Disclaimer: For those who don’t know me, I have played and followed League of Legends since the closed beta. I say this not to add a level of credibility to this article, as I believe any article should be judged on its own merits rather than on the reputation of the writer. I say this to make it clear that this is written by someone who ultimately loves League of Legends and has dedicated a large portion of the last 7-8 years of his life to the game.

League of Legends has just finished its 6th year of competitive play and celebrated the game’s 10 year anniversary. LoL is the biggest video game in the world, with bigger worldwide concurrent players and streaming viewing numbers than any other Esport. It is also the first truly global Esport game, with no other major Esport title able to become among the most played games in North America, Europe, South Korea, China, South East Asia, Taiwan and Brazil.

Season 3 Worlds at the Staples Center.

And yet, League of Legends is in a state of crisis. Largely due to the serial and rampant mismanagement caused by Riot, LoL’s decline is inevitable.

Scripters Run Rampant

In March of 2016 I released information about Korean Scripters bribing Riot Korea employees. Even though the article got a fair amount of attention, there has been no investigation into Riot Korea and the practices continue. But Korea is far from the only region affected by scripters and elo boosters, these parties infect and contaminate all servers throughout the world. A contact of mine within Riot recently told me this (paraphrased to protect his identity):

‘The full scale of this problem is unknown to almost everyone outside of Riot, but official company estimates place the number of League of Legends accounts that regularly use scripting programs as high as 10%. If you’re Riot you can’t just permanently ban 10% of your playerbase; that’s not good business.’

This means that if you queue up for a ranked game anywhere in the world, there is an extremely high probability of there being a scripter in your ranked game. There’s no evidence to suggest that the scripters and elo boosters in other countries are bribing local Riot employees like in Korea, but Riot is letting this practice happen all across the world.

Let’s take the case of Seo ‘Eve’ Jun-cheol. Eve made his debut as the jungler for Samsung Galaxy in 2015 and was signed to Apex Gaming in January of 2016. In May of the same year, Eve was suspended by Apex Gaming but no official announcement was made. ESPN’s Jacob Wolf later reported:

'Apex jungler Seo "Eve" Jun-cheol's Korean League of Legends account has been banned for the use of a program to automate in-game actions, aka scripting, sources say. Eve's personal account was found scripting through a sweep made by Riot Games Korea. As a result, he was suspended from Apex Gaming indefinitely. No competitive ruling has been made at this time.'

But let’s think about this report -- At the time that Eve was banned, he’d lived in and played on the North American server for 4 months or more. So why was his Korean account picked up then? Are we really to believe that Riot Korea, a company that claims to be interested in punishing scripters, only sweeps for accounts once every 4 - 6 months? So was Eve using scripts in his last few weeks in Korea, or had he been using them the entire time he was in Korea?

And why was their no official statement from Riot or Apex Gaming? Shouldn’t a company that wants to punish and deter scripters like the idea of a high profile case like Eve? I mean Eve played on one of the most successful League of Legends teams ever, a team that was sponsored by one of the biggest and richest companies in the world. Surely a case like this is gold for trying to deter scripters? Instead, this incident was swept under the rug, ESPN don’t even run a full page article to the incident.

The truth is that Eve, much like 2 time EU LCS Champion and MVP G2 jungler Kim ‘Trick’ Gang-yun, was an elo booster before becoming a professional player. Unlike Trick, Eve used scripting programs to make the process easier. Riot Korea became aware of this (even though Samsung’s LoL team and the coaching staff were not) and chose to only punish Trick as Trick’s suspension would have a far lower impact on CJ Entus than Eve’s suspension would have on Samsung Galaxy. Once he came to NA, Riot Korea banned an account that was using scripts in a blatant and offensive manner that was attached to Eve’s Korean social security number (though was not played by him). This then caused the Apex suspension.

Riot Games, as a whole, is complicit of both scripters and elo boosters. Both are only punished when they’re made obvious to the public, in order to keep up appearances.

Riot Doesn’t Care What Its Players Think

There is a fundamental disconnect with how players would like the game to be and how the game is actually. Riot doesn’t care what its playerbase thinks; they've decided that they know best and you will thank the company when you’re older.

The introduction of Dynamic queue is a testament to how Riot Games operates. Riot starts off by fixing a problem that doesn’t exist and totally misunderstanding people’s actual frustration with the game, then lies to the community to contain the backlash and then gets some self satisfied and smug individual to tell you a bunch of made up statistics about how they were right all along.

The biggest problem with solo queue was duo queues. Due to Riot’s matchmaking system, duo queues caused the opposing team to have a higher average elo because Riot believed that having two people ‘premade’ with each other gave them an advantage in teamwork and communication. This was, of course, not true. The majority of duo queues played less than 10 games together, and were generally formed by two complete strangers after a solo queue victory.

Think about it -- how many times have you gone off and played well in a solo queue game, only to be spammed with friend requests by your teammates? You know, at least on a subconscious level, that that game was an outlier, otherwise you’d be climbing the ladder and then wouldn’t be interested in the help of someone at the same elo as you.

But duo queues had an unfair amount of power in a solo queue game. They could deny any surrender vote, control pick and ban phase, bully individuals out of roles they were entitled to and verbally berate anyone who stood up to them. They also put your own team on the back-foot, as you forced to play vs. opponents who were slightly higher elo than you, likely causing your entire team to underperform.

