RohanGod // The Greatest Gamer

One day, I'll become The Greatest Gamer Ever.

Dear Riot Games, NONE of the frustrations currently coming from playing League of Legends are healthy. And for the record, I actually do agree that healthy frustration is a real thing. It's just not applicable for the current state of League. At all. Over the years, many systemic changes to League have resulted in the individual player having less and less agency over-all. That's a whole separate topic of discussion, but what's important here is how agency relates to frustration. Frustration leads to growth when you have agency over the situation. That's when it's healthy. What do you think happens when you remove the agency but leave the frustration? You end up demoralized, hopeless, and just plain old angry. Now let's talk about the big pain points: The Ranked Ladder. - Uncapped LP. Aegis. Bad LP gains/losses. - HUGE skill gaps per-game, due to inflation. - Zero game quality. The Game. - State of mages, support, and toplane. - State of tutorial mode champions (Garen, Nasus, etc.) The common factor between all of those points is that you as an individual player have a SEVERE lack of agency. Let's take a look at the ranked ladder from the POV of a Master+ player. You're a Master+ player. You have to climb THOUSANDS of LP with negative gains/losses due to a shitty random Double LP system. You have to slog through hundreds upon hundreds of games with absolutely horrible game quality due to an incredibly inflated ladder. At times, often frequently, it'll feel like you're just rolling the dice for which team ends up with 3 multi-season Challengers vs 3 players who've been Diamond for the past 10 years straight. It's not fun, and there is genuinely nothing you can do to make the experience more bearable. It feels completely and utterly pointless and boring to take the game even remotely seriously. No agency. Frustrating. Not healthy. Guess what? The general gamestate's not much better. - Mages have been walking around with infinite mana, infinite damage, and infinite movespeed. You're not allowed to interact with them, because they just leave a macro on QWE to nuke waves from off-screen. Their mana bars do not move, ever. - Support has been completely game ruining for the entire year. Let's take the easiest role in the game, one that can skip 90%+ of playing League of Legends. Then, let's overload it with resources and somehow give it even more agency and freedom than Jungle! Oops! Now EVERYONE except for the support is miserable! One game the enemy Bard simultaneously ruins the lives of your top, mid, AND jungle. Next game, your Thresh roams to gank the Mundo vs Malphite toplane matchup while botlane is on a freeze and your ADC gets dove and loses 4 waves. - Nasus and Garen. I'll admit there can be subjectivity to this point. But personally, I do not think there's any world where tutorial champions like Nasus and Garen should EVER be allowed to remain strong enough to be consistently pickable in high ELO. Yeah, easy champions do need to exist in every role. But when we end up on the EXTREME end of the spectrum, when we go beyond simply "easy" and enter the territory of just straight up binary, I think a line needs to be drawn. IMO, binary champions like Garen and Nasus being strong isn't just frustrating to play against. It's just boring and miserable. No matter what degree of rationalization you do to pretend like there's hidden intricacies to the thought process required to make these champions work? Nasus clicked ghost and W, and then he killed you. Boring and miserable. Overall, I think the current gamestate of League REALLY fucking sucks. I just hope a lot of stuff gets reevaluated, because I don't think the current philosophy behind the decisions that shape the game is good.

God damn dude, wtf is happening to Riot Games? League of Legends: - Ranked integrity is just irreversibly ruined? And it was ruined on purpose, by choice??? - Matchmaking is horrible. Master tier is filled with 50,000+ players with a 3,000LP spread. Rank 1 is 5,000+LP. - Iconic names are complaining and quitting left and right. VALORANT; - Ranked rewards coming soon™️. Year 7 btw. - Completely miserable playerbase. Everyone is jaded because no one cares anymore because there’s no reason to care. - Streamsnipers, wintraders, and cheaters now seem to outnumber regular players above Immortal. TFT: - Fire Mortdog opener transitions into releasing the absolute worst, buggiest, inexcusable product I’ve ever seen in the gaming space????? - Dozens of cosmetics individually worth $100s each are disabled. Indefinitely?????Dogshit, basically nonexistent compensation? - HOW THE FUCK DID THIS ENGINE UPDATE MAKE IT TO THE LIVE SERVERS. WHAT THE FUCK. 2XKO: - LITERAL RUGPULL???????? I mean dude I don’t like doomposting, but what in the absolute fuck is happening??? Where is the company that made the games that I loved 😭

Comparing Deadlock vs. League of Legends: Deadlock vs League is trending and every take I've read comes from people that either don't play / aren't good at League. As someone who's been good at both, lemme lay down the law. Deadlock: - Higher mechanical ceiling + more mechanics overall - Higher tempo game, WAY less downtime overall - EXTREME flexibility. For the most part, you can do whatever you want, wherever you want, and on whoever you want. - SUPER DEEP item system. Different builds can make it so that you're playing a completely different character and game. Very cool. - VERY forgiving game. Super strong comeback mechanics. Died 5 times in lane? You can still EASILY come back. - Less punishing = Easier overall. League of Legends: - Lower mechanical ceiling + less unique mechanics overall. - There's a lot more downtime where you can just chill and think about your next play. - More objectives, variety, and nuance between macro play. - More rigid, less flexibility overall. As opposed to Deadlock, there's actual troll picks and characters that don't work in certain lanes. - MUCH more punishing. ESPECIALLY early/midgame. Making consecutive big mistakes in lane vs. a good player can ruin your entire game, basically before it even began. - Comeback mechanics aren't as overwhelming. Making comebacks is harder because you have to be able to spot and punish mistakes from overconfident enemies rather than being brute-forced by systems in the game. - More punishing = Much harder. At the end of the day, literally the only true similarity between the two is that they're a MOBA. That's it lmao. Both are fun and good games, League is huge and Deadlock will be huge.

