This past week has resulted in some of the most disheartening replies and decision making for the competitive scene from Riot Games that I, personally, can remember. I have never seen such a blatant “fuck you” to the competitive scene like what happened this past week. I knew Riot cared about the casual market more than the competitive scene and it does somewhat make sense to have that as their overall priority due to being a for-profit company, you got to squeeze out every drop from your customers, however this week they’ve made numerous large decisions that were entirely focused on catering to the casual, ranked and normal game, while really hurting the competitive scene. What they did this week alone is ensure the competitive side of the game will not grow from their hands anymore. What they’ve done within the past ten months is ensure the competitive scene has peaked and it will never again return to that peak. They have personally killed sister teams, changed the tournament format in Korea, and backed numerous horrendous “competitive rulings” such as the one in LMS with Raison being retroactively banned for boosting in Korea. The past ten months have just confirmed to me that no region and no time period will ever touch what Korea showed from Spring 2013 to Summer 2014. That is the peak of the game and the peak will never change thanks to Riot and Riot alone.

COMPETITIVE BALANCING & PATCHING CONCERNS

Just starting off with an ongoing issue that has seemingly been ramped up into oblivion just this week is the extremely rapid fire, dense patches that are being released in the second half of this season leading up to Worlds. It’s normal for Riot to release a new patch every two to three weeks. What’s not normal is Riot filling these patches with so many sweeping changes, especially this late in the season when you’d expect changes to ramp down and focus entirely on fine tuning the existing game. You would expect that they would do that if they had any focus on the competitive scene. There’s four, possibly five, months out of the year where the competitive scene is either occupied or there’s no competitive play going on: January, May, October, November, December. Why they can’t make these sweeping changes in those months instead of the month before playoffs and Worlds can only be pinned down on them only caring about the casual game. It just blows my mind why they feel the need to bring in all of these huge changes just before Worlds. Did they not learn from Season 3 Worlds? Well, they did in Season 4 so why are we going back to this bullshit?

In Season 3 there was a very large uproar over the sweeping changes that Riot made prior to Worlds, resulting in certain items being effectively removed from the competitive side of the game while buffing up certain other items that had been stable for the most part of the season. A lot of champs that had been staples for the competitive scene all season long were suddenly nowhere to be found, and certain champs that were lower tiered rose up and dominated the tournament. In Season 4 they took a more light handed approach. Making slight changes leading up to Worlds, but still remaining more on the fine tuning and balancing road. As a result, the Season 4 Worlds patch was pretty stable overall. Only two champs in particular stand out at Season 4 Worlds as being horribly overwhelming and meta breaking, those being Alistar and Zilean, and there weren’t wide ranging changes made in the patches prior. Enter Season 5 Worlds. Instead of lessening the changes leading up to Worlds we see a massive array of changes on the PBE that will in all likelyhood go live before Worlds so they can be displayed on the big screen. Instead of fine tuning the existing game and prepping it for Worlds, we’re seeing wide ranging AP item changes that went live on 5.13, we’re seeing six separate reworks, two of which are currently live, we’re seeing these Juggernaut changes that will likely go live on 5.16 that bring defensive item changes on a massive scale along with some brand new items, and we’re seeing some top competitive champs having abilities outright changed, Elise’s Q and Azir’s E being prime examples. It’s very hard to believe they are spending this time with competitive in mind considering how large all these changes are, alongside your average nerfs, buffs, and bug fixes that come with every standard patch.

Say they have 5.16 as the Worlds “content” patch and 5.18 is the real “Worlds patch” aka they stop releasing actual content right at 5.16 and spend 5.17 and 5.18 as “balancing and tuning” patches. The problem then enters that we’ll be seeing zero competitive play on 5.16 or 5.17 leading up to Worlds. How are you going to balance for the competitive scene properly if you have no games to go on? LCS playoffs are all on 5.14. Regionals for LCS will likely be on 5.15. Champions Korea hit 5.14 this week and will likely go through playoffs on that patch. Regionals for Champions Korea will likely be on 5.15. LPL is currently still on 5.13. Their playoffs and regionals will likely be on either 5.14 or 5.15. LMS regionals will likely be on 5.14 or 5.15. Brazil finals this week are on 5.14. You get the idea? No region will be playing on 5.16 with all this new content in a live competitive environment leading up to Worlds. We’ll have zero information going into Worlds of what to expect and how to properly balance all the content Riot is bringing into the game outside of how it performs in casual play.

