League is dead

(I apologize in advanced, I feel like I rambled this entire thing, but it has also been on my mind for such a long time.)

I've been playing this game since season 4 (2014) and I was around 15 at the time. I remember playing this game on some shitty HP laptop I had that was running it at 15 fps (if I was lucky). There was so much charm to the game back then, my friends and I would play this game EVERY DAY after school. We were all silver players that slowly moved up, some of us hit gold/plat/diamond and some of us kept going past Grandmaster. Now none of us play this game except for ARAM and even then, that's just once in a long time between us rotating through other games.

League used to be fun to play and it definitely isn't the nostalgia of being younger. I used to want to get better at league and tried so hard to learn the game, which was much smaller than it is now. Items are much more important now and have tons more effects/passives, not to mention the map changes making the entire game feel like RNG sometimes. New champs have crazy passives and you can only make so many champs until they are start to feel the same. League used to be heavily micro/skill-based, but now it feels like it's all about items and macro-play. I feel like that's why we saw so many amazing players arise from that timeframe of League.

Ever since season 7, I've only returned to play League to hit Gold to receive the end of the season rewards. I'm just now getting back into League because some friends who have never played it want to play, but we still only play ARAM. This seems to be something I've come to realize about the NEW player base as well, I see that a lot of players only play ARAM with friends because the regular game is just too hard to learn or tilting to play. I've never seen so many high account level players be hardstuck bronze/silver before and I don't mean that in a mean way. These bronze/silver players started maybe a couple seasons ago and are somehow already between level 700-1,500. I've been playing since season 4 and I'm currently level 431 with around 3,856 hours/161 days worth of gameplay in total. It feels like a lot of players come in focused on skill/gameplay and a lot end up staying for ARAM/skins without ever ranking up.

This game has lost most of their strong player base, which is honestly why I feel that they've pushed so hard to sell these new skins. No one sits here and spends hours trying to get better at the game anymore because it's oversaturated, people play it casually while playing other games. I have a bunch of younger cousins who play this game and none of them really care for it too much, if that makes any sense. They love the game because the characters are cool and play it every day, but rather play a bit of this and then play Fortnite or other games that require much less effort. At the same time, how can you blame them when the game has such a steep learning curve. It's hard to focus on the BASE gameplay, when you are being overwhelmed by everything else in the game. I'd also like to add that keeping up with the patches every 2 weeks now is definitely much different from the patches every 2 weeks 10+ years ago.

League has gone in a weird direction and I don't believe that they are gaining a ton of new players EVERY year. There isn't that feeling from the earlier seasons where everyone was hype about the game and spent time learning everything about the game to rank up, that's probably why the game feels so dead to me now and has lost its charm. A lot of the new player base are casual League players who don't really even know how to play the base game anymore, but that makes sense because with the uptick of gaming/anime becoming the new norm, it's only reasonable that they are spending less time on this game with so much more to do/play elsewhere.

The last time I felt excited for a new champ was probably Jhin because his lore was so awesome at the time and that was back in 2016. I suppose I was also excited for Yone, but that's also because Yasuo was such a popular champ and we all remember he had a brother from way back when in his lore. The most recent skin I bought was Mecha Kha, which is a skin that was released in 2012 and also considered the best Kha skin. League has been pushing all of these anime-like skins to popular champs to farm money and they all lack that special aspect that makes a skin stand out. Also, what happened to all the energy for League? All the big League streamers/youtubers peaked out around 2015-2017 and just never came back besides T1 of course. I remember everyone was watching xPeke, DoubleLift, Imaqtpie, NightBlu3, Tyler1, Sneaky, TFBlade, Gosu, Trick2G, DongHua, Pants Are Dragon, Instalok, MagikarpUsedFly, and other League channels/streams, but now league content is completely dead. I'm just rambling now, but I do feel that League has past its prime a long time ago. This new version of League, though interesting, feels empty and lacks the character is used to have.

TL:DR
League feels empty because it's become diluted with so many things and lacks a strong player base. New players are casual players and don't really try to rank up because the game's learning curve is too steep. Older players have nothing to come back to besides a few new things each season/end of the season rewards. ARAM has become the main game mode for old/newer players. League is past its prime and there's no new content.