Background
With the start of the upcoming thirteenth season of Riot's classic MOBA game League of Legends tomorrow the community is split upon the argument if Riot is even actively developing new content for the game or rather dragging the game over the line relying on the success of their other popular games namely Valorant and Wild Rift or on the fantastic animated series Arcane. As recent developments in League's history featured a trite pre-season, a new provider for the very important SEA region and the departure of a beloved host (not sjokz so doesn't matter) of the LCS coupled with switching the schedule of the aforementioned professional league to a completely inaccessible time slot in the afternoon, people are concerned about the future of the game in the west. It's hard to gauge actual facts as Riot doesn't release their numbers but from the eye test alone you'd immediately come to the conclusion that League of Legends is heading south. While many people (casual and professional g*mers) have said this for a long time now, the recent developments have made things much worse and I'll tell you why:
Not officially announcing the start of the season until a couple days prior
While this tweet offers a timetable of the season start for each major and minor region you'd think it's kinda weird for a game of this size to not have a concise and clear answer until 2 days before the season start. Players had to figure out the exact date for the start of the season for weeks prior relying on vague he-said-she-said information on twitter or other inherently unreliable sources.
The fact that we have to find out like this after deducing the fricking SEASON START like Hercule fricking Poirot is utterly ridiculous
again we have to look for it on twitter, nothing in the client etc. its so fking disgusting
Is the new events tab we got for no reason (that is entirely more clunky than the event rewards page being in your rewards tab) not enough for you? You think they could somehow manage fixing the client and adding useless shit no one asked for at the same time lol? Nah, they only had the manpower to shift the events page to its own clunky tab that you can barely see more than 2 rows worth of cosmetics in.
Just be thankful that useless new events page didnโt end up breaking the client further, we could have lost the entire runes page as a result of adding that new tab.
And the official insta has a countdown with 12h in their story, some say the new ranked season already started in Korea. I just don't know anymore...
For some reason Riot already started the season and Korea and had to reset all already played games (see here for example).
Not following up on their promises
This headline is intentionally chosen to be opaque mainly due to the fact that I am incapable of finding all broken promises but here are some prime examples of Riot failing to deliver:
Removing Smurf Queue: SmurfQ was a method Riot used in the previous season to combat the menace of smurfs (stronger players playing on new/stolen/friends' accounts against weaker players) in ranked games although they failed to figure out how to remove previously inactive account from this queue meaning if you were a returning player (or any other player with a high discrepancy between your MMR and your rank) you'd end up in full smurf lobbies which was an absolutely miserable experience over and over again. Some people claim it took them tens if not hundreds of games to finally be out of smurf queue and play against people on their skill level. As this was obviously not fun for either the returning players or the plethora of next Fakers in smurf queue Riot decided to just remove the system making smurfs appear in regular ranked matches again. See here or here for further discussion.
Failing to release the new VGU: As League of Legends is quite old now a lot of the older heroes are not capable of keeping up with the power creep of the latest releases making them obsolete and quite frankly incredibly unfun. Riot combats this by updating older heroes to new standards either via a visual or a gameplay update; sometimes even combining both of them for a visual and gameplay update. As a token of goodwill Riot offered players the choice of which hero gets this desired upgrade and the community voted for Skarner who is as one-dimensional as Salvador sperging out about the Ukranian-Russia war. I think he won the poll about a year ago but nothing has been done and the community is quite sceptical about Riot failing to deliver yet again here
From the sound of it they still haven't decided what visual design road to take him in, which sounds really odd at this point.
But we don't know when this was recorded so maybe something changed since then?
I legit think they didn't expect him to win so they didn't even have any plans made.
Honestly I feel like they have no idea how to tackle him which iirc thatโs why they didnโt rework him before either
This article talks about an update for this long-awaited VGU that's planned for Skarner but it's still mind-boggling how Riot is simply incapable of doing this in an acceptable time frame.
Other hero updates: Some announcements of older heroes receiving 'ASU', 'midscope' or other minor updates to make them more accessible received mixed reactions and I'm frankly too lackadaisical to write about that here but if you're interested Jax, Rell and Ahri are some of these.
