The meta shouldn't be "abuse whatever just came out"

They use the test server to make sure the new champion is OP enough to make them good $$$.

[sg-lulu]

If I'm correct (I'm probably wrong) the main PBE server is located in North America and as Hayaishi said It simply doesn't generate enough data to balance around it.

You have to remember that there is one server and there are multiple regions playing the game. People who live in Oceana will get around constant 200 ping while playing on it and those who live in Russia, Korea or other may have similar issues. People also have to be legible to play on PBE as well an Honor 2 account and other. The community is very split when comes to this and as Haya said, this affects the data.

It simply doesn't generate enough data to balance around it.

I mean overall pre season has been pretty good especially compared to previous pre season balance issues.

The primary purpose of the PBE is to bug test and make sure that nothing game breaking slips into the live server, things display properly, everything works as intended, etc.

Another issue with the data is that it isn't quality. Because MMR is all over the place, ping is all over the place, everyone is just trying to spam the new changes, and the playerbase is so much smaller, data will always be low quality at best and utterly useless at worst. It is tough to make choices on how to balance things based off of low quality data.

I also assume riot would rather release something in an OP state and nerf it down than release something in a useless state and buff it back up. It is hard to get people to try out a new champion when they're borderline useless on release and only good after ~2 or so patches.

BUT, there are definitely more than a few times when riot should have seen something being game-warpingly OP a mile away, but seemingly chose to ignore it. I am not saying that riot should never balance off of the PBE, I am simply explaining why many times they don't.