I was really excited for Season One – maybe too excited – and I think that excitement led to overblown expectations about the changes to the game. I do think my expectations would have been held more in line, though, if Riot had been more transparent about all of the features/changes to the game and client with the advent of the League’s first competitive season.

Consider a recent thread in which a player asked about the required number of champions for Ranked Play. What’s that? Yes, you are required to have 14 champions unlocked in order to play ranked playlists. I was actually thrilled to find out, but why didn’t we know more about it before? It wasn’t in the patch notes as I can remember (and I tend to read those pretty carefully), nor was it in any of the previews.

The ranking system also includes anti-dispersion code so that a high player and low player can’t queue together to bump the high-ELO player’s rating (this still doesn’t explain how the top 5v5 solo player was more than 200 points above the next player, even though they were known to play with each other (this has changed since Saturday)).

All of this would have been great information for the community. I can understand withholding a few things for the element of surprise, but these little, behind-the-scenes mechanics actually disperse a lot of the rage players stir up with uninformed speculation.