I’ve been trying to find the words to express how disappointed I am in riot’s decisions to become a “big company” including all of the shitty decisions completely at odds to their playerbase, and I’m just struggling.

I had hoped they had decided skins were lucrative enough, for how long they had just sold skins and left it at that. Now they’re chasing “whales” for the sake of money, adding more and more ads, bloat, categories of fake money, and intrusive gacha crap, all the while their decisions progressively guts the core of people who actually care about their game. The people that drive the community and “engagement,” as it were.

The people who make content for league (like SkinSpotlights, who is affected by this,) the custom skin makers, people who go out of their way to make it work on linux, these are passionate communities that they are actively shafting just to have a band-aid solution (and let’s be real; it is a band-aid,) for high-elo scripters and low-level bots that affect (generously) 5% of the playerbase meaningfully. I acknowledge that scripters are extremely shitty to deal with but doing this isn’t going to stop them, and it has serious downsides.

That it makes the barrier to entry for “even windows” users higher isn’t good either-- a game that was well known for working on potatoes now has an always-on anticheat that makes many people have issues playing other games without freezing and stutters, fucking up their BIOS and bricking their pc, bluescreening at random, being nearly impossible for the average user to remove properly, and getting false positives for people who are programmers just running their work programs. How prevalent an issue these are isn’t THAT important, that it happens at all regularly enough to get people clamoring about how it bricked their pc will make any average user pause. Realistically, if an issue happens to one person in a friend group, then you’ve most likely lost the whole group.

This is ignoring that it’s a security nightmare being an always-on rootkit that millions of players use. It is the prime backdoor for legitimate hackers to target now.

I have a lil barebones potato laptop that runs windows that I could theoretically keep league on. I am seriously debating on whether I will, even though I unironically love this game, and was just finally able to get a foot into the competitive scene like I’ve wanted to for years. Hell, I don’t even know for sure if it’ll work on my potato laptop. It already barely runs league. 8/