That’s a huge fucking problem for the competitive scene and one very common response I’ve gotten when bringing all this up on Reddit is “there’s months to balance it all, it’ll be fine, and pros are paid to adapt so fuck them”. Pros having to adapt does not excuse Riot for their extremely ill-timed content introduction and as I’ve already pointed out, it doesn’t matter how much time is between 5.16 and Worlds to balance all this content when there’s no fucking professional games being played in that time frame.

So there’s my rant on this single issue. Unless Riot is going to creep in the scrims of teams to find out how all this shit is being used from 5.16 onward then I don’t know how they’re going to balance it all properly for competitive play. Unless I’m missing something entirely, I don’t know how they can seriously say all this content will be balanced with competitive play in mind. A lot of people are saying these champs weren’t competitively viable at all so unless they’re horribly overpowered it won’t change anything. I entirely disagree. There’s a lot of variables to consider when talking about where and how these champs could be viable and right now we don’t entirely know. If standard laning is the go to style at Worlds, new Darius very well could see some play and right now his numbers on PBE look incredibly strong. That’s just one example. The entire Riot balancing philosophy has been flipped on its fucking head this second half of the season and I don’t know why. Stop it. Fix this shit and stop ruining your game. I like it. I like writing about it and I like thinking about it in a very in depth way. Seeing every single coach, analyst, and pro just shake their heads at all of these absurd changes is extremely disappointing because this game could be so much more.

DENIAL VS DIGNITAS EUROPE & CHALLENGER ISSUES

Now I’ll touch on the Denial vs Dignitas EU set this past week where Denial basically got told to go fuck themselves from Riot. Denial’s jungler, Kirei, was having DDOS issues because Riot decides to run this tournament over multiple weeks in an online environment instead of flying every top four team out to Berlin/LA, finishing the tourney in a couple days. So all because this is being held online and because Riot insists on it being live (they put a slight stream delay on it, 15 minutes at the beginning, growing as the stream goes on) Kirei gets DDOS’d. They end up losing all bans for game two because of it. Luckily they were facing a team that was courteous enough to not have a Riot mentality and they weren’t too harshly burned for it, however Dig.EU ended up picking Gangplank, a pick that had been disabled for the entire week prior across every single fucking queue including custom games. Hell, the pick was considered so unpracticed and unstable coming out of its rework that it’s disabled in Korea for this week because they knew it would be bullshit for anyone to be able to play it in a competitive match right now. Riot didn’t disable it and as such Dig.EU picked it. As an aside, lore should never impact gameplay. That entire argument has been made over and over, everyone gets it now and hopefully it hits Riot square in the brain so they never fuck this particular situation up again. So we go into game three after Dig.EU takes game two. About 15-20 minutes into the game, Denial is slightly behind in gold, but their comp was about to hit a huge spike. In a good position to have the ability to take the game and run with it, Kirei loses his internet and after a set time Dig.EU is rewarded the game and the set. Unlucky. Something he actually cannot prevent was the cause of Denial losing game three. This wasn’t a game where they were losing and had no chance at actually winning. This was an even game and they were about to hit the most powerful point in their comp. Asking for a remake and even to play it out 4 vs 5*, Riot tells them no and the result was made permanent. Denial falls down to third place and elimination match, Dig.EU goes to promotion and has a chance at auto-promotion.

This isn’t the first time DDOS issues have run rampant in the challenger scene. It’s very prevalent and it’s because everything is run online. I understand most of the challenger scene stuff being played on LAN is not feasible. Europe and North America are far too large and their challenger scenes are far too unstable to have everything centered in one specific area, unlike Korea and China whose challenger and secondary pro leagues are stabilized or in a very central area like Korea. However, this tournament in particular should not have been run online. Riot has zero excuse for not flying these teams out to Berlin and playing every top four match on LAN and in a stable environment. It’s absurd that this tournament isn’t being played on LAN considering it determines the next half year to nine months for these players involved. You want the challenger scene to be stabilized in the west? You want organizations to get more involved? This isn’t how you do it. Telling teams to go fuck themselves and running the league like garbage is not how you do it.

Every single challenger scene story in the west just piles on how little Riot cares about it. You have power hungry morons like Tiza running it all, someone who doesn’t do his job properly and has even threatened certain players. You have no care about your supposed “no sister team” rule, Coast-Vortex laughs at that one by living in the same gaming house. You don’t care how the players are being treated and you surely don’t really give a fuck about poaching in the challenger scene, shout outs to Odyssey Gaming in North America who are currently constantly approaching contracted players to try and buy them. You banned out Chris Badawi, but only because he started treading on LCS teams. He very much deserved the ban so at least the end result as positive.

