Is League Of Legends Dying

Introduction

Is league of legends is dying, the never ending question that pops up in our minds season after season. You’d ask me in Season 6 if I’d think league of legends is dying and I would certainly say no. You’d ask me in Season 12 after the massive changes and fixes on one-shoting if the game is dying and again I’d say no. However this is not the case if you were to ask me in Season 10 and 11. Before I start talking about every season individually today I’m going to go over of what the industry peers think and what the professional players such as faker have said over the years about the game.

Table of Contents

At the same time we will go over some analytics and statistics that saw the raw data (which never lies). While data may always have a lag with game developments and progress it does give a good picture of how the game’s popularity has gone over the years and what has affected it.

In this article I will not go over how it compares to other games such as Dota and other esports which are unrelated to this such as counterstrike. I find that comparison pointless and don’t think it matters in the grand scheme of things as new games always come and go and they are not real factors to see how the game itself is going over the years in terms of quality and player base.

Did you know that when a popular game gets released all other popular games end up losing a bit of a player base?

One of the best ways to judge something is by numbers and take aside from emotions. However the truth is that there are a lot of external factors that go into why a game is successful or unsuccessful and that does get affected on how we also view it. After all bad or good media act as a catalyst for or against a game and they are prone to bias our mind and thinking towards it.

A good example is if a good player like faker comes out and shares his thoughts on the current state of the game people see that and get affected by it. Even if you are neutral at the time if you respect the guy that said it you will start changing your thoughts despite of what you think about it at that time. So in here I’m going to clearly view these people as differentiators that yes could influence your thinking but not the popularity at a whole.

The relation I always like to make is that of a stock. A good stock with good fundamentals for example like Apple gets influenced with bad or good publicity. There could be rumors that lets say the iPhone 13 pro max had an overheating flaw and the stock will take a hit because of it. What’s more important though is that is really temporarily and eventually bounce back up if the fundamentals of the stock are good. Similarly in a game the concept of fundamentals holds and you may see swings towards the up or downside but overall those should only have a temporary effect on things.

So please read on with an open mind here and take my personal points of view with a grain of salt, after all I will try to stick to the numbers.

Turning Milestones In League Of Legends

In this section I’d like to go over as a player mainly what I considered historical and turning milestones for league of legends. What I mean by this is specific patches and seasons that things changed for the best or worst over time on the quality of the game. Again this is my point of view as a player and what some professionals have said at those times. I personally value a lot faker as I think the guy is very deep and philosophical on the things he says about the game.

Season 6 – The Golden Era

Luckily this is the season I started playing the game and I believe it was one of the most successful seasons of the game. But this isn’t because I started to play it then due to publicity and influence by friends but because there were a lot of good things about it. Let me go over some of them:

Balance: The game was very balanced and most lanes were equal on influencing the outcome of the game. For example if the game went late game the late carries would shine, if the early game was strong and one team dominated with their early carries it would finish fast. I think this is a very important aspect to get rewarded if you play your champions properly. Furthermore there was a good amount of balance and not many champions were broken. Arguably you’d say Zed and a few other champions had an edge but they also had their weaknesses.
Items: The items I believe were at a very good stand point in terms of power and what they offered. The diversity and balance between mage, adc/crit and basically assassin items made the gameplay very pleasant. If you fell behind you could buy a cheaper item and still feel relevant rather than being at the mercy of a one shot champion that insta kills you.
Tanks: In league tanks have notoriously been strong and doing a lot of damage while not being able to kill them. The combination of anti-tank items along with proper runes limited that in Season 6 and you didn’t feel powerless when facing them.

As you can see above I kept the list to a minimum as I think those three reasons were the prevailing ones on making Season 6 one of the best seasons of the game.

Season 10 – The One Shot Era

This season in my opinion is one of the worst ones when it came to game play. Most assassins partied here as they were able to basically one shot everything. If you knew how to play zed you were almost guaranteed a win. Also lets not forget the roaming Katarina and her resets killing everything in the map and staying at full health. To make things worst some of the ADCs yes ADCs were also able to one shot you very quickly.

I secretly remember one of the reasons of why I stopped playing League of Legends for a long period of time in season 10. It was a one item KaiSa that was basically one-shotting our entire team with her Q. For example we had a jungle team fight and I saw her literally kill 3 people at the same time including me with 1 Q ability. This in my opinion is not just overpowered but completely broken in terms of raw stats.

