tweaking and changing items, champions, runes to a vast extent that can keep the game fresh. But also just contributes to the larger issue of the community failing to improve on steady patches that don’t change things in a vastly new way. BUT regardless of all the issues within the community and riots patches. Many players, including myself, still seem to be drawn to this game and continue playing. Whether it's the fun of playing with friends and doing dumb stuff or actually trying to improve and climb every season. Or even just playing without care of ever-improving and being good. The game still a lot of good moments to have fun and provide laughs to the community.

 Even if things within riot and the community don't necessarily change vastly for the future. Seeing some improvement of life changes, such as the auto punishment system due to certain words being used. The game used to have a lot of banter amongst friends and players in the chat and nowadays it's too hard to have fun in the chat regardless of non-toxic intention. On top of this, you have the report system in general, which a large portion of the community constantly complains that it doesn't really work. But in actuality it does work, just not exactly how many people think. For instance, chat history reports it’s easy and quick to ban/punish as they have logs, but they still seem to fail. Were as the bigger issue on having an INTer every game or close to it, and them seeming to never be punished. Riots tribunal team isn't big enough to handle the number of reports received every day. Without players giving specific time stamps, or the preferred method of a clip directly of the INT moments, not much can be done to the player. Many players are aware of the replay function in your match history expires after a while with the update of a patch, etc. But what many fail to realize, is these replays for the matches ALSO expire on riots end, making it vastly impossible to ban many of the problematic players in the community without an actual clip from the game inserted with the report. If a report is made and the replay expires, nothing can be done to the player in question.

 The game will still continue to grow and have its moments of fun amongst a group of friends, and I don't see it dying out anytime soon. But many changes, even just a small quality of life changes to their system would be vastly welcomed by the community as a whole.