Balance issues: Insert some g*mer seethe abour role/champion/item/team/region being too strong/too weak/too unfun/too fun/too hard/too easy see here: Recently people have come to the adc subreddit and demanded evidence and facts, and with Phreaks tweet., here: Riot Phroxzon follow up comments from the videos (includes ADC satisfaction, healing outliers and more) or here: Isn't the amount of damage riot lets tanks do a bit excessive?
ARAM changes; All Random All Mid is a fun mode in all MOBAs in which players are assigned random heroes to battle it out in a straightforward lane without any depth or strategy. Basically the mode for casuals or people who just want to relax. However Riot updated the mode to make it incredibly unfun and players are NOT happy at all:
The update didnโt ruin ARAMS, you just forgot what the gamemode is all about. [600 comments]
The current state of ARAM balance is an absolute mess. [680 comments]
ARAM Champion specific buffs are borderline insane [600 comments]
ARAM is dead to me [1500 comments]
The game most just feels so awful now. The aram balance adjustments feel awful and the new tower falling/death times feel terrible as well. One of my favorite champions, ashe, is forced to not go adc, while Leblanc gets broken modifiers because iron players suck at her. No aram adjustment should go past 5% in my opinion. Yes some champs will be better than others but at least I don't have to scroll down a list every pre game to see what champs are currently neutered. I can't believe we didn't get nexus blitz so they could further ruin this abomination of a game mode. Goodbye aram I'd rather play weakside top lane then waste another minute wallowing in the filth that is ARAM.
ARAM seems less "for fun" with the recent changes [800 comments]
The failure of the 2023 cinematic
The absolute bomb Riot dropped was the travesty of the newly released cinematic. Despite releasing a couple of hours prior to this post it has already gathered more dislikes and negative comments than all other cinematics combined:
On Youtube:
Alexcx: the cinematic perfectly depicts the state of game: uneventful and below expectations [+15100]
Maple: I can't help but to feel sad about this, honestly. Cinematics were the only thing that NEVER disappointed from riot, yet here we are... [+2000]
Tren Status: After the 2022 cinematic, I can't even begin to explain how DISAPPOINTING this year's is [+6500]
On Twitter: (a lot of people working in the league bubble are disappointed)
https://x.com/LeagueOfLegends/status/1612736707220369408
https://x.com/viennavtuber/status/1612738189206376448: Darn :/ after last years "The Call" which was the certified banger of all bangers I really feel like yall gave up on League ๐
https://x.com/Nanal0l/status/1612769755429015553: I thought this was the riot mmo trailer ๐ dont feel the league hype energy from this
https://x.com/YamatoMebdi/status/1612786317003493377: Nah this better not be it
On Reddit:
Is that it?
1 year for the intern to drop their realistic render of the rift and voice a few lines
Fantasticaly underwhelming. I hope this is the biggest dissapointment I'm gona suffer this year.
I admit, after last year "The Call" my expectations were high as heck but witnessing this shit that was goo in 2012 at best probably summs up the issues the game faces and probably make community realises why the voices calling the game "maintenance mode" are louder than ever.
Pre season was already dissapointing enough with core gameplay issues around itemisation is still unfixed ever since new system from S11.
Feels like everything I/WE loved about this game slowly getting tossed aside by every year. :(
It has 8.1k dislikes and 2022 cinematic with 143 million views has 8.3k lmao. Took 1 hour to get the same amount of dislikes.
If this is the future of cinematics for league, I just hope they stop doing them at all. This was so cheap and disappointing wtf. Dislikes are deserved imo.
It's so bad I'm confused - it quite literally looks like a Riot cinematic from 10 years ago, complete with the odd plasticky graphics, and focus on the Summoners/Summoner's Rift instead of the actual world of Runeterra
https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/10866a8/lets_discuss_the_cinematic/
My personal opinion? Worst cinematic ever. 0 Lore progression, 0 Hype. I donโt know what they thought creating this. After the call, this is probably the painful awakening. It feels like Platin Peterโs motivational speech to his duo mate, that they will win dia promos this time.
https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/10866a8/lets_discuss_the_cinematic/j3qh2g1/
Dash got sacked to make more budget for THIS???
Lil Nas X catching some strays:
https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/10866a8/lets_discuss_the_cinematic/j3qfwxd/
The shit that happens when you blow your entire budget on lil nas x
Except the 2023 budget is supposedly the biggest yet so thereโs no excuse
his music isn't even mid
why did they even pick him?
the worlds song sucked so fking hard and now this?
