User blog comment:TehAnonymous/TehAnonymous AMA/@comment-26111682-20150215102557/@comment-1990160-20150220053821

As far as gameplay mechanics go, it's improved. But I long for the days of yore, because the League of today is not the League of my youth. Many little things have slowly changed over the years, changing some of the more visible aspects as well as more subtle nuances. One of my biggest annoyances are the champion square updates, because to me it has quite literally changed the face of the game.

An example of this would be Alistar. The older images may be less detailed, the edges less sharp, the colors dimmed, but those are the images that I identified with as Alistar for the longest time. I remember when they gave him Trample, his repeated nerfs when he was a powerhouse in the metagame, when they hit the mana cost on his heal when Riot was killing off the healing support meta, and now? they've changed his Headbutt. It's like I don't even recognize him any more.

Riot used to have lore. And then they didn't. And they introduced several... regionally-themed modules that group-retconned a ton of things - Freljord, Shurima, the Shadow Isles... Again, this really broke my connection to a lot of the champions, that Riot just kind of decided to say "everyone is Freljord now whooo~" and people liked it. See: a recent comment of mine, #1185825