Class Updates were a mistake (Sort of)

Simply put, the class updates that started with the Juggernauts and stretching to this season with the Tank update being the last one, the class updates have probably been some of the most harmful changes to occur to league in recent memory. This isn't due to the changes themselves being bad, while some were pretty bad, or those changes creating toxic patterns in champions or something stupid.

No, this post isn't going to point fingers as to how the tank update made Maokai, Sej, and Zac more toxic and uninteresting. No, this post isn't going to talk about any of that.

What I really want to hit on is the dangers of doing massive pools of change within a short span of time. Basically what the class updates did when they would select a handful of champions from a class and do a large scope of changes, typically touch other champions in a smaller way and then also touch on their items all around the same time. You can see this at work with the Assassin class update which updated LeBlanc, Talon, Katarina, and Rengar all on a larger scale scope, changing several abilities and mostly how they all functioned, with several changes being made to champions like Akali, Zed, Kha'zix, Fizz, etc to update them and make them fit to their roles and be healthier all in one go. Along with those champion changes, we also worked on items to benefit those champions along with vision and stat changes!

This dear readers was the biggest mistake a class update could do and what almost every single one of them did.

Class updates at the core was basically, let's look at one thing and change it, which then brought other things that needed change, adding other things that needed to be change, which also got other thi-

I think you get the point.

When you start changing a lot of things all at once, and you set a for sure date for all those things like the class updates, you get a lot of issues that go completely unnoticed. You get a lot of new things that may seem fine on paper and your testing but once they hit live, scar the game and everything around it for months, no years, without a proper fix. The problem with the class updates wasn't the changes themselves, although some would happily argue that, the problem was they tried to do too many things, changing some things for the sake of change and ultimately created more issues than they solved.

Rengar has been left in a terrible state for months and arguably his problems weren't fixed. How can you blame them when they changed 4 champions massively along with items, stats, several other champions AND vision. Kog'maw was so toxic that he needed to be reverted. Yes, they had to revert him because of his changes. Still, how can I blame them? They were working on like 6 marksmen all at once along with a ton of other things.

Are you seeing my point?

Too much change leads to a dangerous end result. The class updates aimed too high and would consistently miss the mark almost every single time. Creating more toxic interactions, more annoying champions, more visible issues that have rooted themselves into the game and really cannot be fixed any more. That is why the smaller scope work of just working on 1-2 champions at a time, sitting down and not forcing out a due date for them has resulted in champions being in a lot better of a spot. Of course this hasn't always worked, god no it still fails, but these smaller works allow for more focus, and time to work out each flaw and try to actually fix them. Class updates were like a production line. They just had to keep everything moving at one pace, regardless if it had defects or problems.

Basically, class updates offer a hard lesson in committing to more work than you can chew and how trying to do too much, leads to a poorer quality across the board.