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@Riot MSI, Worlds is so dull with such a limited set of champs used

Sylverblitz·5/8/2016, 1:04:53 AM·2 votes·656 views

I'm watching some of the MSI games and it's so dull seeing the same picks game after game.

Ekko / Poppy / Maokai top, Nidalee / Graves / Kindred jungle, Azir mid, Lucian / Ez / Kalista ADC, Alistar / Braum / Bard support.

Those are the most common I'm seeing and it is just so dull. The games may have exciting moments but it is just so boring seeing the same champions every single game. Riot, you have to do something to either force players to pick more champions or limit the amount of times a team can play champions in a tournament.

Everyone knows that on the tournament patch Ekko is beyond a broken tank, that Poppy is a solid tank, the jungle belonging to a few fast clearly champs and mid a mix of Azir and a few mages with LeBlanc popping up. ADCs are either the permanent lane bully Lucian, the slow and ult spamming Ez, Kalista or a few times Sivir. Support is just as limited with nearly all picks limited to those three.

What if teams were only able to play a specific champion twice in a tournament? Or if for LCS etc all champions had a limit on the amount of times they could be played by each team? It would make picks and bans even more important for teams knowing that this might be the last time they can abuse Lucian's lane bully potential this game. Imagine a time where champs like Nocturne, Shaco, or Heimer had to be picked to save the current OP pick for a big game. I just want to see more than the same handful of champions constantly in play.

3 Comments

ValyrianBlade5/8/2016, 1:21:55 AM1 votes

I disagree for a few reasons.

The biggest and most important: I'm not sure about MSI format, but for Worlds and various championships, knock-out series are best of 5s. It'd be ridiculous to say that each team can only play something say 5 times all tournament. Then one team has to play a 5 match quarterfinal and a 5 match semifinal while another gets two 3-0 sweeps. Is it a reward for playing well? Not really in my opinion - since it could equally be lucky that you were matched against the weaker team. Same goes for group stages, get put in the group of death and you use up all of your strong picks in groups basically guaranteeing losses in quarters or semis. Get put in an easy group and you can save your strong picks for the knockout rounds.

Aside from that: It actually could detract from balance. You need to solve the root of the problem, not a symptom. The symptom is that we're seeing the same picks over and over, the root cause is that the game is in a horrendous state of balance right now (and even worse on the MSI patch). The champions are picked for one of a few reasons: they're OP, they're necessary to deal with what's OP, or they're consistent and safe and work well with the first two groups.

If you start limiting the number of picks, what happens when a team runs out of it's ability to pick that champion that can deal with the OP one. What happens when everyone agrees team X is the team to beat and runs the OP pick in to them, so they run the counterpick game after game and suddenly can't run it anymore when their opponents still have the OP pick left available? It just doesn't seem fair.

MSI is simply proving how badly balanced league is right now. I'd add a few champions to the list (ryze mid, Twitch ADC, I think I've seen Elise jungle and Morgana support, and CLG has run Aurelion Sol mid a couple times at least) but the severely limited champion options across EVERY TEAM is horrendous. You can't limit the champion pool that much. Like seriously, some of these players are probably insanely good on champions they've never gotten the chance to play because the OP champions are simply too strong that playing their personal power picks would put them at a severe disadvantage. I just hope Riot realizes this and the "boringness" of MSI is enough to get them to put things back in to whack. Reallocate resources towards balance, get stuff in check, stop releasing so much new content (I know they're different teams, my point is that it's the new content that's causing most balance issues), and once we've got League back to a healthy spot we can start trying to add all of this "cool stuff."