2XKO // The End. Alright guys, we’re just going to rip the band-aid off. I’m calling the 2XKO ranked climb here. Let’s talk. As we all know, Riot just made the decision to pull the plug on the game and completely remove ranked in 3 weeks. I’m currently Emerald 3, almost Diamond. With only 3 weeks left, it’s literally impossible for me to reach Challenger before the end. I was originally going to all-in and climb as hard and as fast as I could. I’m 100% confident I would reach Master, and there’s a very small chance that I could even hit Grandmaster before the season ends. But, as processed my feelings, I realized that… I didn’t want to. I wouldn’t be able to stomach the constant disappointment and “what if’s” and thoughts on the potential that this beautiful game could have, and should have reached. I fucking loved 2XKO. No, I still do. I love every part of this game, the good, the bad, the unbalanced, the obnoxious. I love how much I hate the lows and I love how much I’d ride the highs. I love how fucking compelling the character design is. I grew up on League, I’m familiar with all of these champions, but holy fuck the visuals and animations and FEEL behind their abilities and voicelines and supers and ultimates had me so fucking invested. No bullshit man, everytime I’d use Darius ultimate I’d want to stand up and scream “FOR NOXUSSSS!!!!!” as he flew down with his axe because it was just so raw LMFAO. I love this game and it’s simply too special for me to soil the memory doom-queueing it for 3 weeks straight. My whole FGC journey is the first TRULY new gaming experience I’ve had since I was a little kid. I’ll never forget this dive, it taught me so much about myself, and I really am thankful. For now though, it too comes to an end. It sucks, because I know that I wasn’t even remotely close to hitting my ceiling. I’ve gotten a ton of requests and suggestions to try out Tekken, and I strongly considered it. But man… I just can’t. Maybe one day, but not for a while. This shit’s really hitting me deep. 2XKO meant a lot to me. I was waiting for the opportunity to one-up myself and set a record that nobody else would ever be able to break. 6x max-rank Riot Games. I waited for 3 years and got snubbed out of the chance. I could rant about the “what ifs” and should’ves” of 2XKO. I’m not going to. None of it matters because it doesn’t change anything anymore. To me, 2XKO was meant to be the greatest fighting game of all time. Thank you to the developers that poured their heart into it. Lastly, thank you for reading this. Thank you to the FGC. Thank you to everybody that followed my journey along, offering advice, laughing at my disbeliefs, or even just reading through my journal logs. I’m sorry for the disappointment.

Really sad about the 2XKO news, man. I'd just started making really strong progress and climbing smoothly. For the first time in my FGC journey, I was actually feeling confident about my ability to reach Challenger. I'll make a more detailed post tomorrow. Just sucks. :(

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Fighting games have genuinely changed my view on reality. No troll. I want to share the inner mechanisms of my mind. This is gonna come across as EXTREMELY egotistical, but there’s kinda no other way around it lol. I’ve never felt challenged in any of the 18 competitive videogames I’ve played. No, I’m not saying that none of them were challenging. I’m saying that I’ve never felt any real sensation of doubt, uncertainty, or significant pressure at any point during any of my climbs from the bottom of ranked ladders to the pinnacle. Of course, at times it’s felt REALLY fucking difficult to improve and rank up. Especially during the harder games - Overwatch, Valorant, Deadlock, and especially League of Legends. There’s MANY reasons as to why those games are objectively hard as fuck. But, at no point during any of them have I EVER even been able to conceptualize a wall that genuinely made me feel nervous. My journey into competitive gaming began 15 years ago, when I was 11. My first taste of dominance came through playing Wizard101 PvP on my family computer and Call of Duty MW3 on my Xbox360. It was never hard. That fact remained true, even as I branched out into other games. I downloaded League of Legends in season 3. I hit Diamond in my first season of playing ranked, S5. The next season I played ranked was S9, I hit Master. The third season I played ranked was S11, and I reached Challenger. I hit Top 500 during the first season of Overwatch ranked, during summer 2016. I installed VALORANT in the summer of 2021. 5 months and 500 total games later, I hit Radiant. None of these roads were simply sunshine and rainbows. I’ve tilted, suffered unfathomable loss streaks, raged, and been incredibly demoralized. At times, I’ve even considered giving up. But, none of these struggles have ever penetrated beyond the furthest, most superficial layer of my conscious mind. Every time that the initial flare of negative emotions from that perceived level of difficulty passed, my deepest self always knew that there was a flat 100.00% chance that I would eventually climb and reach the absolute highest rank on. And year after year, game after game, that prophecy always came true. No pressure, no doubt, no difficulty. At some point, it began to just feel inevitable. And because it felt so inevitable, so guaranteed, and so easy; Reaching the highest rank in a game has never carried any feeling alongside it. For the first time ever, things are different. For the first time ever, victory doesn’t feel guaranteed. For the first time ever, I’m aware of a wall of difficulty that surpasses my current level of comprehension. For the first time ever, I feel pressure seeping past my skin and through my bones. Pressure that reaches my deepest self and asks me, “Can you do it?” For the first time in god knows how long, I’m met with a challenge that ignites every fiber of my being with the irresistible desire to surpass my limits, get stronger, and do whatever it takes to win. I feel weak again. 200 hours of playing fighting games has overwritten 15 years of absolute dominance. And truly, I couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity.

Hi guys @Play2XKO @riotgames Down to port Riven into 2XKO? I really need to one-trick her for the 3rd time in the 3rd different Riot game plz 😭

2XKO // The Platinum Pit-Stop.