League of Legends has had a mighty reputation as one of the most-played games in the world, but it's certainly not perfect, and some mechanics have been criticized for being not as well-done as others. Some manage to be eventually patched out and fixed, but others remain in the game and earn notoriety for being annoyingly unintuitive or just plain frustrating.
Universal
- Stealth is considered one of the most unhealthy aspects of the game since it makes champions who possess it really, really annoying to fight against. Planning and vision goes out the window when a specific champion with a stealthing mechanic instantly nullifies them, letting them go in undetected, bursting down their target and running off (even worse when you keep in mind it's typically found on assassins who usually have an escape option in their kit to easily do that). While reworks to stealth behavior and item counters have been implemented to make it slightly more palatable, some champions reliant on stealth such as Twitch, Rengar and Evelynn have gone through ups and downs as a result of it being really difficult to find a mutually fair solution to. Even worse was Akali's "true stealth", which made her invisible even to turrets under her shroud until it was removed for making diving with Akali too safe.
- ARAM has a specific issue in that unlike Summoner's Rift, there are no dedicated trinkets or control wards to detect champions or traps under stealth, and up until preseason 11, the only counter was Oracle's Elixir, a consumable item granting vision but required spending 300 gold and only lasted 3 minutes. Combined with other quirks of the itemnote and the game mode itselfnote , it was a very awkward means to get value with. A new anti-stealth feature was introduced in preseason 11 by having cannon/super minions detect the invisible in their radius, but this consequently took control away from players, making things unwieldy in a new way.
- Dodge, a now-removed stat similar to critical hit chance which granted a percentage-based chance to have autoattacks against you deal no damage. Needless to say, it wasn't fun for players to suddenly whiff on what might've been the killing blow just because the Random Number God said so (it wasn't even a direct inverse to crit chance, as even non-critical hits deal some damage), but it was also unreliable for the user to have it unless they stacked up on the stat with runes and the precise one item that provided it (Ninja Tabi, boots that granted 12% Dodge). The fact there existed the item Sword of the Divine, which came with an active buff to ignore Dodge entirely, made the stat seem like even more of an unnecessary problem for everyone involved. Dodge was mostly removed from the game by early 2012, with Ninja Tabi and Sword of the Divine reworked (the latter later removed altogether), with it now only existing on Jax in the form of his Couterstrike.
- Healing and anti-healing have a very long history of controversy in the game: from as early as the likes of Soraka, healing has received a lot of criticism for being a pretty non-interactive mechanic that walks a fine line between being incredibly powerful at sustaining champions in combat or simply useless, derided as either making things unfairly padded or making those who benefit from healing obsolete. There was a period between 2014-17 where Riot generally tried to downplay the importance of healing by making abilities that provide them interplay with some other utility, such as dealing damage or crowd control (Soraka and Sona — two of the most well-known "pure" healers in the game — received reworks in 2014 that forced them to work harder for their healing, and at more notable personal cost beyond simply mana), but starting from 2018, they've gradually fallen back into their old habits, with several new champions being balanced around their ability to heal themselves or others. A lot of flack has since been directed towards the lack of options of counterplay; simply shooting the medic first may not be a feasible option depending on champion picks and their individual mechanical design (Yuumi is an infamous healing champion based on the complete inability for her to be targeted first, a core tenant to her character), and even with the existence of Grievous Wounds items (which gained increasing prominence following 2021 as several options were introduced to be used by almost every champion archetype), this still runs into the problem of binary stat interactions, where they either make several champions obsolete or are themselves ineffectual stat sticks. The latter dynamic has received particular criticism in metas where healing is significantly ratcheted, as Grievous Wounds items are ironically treated as imperative not because they actually grant a substantial kryptonite, but because it's the only option of making a dent in healers who are otherwise practically invincible.
- Unit collision, more colloquially known as "creep block", an interaction that prevents champions from walking through minions, is considered by nearly all members of the playerbase to be annoying and pointless. Collision detection can be a very fickle thing in League, and the sensation of getting tripped up by crowds of uncontrollable minions (including your own) and potentially costing you a kill (if you're the aggressor) or your life (if you're being aggressed on) is a terribly unpleasant one. The fact that a handful of champions have passives made to directly ignore unit collision indicates that Riot does consider it a necessary jank for everyone else to deal with, which has remained a controversial decision, to say the least.
- If someone on your team disconnects, either because of connection issues or simply because they Rage Quit, you're basically screwed. You can only win a game 4v5 if your opponents are outright terrible, or your team starts snowballing a carry incredibly quickly and you rip through them before they can overwhelm you with attrition, but in most circumstances, you are effectively guaranteed to lose because they can simply control more of the map than you possibly can, which, if you're in a ranked game, also means you'll lose LP just the same as if you'd lost fair and square. Adding insult to injury is that a leaving player is not grounds for you to leave as well — if you attempt to, you'll be penalized just as much, meaning that outside of an early surrender, you'll have to waste several minutes playing a slow, dead game because of something that's not your fault. Riot has been notoriously slow on enabling forgiveness for this issue — 2016 saw the earliest one can call a surrender vote moved from 20 minutes to 15 (and even then, a pre-20 minute vote has to be unanimous), and it wasn't until 2022 for surrender votes on teams with disconnected players to be moved to 3 minutes.
