Theta 13Hz

Dear Riot Games, NONE of the frustrations currently coming from playing League of Legends are healthy. And for the record, I actually do agree that healthy frustration is a real thing. It's just not applicable for the current state of League. At all. Over the years, many systemic changes to League have resulted in the individual player having less and less agency over-all. That's a whole separate topic of discussion, but what's important here is how agency relates to frustration. Frustration leads to growth when you have agency over the situation. That's when it's healthy. What do you think happens when you remove the agency but leave the frustration? You end up demoralized, hopeless, and just plain old angry. Now let's talk about the big pain points: The Ranked Ladder. - Uncapped LP. Aegis. Bad LP gains/losses. - HUGE skill gaps per-game, due to inflation. - Zero game quality. The Game. - State of mages, support, and toplane. - State of tutorial mode champions (Garen, Nasus, etc.) The common factor between all of those points is that you as an individual player have a SEVERE lack of agency. Let's take a look at the ranked ladder from the POV of a Master+ player. You're a Master+ player. You have to climb THOUSANDS of LP with negative gains/losses due to a shitty random Double LP system. You have to slog through hundreds upon hundreds of games with absolutely horrible game quality due to an incredibly inflated ladder. At times, often frequently, it'll feel like you're just rolling the dice for which team ends up with 3 multi-season Challengers vs 3 players who've been Diamond for the past 10 years straight. It's not fun, and there is genuinely nothing you can do to make the experience more bearable. It feels completely and utterly pointless and boring to take the game even remotely seriously. No agency. Frustrating. Not healthy. Guess what? The general gamestate's not much better. - Mages have been walking around with infinite mana, infinite damage, and infinite movespeed. You're not allowed to interact with them, because they just leave a macro on QWE to nuke waves from off-screen. Their mana bars do not move, ever. - Support has been completely game ruining for the entire year. Let's take the easiest role in the game, one that can skip 90%+ of playing League of Legends. Then, let's overload it with resources and somehow give it even more agency and freedom than Jungle! Oops! Now EVERYONE except for the support is miserable! One game the enemy Bard simultaneously ruins the lives of your top, mid, AND jungle. Next game, your Thresh roams to gank the Mundo vs Malphite toplane matchup while botlane is on a freeze and your ADC gets dove and loses 4 waves. - Nasus and Garen. I'll admit there can be subjectivity to this point. But personally, I do not think there's any world where tutorial champions like Nasus and Garen should EVER be allowed to remain strong enough to be consistently pickable in high ELO. Yeah, easy champions do need to exist in every role. But when we end up on the EXTREME end of the spectrum, when we go beyond simply "easy" and enter the territory of just straight up binary, I think a line needs to be drawn. IMO, binary champions like Garen and Nasus being strong isn't just frustrating to play against. It's just boring and miserable. No matter what degree of rationalization you do to pretend like there's hidden intricacies to the thought process required to make these champions work? Nasus clicked ghost and W, and then he killed you. Boring and miserable. Overall, I think the current gamestate of League REALLY fucking sucks. I just hope a lot of stuff gets reevaluated, because I don't think the current philosophy behind the decisions that shape the game is good.