I've played this game since Miss Fortune was introduced... and I still play it occasionally with another friend but LoL has lost its appeal for me. People say that the community is bad, that Riot is a terrible company, that the game has poor design... over time I've found these all to be true, if not because they're self-fulfilling prophecies and I believe a direct result of both the game's bloated design and its shallow marketing.
Summoner's Rift is the mode Riot spends the most time developing and coincidentally it's the mode that feels the worst to play. Not because of any one problem with the map in particular, but because it's the most popular map and played the most often Riot has to keep changing things to keep it interesting every competitive season. And this is where the game gets boring. I used to play LoL in marathon sessions but now I barely want to touch SR and whenever I log on it's mostly for first win or to play ARAMs/Dom (I haven't really tried Treeline since they remade it, it has the same problem with being convoluted that SR has now). SR has the worst community and games drag on longer than they really need to (I had a 52-minute match yesterday that could have ended 20 minutes earlier, and this hardly ever happens in Dom/ARAM whereas in SR blind pick normals it's to be expected).
The thing is, the way Riot's changed SR over the years has mostly been in a lateral sense, and the game has not evolved in the years it's been in development. It feels like the game's become the product of unchecked feature bloat like many long-running MMORPGs or even fighting game series where new shit is just tacked on because it's new. Riot listens to the community too much, without listening to them at all, and I guess this is ultimately the game people want to play or they wouldn't still be playing it. But I have to ask whether all the changes to jungling, support, and etc. over the years have really helped or if they've made the game needlessly complicated for no reason without fixing the fundamental issues that people have playing the game. For example, the new Summoner's Rift is supposed to promote visual clarity and help players intuitively understand how the map works. It doesn't. All of the new animations are overflowing with personality but they make it confusing to tell when exactly monsters spawn or what certain units are doing. Minions are still a mess and I can't imagine new players have an easy time mastering last-hitting, and why focus on such a pointless skill when things such as map awareness and teamwork are more important. Creating more objectives on the map has just made it harder for me to adjust back into the game after a long hiatus and I don't see any real reason to try. There are now well over 100 champions and counting and shop items are constantly changing, and the sheer amount of knowledge new players are exposed to and expected to learn before actually being able to play the game at a reasonable skill level is so ridiculous that I question how new players are still being attracted to this game.
Not to mention despite Riot's artists' superb technical abilities, the game has lost any semblance of the unique personality it originally had in order to pander to non-players who hated the old art and international audiences who like boobs. I like boobs and I'm the last person you'd hear calling for diversity in gaming, but Riot's female champions pretty much all look exactly the same in terms of body type, face, and personality. Their male champions haven't been much better. Sex sells, I guess, but that's no excuse for lazy character design.
