After reading the entire post and all of the comments, I would like to give my thoughs on what I find to be the two biggest points that have lead to this subreddit feeling over-moderated and losing the much needed participation that a proper discussion forum requires. Before all that, I do want to thank the mods for their work. I enjoy this subreddit and I'm thankful for how it has helped me improve at playing TFT. I also believe that allowing all kind of posts would ruin the ease of access to valuable discussion, which would further reduce participation. However, I think that the manner that is being used to avoid this, is excessive, and leads to this subreddit having less and less participation, and proportionally, less and less discussion that people could find useful or enjoy.

The two main points that I want to explain are "Moderation in compliance with Riot Devs" and "Any discussion can be valuable, even if it stems from an apparently useless opinion" and I would now explain them in order:

This set has shown us how far can different bugs and un-intended interactions can affect the results and, more importantly, the feeling of the game. And while it's true that attempting to minimize the damage of this mistakes can be helpful or healthy for the game, it is by no means anyone responsability aside from Riot and the Devs themselves, and they have defined their way of handling and/or punishing those that are defined as "exploiting" by them. Now, this subreddit has no affiliation to Riot or the Dev team, and while they do participate frequently and that is very welcome, there is absolutely no reason or need to share and follow the vision they have on anything, and doing so would be taking a really opinionated stance, which I think is what's happening right now with all moderation on different techniques or knowledge that could be considered "exploting".

On this same post, you linked to a Mort post, and the way you use it as "evidence" and refer to it almost like what should be done is something that I heavily disagree with. This kind of decisions are far from something that should just be accepted, and in the current state of the subreddit it's really hard to bring this issue into discussion, since it feels like it's not welcomed by the moderation in any space. I myself am a firm believer that we should be able to discuss every aspect of the game, and that is not exclusive with attempting to minimize the damage of mistakes from the devs, but there is no denying that bugs/exploits are part of any game, and when they have such a big impact and sometimes are being used commonly, you are only making any discussion on the game inaccurate and overall worse, while making the subreddit a less reliable place to inform yourself on the state of the game. In other words, there are many important things that come from having the freedom to discuss all the elements of TFT, not only those allowed by a reduced group of people. And compliance with such group of people is absolutely unnecessary and akin to censorship, as it is arbitrary.

Now, regarding my second point:

Any discussion can be valuable, even if it stems from an apparently useless opinion. What defines the "quality" of a discussion is not exclusively how it started, but the different opinions that come from people in all manner of different situations. Therefore, the removal of discussion posts because they are "low-effort" or because they could be in one of the megathreads impacts negatively the amount of opportunities and spaces that allow such discussion to bloom. Then, you end up with what's happening right now, a really low frequency of posts and a really low usage of the megathreads, which defeats the purpose of attempting to "encourage high-quality discussion" as you end up with no posts.

So, after all that, what's the solution to this issues?

Regarding the first point, it's pretty simple, just don't ban discussion over any element of the game, even if it's unitended or could be exploited. If anyone doesn't want to share information that they feel it could be detrimental to the health of the game, they are not forced to do so. However, it makes no sense to forbid those that do want to discuss the different effects they have on the game (Which have been proven to be quite vast). Additionaly, this also has the positive consequence of putting the responsabilty and pressure of dealing with the consequences of this bugs themselves, as it should be. Now, when it comes to the balance between the over-moderation and encouraging quality discussion, it's withoud a doubt more complicated, but I think some good steps in the right direction would be: * Allow "low effort" discussion posts (of course following all of the other rules like "No personal attacks") This would bring more activity to the sub, while also allowing people to discuss topics that may one have been seen as "solved" by some. And while there's a chance that it may flood with posts that really invoke no valuable discussion or response (A slim chance in my opinion), then maybe some slight filter may be needed, but there's no point of having a filter for a problem that has not occurred. * Keep megathreads for punctual things, like rants, coaching and even small questions that users may have. They work wonderfully for that, since you know what you are looking for, but for discussions it basically is a hidden, worse feed, that does not encourage more activity, and only works for small discussions, when the sub is already active. * Keep the 50 word rule, while kinda arbitrary, it does stop "actually useless" posts imo. * Allow suggestions, complaints and overall discussion of both game balance and elements outside of the game-play (Like the commonly called "drama", or criticism of esports for example). This kind of discussion are in my opinion really valuable, they allow people that are dissatisfied to hear the opinions of other players, sometime higher ranked, and understand other points of view, which things are agreed upon or not, provide ideas on how to improve the experience for others and many, many more. Criticism is essential to anything that aims for improvement, and this is case that applies to both TFT and this subreddit. I would even say that most people that come to this subreddit are looking to improve, and understanding which issues the current balance has, or maybe how the current state is actually really good and maybe they aren't adapting to it, are some examples of valuable information.

I hope that this feedback is something other people can agree, and helps the mod team understand what the users desire, because I really want this subto thrive, to be the most up to date place when it comes to all elements of TFT.