A Comprehensive Look: Issues with the Game

In this post, I am attempting to examine some of the most common issues I see people bringing up on the forums, and attempt to propose solutions.

In the end, these efforts may achieve nothing, but I thought I might as well put out a last hurrah while I still have some moderate interest in playing the game.

** | Game Flow |**

Games are too short and snowball too hard. With the snowbally-ness essentially invalidating the "farm up and scale" side of the champion roster, as they are unable to dictate the pace of the game early, and thus fall too far behind to come back without a monumental mistake from the opposing team.

• A symptom of damage creep. (Will discuss)
• Core items for damage classes have generally become more gold efficient, and, quite importantly, generally have smoother build paths. Examples include getting cheaper, and being considerably smoother than Deathfire Grasp (I compare these 2 because they're core for AP Assassins. is cheaper than the Brutalizer was, providing bullies with earlier power.

| Balance |

Champion balance is considered to be an absolute joke. Whilst before, there were a select few completely broken champs (Olaf before he got Olaf'd, Kassawin, Better Nerf Irelia...) it was generally few enough "completely OP" champs that they could be handled in ban phase with only 3 bans a team. Now, the perception is the champion roster is divided into 3 sections: champions with little to no viability (about half the roster), champions with viability if worked with considerable knowledge (about 5 champions), and completely broken OP champs (just under half the roster). With so many broken champs, people feel frustrated because they don't have enough bans to get rid of them.

• Also a symptom of damage creep. (Will discuss)
• Whether or not the game balance is actually better or not does not really matter: if the overall player base is unhappy with the balance of the game, then it is the responsibility of the balance team to address the balance issues at hand, most crucially by being clear on how they want to balance their game. If their goal is to balance around the LCS scene, then they should be extremely clear on this by listening intently to the feedback of the best players and by responding to less-good players with "git gud". Since Riot has not done this (at least, to my knowledge), I am forced to believe either that the Riot team does not want this direction, or has no plan as to how to achieve this goal.

Class favoritism is frustratingly evident. I have seen many threads talking about how the ADC role is Riot's "baby", and that their is clear favoritism with the AD classes, with AD Carry itemization appearing strictly superior to AP Carry itemization, and with AD Assassin itemization appearing strictly superior to their AP counterparts. This appears to be further exacerbated by the plethora of defensive AD options juxtaposed by the limited choices in defensive AP options. Even worse, many have pointed out that the tank items, outside of just a couple good items, are just terrible. This issue in particular is not old, with complaints from years ago still holding weight concerning how easy it is for carries, particularly AD ones, to bypass considerable amounts of defensive stats. Support items are so powerful that the identity of the supports themselves is waning, and bruisers...

• Also a symptom of damage creep. (Will discuss)

| Damage Creep |

Enough circling the drain: there's just too much damage in LoL. Most assassins are irrelevant because their ability to assassinate isn't as good as non-assassins such as carries. ADCs are killing people in very few autos, tanks cannot tank damage, but have monstrous base damages so they can solo kill lane opponents.

• On top of many items being more gold efficient and having smoother build paths, cooldown reduction has become an extremely easy stat to obtain. This would not affect the amount of damage in the game if abilities had no tendency towards offense over defense; however, in the game, their are for more aggressive abilities in play than defensive abilities, likely because "play-making" is generally associated with killing opponents instead of saving allies. Since their are more aggressive abilities, more CDR leads to a greater increase in damage than a greater increase in defense.
• Defense is more difficult to obtain, whilst damage is easier to obtain. The new runes bring considerable amounts of damage, and fewer defensive options.
• A greater amount of stats from the field are now available. Dragons provide stats, rift herald allows for greater sieges. Increased damage whilst unchanged (or nerfed) towers means towers are falling faster, gold is flowing quicker, and more damage is being purchased.
• The massive increase of damage is what relegates most of the roster: no longer is there a meaningful comparison of incomparable options. It's no longer a question of whether you'd have the Mundo sustain or the Malphite engage. In a game about getting the one shot before the opponent, everything now boils down to "will I one shot them first?". This, in turn, pushes the power of reliable options, and guts the power of situational options.