So what did Riot do? They created a ladder system that not only allowed people to trio queue, quadro queue, and even penta queue, it also started to heavily punish players who refused to queue up with others. They screwed up the matchmaking system, causing players to play vs. players that were significantly higher elo than them, which is at the very least not fun for one party.

Riot, through removing the ability to solo carry from the average player, have given more power to the worst players on the team -- and whether they’re intentionally the worst or unintentionally the worst is irrelevant. Yes, if you’re good enough and never the worst player on the team you will inevitably climb, but the process is now much longer and more frustrating.

Riot constantly introduces changes to the way the game is played at the competitive level that virtually no professional player is in favor of, such as the removal of laneswaps just before regional playoffs and the introduction of the juggernaut patch just in time for Season 5 Worlds, which massively changed the game and skewed the results. So it’s not just that Riot doesn’t care what the average professional player thinks, they also don’t care what the top level professional players think.

Riot also don’t care what esports fans think, as it took them years and years to remove bo1s from the regular season and bo3s from playoffs. Riot still refuses to allow double elimination and soundproof booths, both of which are a staple in League of Legend’s biggest competitor. Riot still insists on using bo1s for international group stage play, which means teams can attend the World Championships and play as little as 6 games. For some contrast: In Valve’s ‘The International 2016, the minimal number of games that a team can play is 15.

And when Riot does change its stance, it acts like it’s a natural evolution and that they were never wrong. Nevermind the fact that many of their ‘breakthroughs’ and ‘discoveries’ were realised years and years before Riot even existed as a company; it’s like watching someone explain to you why the penny farthing isn’t the optimal bike design in 2016.

Refusal to Allow Individuals to Properly Monetize Themselves

First off, while enough has been said on the matter, Riot refusing to pay industry standard rates to casters is one of the most sickening things they have ever done. There is no excuse for paaying less than every other esports publisher and organizer.

But this issue doesn’t just start and end with caster paychecks. Riot provides far lower monetization options to the teams and players than Valve or Blizzard, its major competitors. Its prize pools and minimal professional league salaries have stayed stagnant since 2013, which, considering the astronomical growth that esports as a whole has gone through, is horrendous. Riot’s point blank refusal to monetize the professional leagues that it runs and share the profits is systematic of a greedy company that only cares about how many skins it sells. When Riot tells you it cares about esports and players, the company is unashamedly lying like it has on so many other matters and issues.

Incredibly Frequent Patches

Incredibly frequent patches make the game’s development and evolution forced and artificial, which have in turn virtually killed off true innovation and surprise strategies. Riot has no patience anymore -- if something starts to get a high winrate they smash the hammer down in such an obnoxious way that it quickly dies. A time existed where overpowered and powerful strategies were allowed to persist for awhile because they brought about interesting counterplay. In Starcraft: Brood War, players were able to revolutionize matchups and come out with surprise victories that changed the way the entire competitive scene thought about the game.

With Riot, there is none of that. New hero isn’t performing well right from day 1? Buff it. New build discovered that makes a champion extremely strong? Nerf it. The treatment of Riot’s latest hero, Taliyah, perfectly represents Riot’s entire philosophy on how to balance a game. Or just look at how many times certain heroes such as Ryze and Skarner have been reworked and remade.

This also affects the way that infrequent players play the game; the rapidly evolving meta means that unless you play the game a ton, you struggle to keep up with how League of Legends functions. This means frustrating games of adjustment or more time reading about the game and less time playing.

Riot’s Cult of Personality

Riot has, on three separate occassions, profited from Richard Lewis's investigative journalism and yet, they have never once even ushered his name in a public statement. Duncan "Thorin" Shields has produced more high quality League of Legends content than anyone else, yet because he doesn’t subscribe to their way of thinking, they pretend like he doesn’t exist. The quality of your work is irrelevant; what matters is how much you worship their false idols.

This issue goes further than just this, though. My contacts within Riot, Riot Europe and Riot Korea tell me that suggesting ideas that don’t fit the status quo are a sure fire way to get yourself forced out of the company. That if you don’t give the impression that you believe upper management to be these infallible visionaries, then you’ll be quickly shown the door. Employees that progress are often chosen due to their personality and not their talents or achievements. Riot Games is drenched in office politics. It infects the air like a nauseating smell.

Without the ability to recognize shortcomings and failures, it is almost impossible to improve. Without critical thinking and open discussions, it’s virtually inconceivable to know if an idea is actually worthwhile.  But this makes sense when you look at how Riot operates, this is why dealing with this company is like beating your head against a brick wall over and over again. This is why even though the entire community was begging for them to not change the solo queue system, they did it anyway.

Spectator and Sandbox Mode

League of Legends was released 7 years ago and still doesn’t have a spectator or sandbox mode; the less said about the matter the better, to be honest.

The main issue holding back the growth of League of Legends is Riot Games itself, and without serious and significant reforms, League of Legends will die a slow and painful death. I have never seen a company make so many poor and illogical decisions and go unpunished, and I know that the breaking point is coming.

Which is ultimately sad, because I love this game.

If you enjoyed this article, please follow the author on Twitter at @Gosickboy_ for more content.

Cover photo courtesy of Riot Games.

THIS IS AN OPINIONATED EDITORIAL. THE STATEMENTS IN THIS FEATURE DO NOT REPRESENT THE THOUGHTS OF ESPORTS HEAVEN COLLECTIVELY.