Adressing Riot's absence from the gameplay board

King Braum·6/10/2018, 4:49:52 PM·10 votes·6,628 views

This is an open letter to anyone in Riot,

Hello, I'm King Braum, I've played this game for over 4 years, longer even if you count the time I played the game on and off around season 1, and ever since I've started playing this game, I've loved it. To save my allies last moment from teamfights, fighting along side them as I desperatly try to keep everyone alive, slowly pressing forward to the enemy nexus, collecting champions to add to my collection and staying up late at night to learn everything I could possibly about them from their abilities, to their cooldowns to even their lore. I found players, a community, friends to share my passion with.

This is quite possibly the greatest community I've had the pleasure to be a part of and this is a game I will always look back fondly off and I want to keep it like that but there's a problem, the game feels like it is in shambles, jungle is ruined, ADCs cry out as the botlane slowly becomes more and more obsolite to the game, more and more damage is added as towers are made paper thin, the game feels rushed with tanks and glasscannon seemingly standing on a hill of the skeletal remains of champions that cant survive in this new meta. the runes have taken away the identity of players, blue essence the spoils of war as the game feels unrewarded. and the community cries out. it begs for answer in the one place where we hope for answers, but in return we find nothing.

EDIT: most of this was writen as a massive rant after noticing the mass amount of players in the gameplay section being bascially ignored. yes, Meddler is doing well with his posts, answering various questions of the playerbase but I feel like more Riot members should be active in the actual gameplay section or otherwise, more Rioters should hang around Meddlers post answering the various questions people have. Either way this is somewhat of a minor complaint written mainly out of frustation so dont pay all too much attention to it

21 Comments

RiotBazerka7/7/2018, 12:02:59 AM8 votes

raises hand I'm here! I'm definitely not an expert in development or gameplay balance, but I can at least point you towards the resources we've put out on the topic! There are plenty of posts on the boards made by Riot Meddler and Riot Fearless about jungle and gameplay balance as well as ample videos and articles about the subject on the /Dev blogs.

That being said, I totally hear you there aren't enough posts & resources to cover 100% of why the meta is the way it is currently. Succinctly put we can't give 100% insight since that would be crossing the line into players privacy and data trends that give us (I would imagine) a competitive edge with our game. Its kinda like why KFC keeps their recipe under lock & key, or why companies wont release the source code to their software.

On top of that we have to consider that if we give 100% visibility into our decision making process would be a massive time investment. If you think about it, there are quite literally tens of thousands of hours that go into each balance patch. Compressing all of those hours into a digestible format for the community once (not even thinking on a 2 week basis) is a herculean task. To be clear I'm not saying "because its too hard we shouldn't do it at all" nor do I think thats whats been done in the past. However, we have to pick and choose our battles. Any time we spend on comms and optics is time not being spent on making the game better, but a lack of optics and comms makes the developers seem aloof and in accessible (like waiting for a package without a tracking #). Ideally we balance both, and I think thats what we are trying to find right now. Hope that helps :S

ModKnightsKemplar7/7/2018, 1:43:17 AM4 votes

Yeah, watch the dev corner posts by Meddler and you'll get a pretty good idea of where the balance team's heads are. They aren't as silent as people claim, nor is the game headed in as terrible a direction as people claim.

As Ghostcrawler wrote once on his blog:

Another way this is visualized as you being on one mountain peak, and wanting to be at an even higher peak, but having to go down the mountain into a scary valley of chaos before you can climb up to that other peak.

He was talking about other things at the time, but I believe this analogy applies to balance, as well. Sometimes you have to break systems a little bit to build better ones; we're in a period like that right now with Marksmen, and the game feels weird. That doesn't mean it will stay weird.

aimlesswarrior6/10/2018, 5:40:14 PM3 votes

I would lloooooove to see a riot video / community qa / or 4 hour podcast responding to the current state of the game. seems like 90% of youtube videos and most of the top boards posts are how horrible the current game play is.

EROTIC RAID BOSS7/7/2018, 3:59:16 PM1 votes

Why wouldn't you just read meddler's posts and talk to him in the dev forum?