Why did they pick a gay black singer to design a skin for a gay black character in a season in which they're trying to promote inclusion?
Summary and further discussion
Go to the League subreddit and I bet you that at least 75% of all posts are complaining about something. It's also honestly fascinating how some posts on this subreddit with millions of subscribers are on the frontpage with less than 100 upmarseys. Some further threads that complain about the state of the game:
Where has Riot's passion for League gone?
'Events' nowadays are just an excuse to get players to buy an event pass. We're lucky if we get a visual novel with it.
Riot's skin philosophy seems to have shifted to "quantity over quality". This is apparent when looking at the Zenith Games skins, Battle Boss Bel'Veth, and skin lines that champions have been forced into like SG and SB.
Champion teasers are something we have to ask for nowadays. I guess Riot doesn't really care about hyping up players for champion releases anymore. But why would they if everything gets leaked anyway nowadays, right?
This year's season start cinematic was terrible. No champions, no nothing, just a render of Summoner's Rift.
Is this the same company that released K/DA, the Annie: Origins cinematic and TFT as passion projects? The same company that made event gamemodes like Odyssey: Extraction and PROJECT: Hunters?
The same company that decided to focus on champion reworks for like a year because they realized that a lot of champions are outdated? Now 'midscope updates' are the new hot thing.
Valo, MMO , project L.. Riot has new favourite child/children.
This is called corporate complacency and is a well known cycle in every industry. It's an issue fundamentally of profit-focused business management culture prioritizing revenue milking over the fundamentals of their original success and consumer unwillingness to punish this behavior.
I nominate the Pokemon company and game freak if you want to see the worst example. 100 man team for game dev reusing assets and can't make a triple a game on a modern console, massive profits. By comparison a game like Warframe has 500 employees.
Do we have to be scared? Are they reducing the budget of League so much?
Ahri took 300 years and she looks identical
Skarner is still in the early CONCEPT stage
Champions are getting post-poned left and right
No new events announced for 2023
Valorant getting better cinematics for a SKIN BUNDLE
Wild Rift getting so many exclusive (and high quality) skins
THAT SORRY EXCUSE FOR A "CINEMATIC" FOR SEASON 2023
What is happening to League? Are they reducing the budget of the game so much? Are we going towards some kind of maintenance mode or something?
I know it seems soon to cry wolf, but all these things together made me really worried for the future of League.
As a former Heroes of the Storm player, I must say that this feels very familiar.
League is the older sibling and the parents dont care about them anymore. All the younger children is getting the attention now.
That's how life often works. Times change.
League is basically running in a skeleton crew compared to 2015-2017.
I mean I remember the gangplank event. the OG Oddysey event and a bunch of stuff like that. the mass reworks that even if annoying af made the game fresh.
anyone who says otherwise its just willfully ignoring facts.
we have gotten the same content the last 2-3 years that we woulve previously gotten in 1 season.
Idk how most ppl don't realize this. We been running on fumes for a while now. I feel like anybody with a shread of wanting to do something diffrent went to TFT.
[..]
All of their best people are on other games. Valorant, TFT, and Runeterra are all fantastic. I'm sure they've got all of their resources pointed at the MMO, too. I guess they figure that League can take care of itself while they flesh out their portfolio.
My guess: Most of LoL Devs moved to the MMO. LoL now only exists to fund the MMO so there will be huge budget cuts while trying to make as much money as possible (thats why there are 2 season resets now, they want us to play nothing but LoL and buy lots of skins).
Personal opinion
'No king rules forever and the times they are a-changin' said the preacher. It's all vanity in the end, isn't that right?
Also please try to NOT make fun of me for writing all of this I'm sensible o-okay 
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The ksante stuff is so obvious pandering like legit, chuds meme about the big companies only making gay or black characters but this guy legit conveniently comes from a place we haven't seen yet on their world and just so happens to be a gay black guy who unironically calls the emperor of another nation a colonizer in game lol
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Compare that to the legit coomer fanfiction waifus of early League
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I remember the early forum threads with upmarseys for Sona's boobs to be even bigger.
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Based.
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Coomer waifus were peak league. I remember back in the day pre/during season 1 when they basically had 1 guy doing all the art/backgrounds and he gave every female champion the most massive milkers he could.
