League of Legends: Editor's Rating/Analysis

Overall, on a 10 point scale, I would give League of Legends a 9/10. I believe this game provides a rich, vibrant, and competitive online experience and is a worthy successor to its predecessor: Dota. This being said, I still believe that the game does have some shortcomings which I will address briefly along with its inherent strengths.

• The graphical engine is both stable and smooth.
• The servers are fast enough to provide speedy loads and a nearly lagless experience.
• The models, textures, spells, and doodads are very crisp and well detailed.
• The champion selection is diverse, appealing, and visually attractive.
•  The Dota experience is enhanced and improved vastly by many new and unique features.
•  The client itself: PvP.net is both graphically inviting and easy to use; complete with conveniently placed buttons and menus.
•  An active forum and receptive Riot employees are always open to feedback and actually consider it when they make decisions on the game
•  Frequent patches and content updates keep the game fresh, new, and competitive

• The “ELO” ratings of players are still being kept secret, although Riot has promised to reveal “ELO” for ranked play mode when it is released.
• The game was released too early in my opinion. Here are a few reasons for my position: There is still only 1 game mode available to play: Blind Pick. Ranked play has still not been released. At the time of release, the game had no working store, however, the store is now working quite well. The game is very close to being finished enough to sell. I think that if a few more game modes and one other map were added then it would be finished enough for me to buy.
• The matchmaking/rating system seems to need some adjusting. I’ve been paired with noobs far too often for it to be a simple coincidence. I realize that ratings are not 100% accurate indicators of skill, but I feel that the rating system could be a bit better. Right now, the accuracy isn’t abysmal, by any stretch of the imagination; I just feel that it could be better. I also think that showing the ELO numbers during the loading screen when teams are locked would enable to the community to give good feedback about how well the matchmaking system is really working.
• The lack of a ban or votekick feature in games is a bit annoying. 1 feeder can ruin a game on his own while the other players are helpless to stop him. There are problems inherent to implementing a votekick feature, but I feel that Riot should at least be doing something to mitigate the effect that leaving has the outcomes of games. This could be accomplished the easiest by implementing a stricter penalty for leaving/disconnecting from an active game. Reconnects should still be allowed. However, there should be a set limit to how long someone can go without reconnecting. 
• When a team losses a player, there is no gold bonus or some other small boost given to the shorthanded team. I feel like there should be. Some would argue that this boost would encourage teammates to leave in order to give their team an advantage. However, this concern could be addressed by making the penalty for leaving much stricter than it is currently. Doing so would discourage players from leaving just to secure an advantage for their teams.

Closing

In closing I would just like to reiterate that I absolutely love this game. The cons I have listed are mostly small things that, for the most part, do not make or break my enjoyment of the game. Would I like most of these things changed? Sure, but I think Riot will fix these things in due time. They seem to know what they’re doing.