anyone else hate new league mechanic?

I think for starters that's to do with the contrast between how matter-of-fact the game plays the whole thing to begin with, compared to how unintuitive and unfair the setup actually feels (early on at least; I'm only in Act 3 at this point). Like, there's no 'storyline' about being the newbie and expected to fight your way up, no tutorial battle showing you the ropes, it's all just 'here is the mechanic, think carefully about your choices to achieve victory', which makes it feel like it's all very even and winnable, like most league mechanics tend to be even early on. And then the match starts and nope.

You lock yourself into a match selection without being able to see what you're up against. It's not at all clear whether the rewards are tied to match difficulty, or whether the game is offsetting what it deems weaker item rewards with more favour, or what. Maybe I have 3 pieces while my opponent has six, maybe I'm facing a whole team of flask-drainers, maybe their champion has some silly nuke in an element I don't have much resistance to, oh well, too bad.

The place-your-pieces thing makes it feel like it should be down to strategy - and I'm not suggesting it isn't as you get more choices - but it seems pointless when my starter pieces are too basic to be trusted to fill any role. I feel stuck in the role of flanker-chasing because if any totem gets left alone for five seconds it's gone, but then sometimes that flanker is wildly tanky and neither chasing them nor leaving them alone seem good options anymore. Scale the other teams way down at the start so we have a chance to learn the structures. Or if the game isn't supposed to be reasonably fair at low levels, just don't make it accessible at low levels. Even when I win it doesn't feel like I did anything particularly differently to when I lose, so it's not really rewarding.

I was baffled by the lack of long-term progression, buying up people for my team only to have them disappear at the end of the tournament. This seems like the perfect league mechanic for some long-term team-drafting - I thought it'd start by 'picking a side' for starter pieces or something, but nope. At some point around Act 2 I got a fourth person on my team, but the game didn't tell me why; they were just there. They're from a particular tribe; was there a way I could have chosen, through the opponents I selected or won against? Is it just level related? How would I know?

The zone itself feels like it could use some more life - and yes, yes, I understand the irony there, but a whole vibrant culture's afterlife reduced to ten people standing in a brown room forever feels almost disrespectful. And I don't understand why I'm even there in the first place. I found a coin, which are apparently all over Wraeclast. Okay. Why do these spirits care. Why do I care.