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One of the biggest (get it) reasons League achieved success in its early state.
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League Waifus are overrepresented in BBC porn which makes this even more based
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Is League popular among black dudes or is just Mutt's Law?
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It is very popular among third-worldcels, therefore I guess so
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It's very funny to see how they're torn between being embarrassed by it because they're Serious Artists now and still wanting to rake in the cash from titcow skins.
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I sadly have to admit I follow most of the league lore
and yeah the revamp they made is miles better but have been blundering even on that end recently. I remember they fired a key writer even when they knew his dad died of covid and his wife had cancer lmao. The sexual harassment stuff is the cherry on top for that company
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I genuinely agree that the lore of league has been improved massively over the duration of the game's life. What started as fanfiction levels of bad became a somewhat interesting fantasy universe with quirky characters someone can easily engulf themselves into.
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what g*mers view as good lore is funny
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You literally like comics, dude.
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It's the wiki infodump style of lore, which is the worst kind of storytelling in games.
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Wdym?
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LoL's new lore really barely is integrated into the game, and isn't even well integrated into Legends of Runeterra either. It just exists as side content in the form of short stories, webcomics, and an actually solid TV show but that all barely gets brought up in the games. The actual storytelling comes from character interactions and unique voicelines, of which there are only a handful for each champ. It's not even like Riot commits to lore, since every time they need a new skinline they just make up a random unrelated setting.
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The problem with LoL lore is the same as comic books. Every time a character gets revisited, all of their old lore is rewritten or retconned so thereโs no point getting invested in them. I think Ekkoโs the only one who has ever gotten consistency. Yasuo is on his like 6th lore iteration now.
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The only thing I know about Ekko is that he is apparently canonically blacking Jinx now, how will the Jinxschizo feel that he has been canonically cucked by a fictional BLACK Kang? I was hoping that we would see an anti-Riot chimpout saga from him
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The art is incorrect. Ekko is a manlet and Jinx is one of the taller characters.
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Wait so now Riot has retconned Jinx as tall? is there a list showing the current canon height of all characters? I thought that Vi was supposed to be taller than Caitlyn, but now this has apparently been retconned too? Vi already literally looks like a coalburner so this doesn't bothers me a lot, Cait also looks good with BBC but her being shorter when compared to Vi in their Cute butch relationship makes this heckin problematic
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Pretty sure Jinx was always 170-180cm in one of the height charts around when she was released. Fits the tall, lanky and fricked up aesthetic.
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Also they are stuck in the same time period. Outside major events, which there have been only 2 notable ones, the story does not advance, and if they drop some good plot point that you get invested in, they probably will revisit it 5 years later. The cool stuff imo is everything in the past because the stories of the past can advance the narrative and also conclude, bc you know it has already happened
Mordekaiser azir xerath aatrox and more have insane origins and the end result is: "And now they are here. Not doing anything in particular but they sure might do something big! Wait another 10 years and maybe the story will be updated"
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I'd say Yasuo is one of the least offensive cases, his lore has progressed rather than being retconned (with the Riven and Yone subplots). Now shit like Varus or Leona though? Bunch of retcons.
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Itโs crazy they chose Azir for this when in universe Noxus was literally Nazi Germany in old lore.
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The current noxus is no longer the badguy nation, more of an expansionist empire. In fact I see lorecels complain more about demacia because they are racist to mages. I still like that there is no defacto goodguys faction because everyone's culture is in one way or another built on warcrimes
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Theyโve fricked the lore hard though because they keep emphasizing this mage discrimination thing when Noxus has Josef Mengele as a champion.
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Demacia was character assassinated like a motherlover lmao
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whenever someone uses colonizer as an insult i think about that stonetoss comic about arabs coming over, not integratiing at all and calling the natives colonizers. because i know the exact person who write a character who says that and who use that as an unironic insult would be for arabs doing that but view like idk making black people wipe their butt a form of colonialism
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That might be because his nation actually invades and conquers other nations as their main goal. Although that's more old fashioned conquest than actual 19th century style colonialism.
Wait wrong nation. But no that one's even worse cause they're literally a slave empire. Is it woke to dislike ancient Egyptian slaveholders
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Hilarious that they made Literally Wakanda, blatant as shit. Fun to play though.
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