I was so upset that I literally took a break of 6months from the game because of it. I only came back because a good friend of mine convinced me to start playing duo in normals again.

Mid Season 12 – The Anti One Shot Era

So while I was just talking about Season 10 and one shotting from assassins this ended up lasting literally for 2 seasons. Finally Riot understood this was detrimental to the game and start losing it’s player base. Popular streams and professional players would come out publicly and talk about the problems the game had. Clearly it was becoming so much of an issue that Riot finally decided to release a massive patch changing every single champion on the game in terms of base health and resistances.

Along with that they also nerfed a lot of assassins and assassin items restoring a bit the balance and making the gameplay more skill based. Once you take away the no-brain one shot combo the game starts being more fun and enjoyable. This is the time where I started investing more time and playing more in my free time. Lately I’ve gotten older and I still don’t play like I did in Season 6 but all things considered relative to my free time I do play enough to have fun and even challenge myself to climb again.

Don’t take my word on it though a lot of pro’s agree with my such as Faker and other famous streamers. Also there’s a lot of fun strategies that came out of this since the game started being longer such as doing cheese stuff with tanks Baus introduced the Sion split pushing strategy (riot quickly nerfed it) and then switched over to a Volibear version of it. The point I’m trying to make here the game encouraged creativity and started showing signs that you can play outside the box and have fun at the same time too. This to me is a win as the game reaches a level where it’s not the same boring, go in get one shot champions and blindly start killing everyone.

Trend Of League Of Legends Over Time

Now that I went over some turning points of the game I also want to show you how the game trended over the years and how that played along the patch changes on each season. Keep in mind that the changes take time to go into effect so when the one shot was introduced didn’t immediately result into losing players and neither when the season 12 fix started bringing back the entire player base.

We will investigate things from Season 6 to see how things went. In my opinion that’s when the game peaked and lost players so let’s see what the graph tells us and start interpreting the results in accordance to the major Patch milestones.

Shocked? Well as you can see the game has an overall weaker and weaker trend. The downline is very steady after season 6 with a sharp drop around season 9-10 when the one shot changes start coming into effect. Also as you can see in Season 12 it had a sharp upwards spike and this is when the news broke out that RIOT will be introducing an anti-one shot patch.

To say the least the gamer audience took this very warmly and started playing again only to drop back lower. I’m not quite sure where this can be attributed but I have a very high level interpretation so bare with me.

I believe the overall sentiment from the past few years has been lingering and it’s here to stay, this in my mind says that the gamers got momentarily excited but then remembered all the things Riot did in the past not to make the game enjoyable. They didn’t want to risk their personal time on the game only to see that getting reversed over time again and going back to square zero. I think once you destroy your player base’s fun factor they will not forgive you because the bad memory will remain.

So a lot of people ask me what about the player base why don’t you take that into account. My answer has always been I don’t really believe into it so I look into trends. The reason I don’t believe in it is that there’s a lot of bots these days that are very hard to quantify. This isn’t specific to League of Legends I believe it happens in other areas too like social platforms, games etc.

Let’s not forget that Elon Musk recently abandoned a massive purchase of the big social media platform twitter because of suspicions on the distorted numbers of the player base. He basically implied there were so many bots that it was very hard to quantify the real user base and I don’t blame him on it. Don’t get me wrong I don’t think the platform itself introduces all the bots but they come from other areas such as scammers, people that want to profit from it, people that want to automate and various other reasons. My point is that bots distort the real numbers and you can never use them as an indictor on whether or not a game is growing.

Conclusion

If you found Is League Of Legends Dying useful and you think it may have helped you please drop me a cheer below I would appreciate it.

If you have any questions, comments please post them below I check periodically and try to answer them in the priority they come in.
Also if you have any corrections please do let me know and I’ll update the article with new updates or mistakes I did.

Where do you think League is headed at upwards or downwards?

As I discussed earlier in this article I believe league of legends as of season 12 after the anti-one-shot changes patch is heading upwards. The quality of the game has vastly improved and the skill based tactical play is back at full effect. Don’t get me wrong things could easily go south if Riot does not keep the balance properly and messes up things in the upcoming patches.

If you want to learn more about league of legends you can check some of the articles below:

If you would like to find more information on the game please check the latest patch notes here:

https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/tags/patch-notes/