- Some of the issue for ranked games in specific were dampened a bit with the introduction of "remakes", allowing teams with an AFK player an early vote to surrender for a stalemate state, where aside from the penalized leaver, neither team wins or loses any LP. This unfortunately still has several caveats, such as only accounting for games where players are entirely disconnected (meaning Griefers hanging out at the fountain and not participating prevent the feature from being used), still requiring an arbitrary 3 minutes before a remake can be called even under ideal conditions, and disabling the option entirely if someone in the game dies (meaning if a teammate gave first blood before your AFK player was deemed officially disconnected before the 3 minute mark, you're back to "dead game" territory again).
- Autofill — a practice where the game assigns players to roles outside of their 2 preferred picks — is near-universally loathed by the fanbase. Riot considers autofill a necessary evil that has to exist in some capacity to deal with potentially long matchmaking queue times, but players find it really messy since almost no players are good at every role that they might be randomly placed in, which can lead to more arbitrary losses (and to some degree, invalidates the point of having a ranked role-based matchmaking system to begin with), and it's especially uncomfortable for those who simply don't own champions for their autofilled role to play with, forcing them to either learn free-rotation champions on the fly or bust out an unconventional, usually-unadvisable pick. Riot has gradually tried to lessen the burden of autofill through some areas (such as disabling autofill on promotional games and trying to matchmake teams with autofilled players against other teams with autofilled players, keeping them in a similar boat), but as long as it remains, complaints exist.
- "Dynamic Queue" was a new system implemented for the 2016 ranked season to replace the Solo/Duo Queue, and quickly became the problem of discussion for the rest of the year. While the Solo/Duo Queue system was made to only limit players to compete on the ranked ladder alone or with one partner, and the Dynamic Queue was made to shake things up by allowing players to queue with groups of any size. Riot's intent was that it would encourage further team play as League of Legends is ultimately a team-based game, but this move became widely criticized as it threw the quality of ranked games entirely out of whack — whereas playing in the ranked ladder alone allows for a fairly straightforward approach to determining individual skill, Dynamic Queue enabling matchmaking groups of varying different premade sizes introduced so many variables that tanked both competitive integrity (teams with better coordination do far better than those who don't, with this system putting a heavy burden on solo players for factors beyond the scope of the game), as well as matchmaking (it was not uncommon for high-ELO players to end up waiting exponentially longer to find games, often resulting in autofill or matchups against low-level players, even if they were still playing by themselves). By the end of the year, Riot fully admitted that Dynamic Queue was a mistake in both root concept and execution, and thus the Solo/Duo Queue returned for the 2017 season.
- Prior to their massive relaunch in preseason 2018, runes and summoner masteriesnote were a mess at best. The idea is simple in concept: various sets of general Support Powers in the form of detailed skill trees or obtainable runes that would give very slight, but meaningful stat changes or various interactions to modify the gameplay experience beyond champion picks. However, the big issue was that pre-2018, they were simply too cluttered and inaccessible to use — mastery trees (on top of constantly changing every year) were simply too big and filled with too many minute choices for most players to reasonably scan through for each game, as were rune pages, which additionally came with the need to purchase runes using Influence Points (the predecessor to modern Blue Essence). This in turn led to accusations that, when combined with the ability to purchase additional pages for rune/mastery presets, this was the closest the game came to becoming truly pay-to-win, as those with additional optimized pages and access to stat-boosting runes were only marginally, but definitively more powerful than those who didn't. After years of complaints, the entire system was greatly overhauled with the launch of Runes Reforged in late 2017, merging the systems into a vastly more simplified (and entirely free) skill-tree system, presenting a smaller, yet more distinct pool of choices that are much more clear-cut in defining and/or altering a champion's playstyle, which has since remained as a vastly more respected gameplay staple.
- Eternals became widely criticized the moment they were announced, and even following a several-month delay to supposedly rectify its flaws before their actual implementation, the biggest one still remained: it's League's Achievement System, but it has to be purchased, mostly through real money. While it's ultimately just a new type of cosmetic and thus isn't strictly necessary, the fact that such a system exists but is tucked away by a paywallnote is greatly reviled as one of Riot's most egregiously blatant cashgrabs, not helped by how high the prices of each pack can rack up.