** | How to Fix? | **

With these issues (being just the tip of the iceberg), how can the game be steered back towards a healthier system?

• Normalization of itemization: Every class should have a select few "core items" that basically everyone in the class should buy. These items should be tailored to one specific class so they are obviously sub-optimal to build on another class. All core items should be equally gold efficient, and the perceived value of each stat should be the same: , , should all be equally valuable. As an example, an ADC should get just as much out of as an AP Carry would get out of , they were to be made core. They should be equally gold efficient, and be tailored so no other class would want to build them. Each class should have one core item. All remaining items should be options, and offensive and defensive options should have equal value. This kind of system allows Riot to define classes through core items, yet provide players with means of decision making and expression without breaking the game.

• Reduced availability of CDR: The amount of CDR in the game is way too high. Combined with outrageous resource pools, and the damage increase of CDR is massive.

• Focus on resource gating: Energy champions should have low cooldowns with moderate impact because they're limited by how many they can use at once. Mana champions should have moderate cooldowns with high impact because they need to weight long term consequence against short term gains. Resource-less champions should have high cooldowns with moderate impact because they need to weight short term consequence against long term gains. Moreover, these decisions need to be part of the game, instead of being a mere after thought. With the exception of a select few mana champions, the majority of mana champions have no mana issues. The vast availability of mana regen means champions who are gated by mana... aren't really gated by mana. Similar issues are present for resource-less champions.

• Buff turrets a fair bit: Even if the amount of damage in the game were to fall considerably, perhaps back to Season 2 or 3 levels of damage (watch old highlight videos to see examples of this), turrets would still be exceptionally weak because of additions and modifications to the game, including Rift Herald, Infernal and Mountain Drakes. Make the outer turrets scale inversely, so they're very strong early, and become weaker over time. This provides champions a safe haven closer to the farm. Well coordinated 4 vs. 1 dives should still succeed since you're committing almost everyone, but people should be safe early. Early game champions can still secure CS advantages, a few kills if the opposing laner overextends for something, but we should not be seeing level 4 1v1 tower dives in the top lane like we are now.

• Reduce the availability of CC, and make more of it point and click: Crowd control is a very important part of the game, as it lets you lock down key targets, or shut down that dangerous diver. However, the abundance of CC (particularly hard CC) introduced into the game via new champions has decreased the value of any given CC ability because there's just so much of it. Reduce the overall amount of CC available in the game, and you make it much more impactful. Example: doesn't care if he misses the slow on his pillar. If he does, he still can ult you. If he misses that, he can still hit you with bellows breath. If he misses that too, he can head-butt a wall. , on the other hand, needs to hit charm (assume we've made the damage less ridiculous across the board), or else her damage becomes unreliable and she will struggle to kill. Making crowd control point and click will also reduce the power gap between melee and ranged champions, as ranged champions will generally have an easier time avoiding skill shots because they need to travel farther.

• Reduce the effectiveness of defense-piercing, or make it more situational: This provides not only a means of allowing tanks to tank, and for defense items to provide noticeable defense, but also to provide a greater accentuation of theme. Maybe nerf lethality and flat magic penetration by half, but then give them current values of lethality or magic penetration against stunned targets, so that an assassin would have more damage against helpless targets.

• Adjust the way damage is calculated: Defensive stats provide % damage reduction. This means an ADC building almost any beneficial stat, whether it be AD, AS, Crit, or Flat Penetration, will get equal benefits against squishies and tanks. If defensive stats provided flat damage reduction (of course, numbers would need tweaking), then building AD would give greater benefits vs. tanks, and less vs. squishies, while building crit would have more benefit vs. squishies and less benefit vs. tanks. Of course, this is a very fundamental change in the way damage is handled, so I don't think this would ever happen. Just a shot in the dark from me.

These are just some measures that will address the issues currently present in LoL. As it is, LoL is losing its appeal to me because it is moving outside of the niche that its original systems were built for. LoL was originally built as a 30-35 minute game, where it was reasonably casual, yet strategic.

In its current direction, I honestly see little reason to favor LoL over even something like HotS, which was designed from the ground up to be a 20-25 minute game, a casual, sit and goof kind of game.