Oh yeah, I was just trying to point out I wasn't a total scrub getting frustrated with smurfs and premades and what not. If I remember correctly Gold 3 is the exact middle, so I was a pretty average player in terms of ranked play. I realize I still had a ton to improve, but maybe if I had access to all the content my teammates and opponents had, I would have been closer to gold 1 or 2.
Rune pages were insanely expensive when I left. 6300 ip is not easy to get. Average game gives you, what, 150 ip or so? If we use that number and say, half an hour hour per game (I feel like my ip estimate may be high and my time estimate may be low not sure though) then that's 21 hours of gameplay to unlock a single rune page.
Like, that's pretty insane. That's a lot longer than a lot of single player games, and I feel like you need at a minimum extra 3 to cover your bases. Another 15 if you want the full benefit (though to be fair, the unfair advantage does diminish the more you have). But on top of all the champions that cost 6300 (and there were at least 30) and all the others that cost less, and how insanely expensive runes were, by level 30 I was no where even near having a collection that was 1/10th of the way to being full.
I'd love it if in the future they dropped this money making model. I tried dota2 and smite briefly and didn't enjoy either nearly as much as I liked league. A lot of people say they're like you in that they only buy skins, so I imagine riot's profits from the p2w aspects of the game aren't as high. League is like, the most played game in the world, it's not a small growing thing where the developers need to squeeze as much money as they can. I'd love it if they went full cosmetics like dota2 does.
Some champions are pretty much objectively better than others. While I imagine quite a lot has changed balanced wise so maybe this comparison isn't quite relevant, but it felt like all of the ad carries were 6300. I just felt straightup outclassed taking sivir or ashe up against draven or caitlyn. I also hadn't gotten any armor runes yet, so laning as ad carry felt awful.
Yeah, I get that eventually it goes away, but with how abysmally slow ip gains were I just felt sick and tired of it. I'm not sure if I've used this comparison before, but I'm perfectly fine grinding through a fighting game campaign to unlock all the characters, but it would take months for an EXTREMELY serious player to build up a good collection, and years for someone who plays an average or even casual amount.