- Preseason 2023 introduced several new elements to ARAM, most of which were well-received, but with one major exception: Tower Rubble, where the first tower of each side — upon being taken down by the enemy — collapses and leaves debris in the middle of the lane, permanently creating more terrain to navigate around, with the direction it was falling also being random each game. Riot intended for this to be a mechanic similar to Elemental Drakes of Summoner's Rift to keep games fresh with semi-randomized map geography, but this was greatly criticized for ARAM since it takes place on an already-tight one-lane map, with additional terrain simply creating worse chokepoints for teams to have to fight through and arbitrarily inflating the strength of champions who thrive in tight spaces, disrupting the pure "all-mid brawling" gameplay. After much controversy, Riot decided the mechanic wasn't getting the results they were hoping for, removing the feature in patch 13.5.
- Wild Rift exclusive: Buying items still has to be done in the home base. Considering that most mobile MOBA games allow buying items from anywhere in the map, the decision to keep this mechanic in Wild Rift prove to be a sore point and roadblock for those attempting to try Wild Rift.
Champion-Specific
- Pet units tend to be awkwardly implemented into the game:
- Malzahar's Voidlings. Unlike other champion's pets/clones, they are directly uncontrollable (though they do prioritize certain targets hit by his abilities).
- In a different vein of taking issue with champion pets, Elise's little spider companions while she's in spider form that follow and move around her render hitting a skillshot that stops when hitting any enemy target upon Elise... rather difficult.
- Yorick's Mist Walkers and Maiden of the Mist have a similar problem. While it's actually usually rather easy to get them to fight specific targets (especially with his E ability), sometimes the issue is that you don't want them to fight and you want them to just stick with you. Of course, this was a deliberate design choice, as Yorick was made specifically to be a strong pusher who has the unique distinction of being able to push two lanes at once.
- Kindred's Wolf is in a similar position but worse, as his bites scale very well with Kindred's marks but it's a tossup as to whether Wolf will actually attack a champion or a nearby minion since he cannot be controlled.
- Ivern's Daisy is in the awkward position of being controllable, but having AI that is significantly worse than Tibbers', another pet that can be controlled and was implemented into the game much earlier. Daisy will stop attacking things at random, lumber back and forth for no reason, and miss her skillshots on enemy champions frequently.
- Illaoi's Test of Spirit ability received a lot of flak not necessarily for being overpowered, but being really unclear as to what it does. Approaching the initial ability as an opponent comes with fairly obvious logic — Illaoi is a close-range damage dealer, so dodge the ability and keep your distance, otherwise she'll rip out your spirit and deal damage to you by hitting it — but the subsequent "Vessel" mechanic for if she destroys the spirit or the host walks too far away from it (which, given the aforementioned logic of avoiding Illaoi's range, is something they'd be inclined to do) is where things get confusing. When Illaoi was first released, Vessels would be constantly harassed by tentacles around them for up to a full minute unless they and they alone destroy three tentacles, but this dynamic isn't given any obvious indication, leaving most players confused as to why Illaoi was continuing to swarm them with tentacles even after seemingly avoiding her initial wrath. Eventually, the ability was reworked by removing the "destroy tentacles to eliminate the debuff" dynamic in exchange for making the Vessel duration a flat, significantly shorter amount of time, making it less of a burdensome skill-check, but it still gets some ire for just how non-obvious its unique form of punishment is.
- Mana-sustain passives. Mages have a lot of strong points (good damage, decent control and nice scalings) and usually their Necessary Drawback is that they're gutted by the mana costs, and get extremely vulnerable when manaless, but all this results in is giving higher mana costs to prevent them from becoming overpowered, completely nulling out the point of their existence and leaving them with effectively a dead ability slot. Some champions who base them on mechanical ability arguably have a point for interactivity (Xerath, for instance, demands players occasionally move into auto-attack range to prevent them from completely dominating from afar), but others like with Veigar and Lissandra (respectively, flat mana regen and negated mana cost based on a flat, disproportionately long cooldown) proved to be so egregious that they were mercifully reworked into new passives altogether.
- An inconvenient, if amusing series of problems from early on in the game's life: prior to the introduction of a proper Spectator Mode in late 2011, prospective spectators (including broadcasters of professional games) relied on an archaic system that required them to join in the games as a sixth player of either team, complete with picking a champion, albeit one who would be invisible and unable to interact at all with the game... for the most part. A handful of champions had global passives that would directly interfere with gameplay despite being otherwise non-interactable: Twisted Fate (whose early passives granted allies either critical strike chance or bonus gold on kill), Janna (granted all allies bonus movement speed), and Zilean (granted all allies bonus experience generation). This obviously tripped up game balance, and while pro broadcasters had the good sense to avoid these champions (in the small handful of times people accidentally did, the games had to be restarted), regular gamers were not bound to the honor system in this sense, and this exploit became a convoluted, yet beneficial way for more competitive players to get a free buff. The problem has long since been turfed following the release of a proper, more robust Spectator Mode, and all offending passives have since been reworked, fully denying any possibility of this problem's return.