Riot has yet to comment about the Denial vs Dig.EU match. Probably just waiting for it to blow over like everything else in this community. Soon it’ll just be yet another shitty story about the challenger scene.

NORTH AMERICAN SERVER RELOCATION

With the single North American server relocated to Chicago, North American pros, all located in Los Angeles, have now just seen an immediate steep drop in practice quality. Scrimming on the live server, which is by far the most common scrimming, not tournament realm, and playing just basic ranked solo queue is now worsened. Instead of getting reliable 20 ping, they are now going to be sitting around 60-70 ping. Riot is not going to move the LCS to Chicago. They aren’t going to uproot their entire pro scene and move it to where the server is located at so as a result their pro scene is being alienated in favor of catering to the casual game, allowing eastern and southern coast players that are normally on 100-120 ping to play around 50-60 ping. I do agree this is good for the casual game. It’s great that for the first time in the history of the game the east coast, the most populated region in the US, is finally going to get playable ping. I’ll be completely honest, I don’t know why the fuck so many people on the east coast stuck around this long playing at the previous ping levels. In a game that is incredible fast paced and precise in terms of movement and ability usage, it’s a wonder so many people stuck around just lagging like it’s a normal game condition.

As for the current competitive scene in North America? This is just awful. Their ping just got effectively triple along with the guaranteed packet loss that comes from the pathetic telecommunications industry in the US and Canada. You ever see a pro stream and just get immediately annoyed when his ping bumps to above 40 or 50? That’s better than their standard playing condition now. Instead of going from a 20 ping, almost ideal practice condition into a LAN setting on weekends, they’ll be going from 60-70 ping, considered almost unplayable at a high level by a lot of pros, down to the LAN setting on weekends. There is a huge gap between 60-70 ping and LAN setting. Luckily, there’s numerous tournament realm servers located in Los Angeles. Unluckily, teams hardly use tournament realm as it’s a really unstable client, annoying to keep patched, and it’s an entirely separate server from live so only pros and approved challenger players can play on it. Oh and Riot doesn’t encourage pros, aka doesn’t allow them, to play on the tournament realm as if it were a live server. They won’t allow the pros and approved amateurs to all play solo queue at the same time, but just remove themselves from the live server and only play solo queue on the tournament realm server. So the best option, pros and amateurs removing themselves from live and playing solo queue on the tournament realm server, is out the window.

To be fair to Riot, this change doesn’t really effect the NA scene in general since it’ll soon die with no new talent from NA coming and staying in the LCS. I’ve ranted about that a million times over so I won’t go into it. This is just another change Riot is making to cater to the casual game while casting aside the professional scene.

SANDBOX

Lastly, the sandbox debacle. I won’t really go into this much other than to say Riot are one of the most incompetent game companies I’ve ever seen. They’re just on another plane compared to most game companies. It amazes me how they could put their firm stance out in an official post on their website and then slowly but surely almost pull a 180 on that stance through Reddit and Twitter. For what it’s worth, a lot of people on the “inside” of Riot, people that aren’t PR members on Reddit, really would like to release a sandbox mode. It just won’t ever happen because as I quote one Rioter, “unless we can make it super fun, I wouldn’t want to release it” and “we’re like cafeteria workers, if we give them too much, they’ll get diabetes”. Sandbox mode is doable. The game’s spaghetti code can allow for it to happen. They don’t release it because people will use it for efficiency reasons and they build this game as a grind. They just choose not to make it through ideological reasons which are the worst reasons. The biggest issue is that Riot doesn’t want to let go that this isn’t just a game anymore and that it is a sport. The MLB doesn’t balance baseball or change baseball based on what the hell happens in a children’s tee-ball league. Riot sure as shit shouldn’t be catering to the people that hop on and play one ARAM a week and have no connection to the game outside of it.

Competitive scene is on the decline from here on out. The game won’t entirely die, but the competitive scene will never again be even close to what Korea showcased for nearly two years in 2013 and 2014. Riot ruined it all by themselves and they are gleefully standing by their ruins.

You can reach me on twitter here: https://twitter.com/stilwell__

I like to ramble and talk about League.

*https://twitter.com/RealSirjdog21 Pointed out on Twitter Denial also asked to play it out 4 vs 5 and was denied.