Just fought Akali top for the first time this season, made me a conspirator

Won, but was laughing pretty much the entire time at how busted she is. I simply could not pin point anything that could have been described as a weakness. I was playing as a tank, and she outclassed my in absolutely every regard except for CC, which I will get to. This champ just straight up has everything. No sacrifice to work around, no compromise to adapt to, she just has it all. She has excellent poke that doubles as an immensely strong wave clear, but at the same time has absolutely astounding lane sustain. She doesn't even have to work for it, just land a near instant AOE skillshot every couple of seconds rank 1. Why does the non magical assassin heal by throwing metal kunai? Ask Riot I guess.

You would think this means you can all in her with some tanky beefiness to punish her energy expenditure she uses to poke. Haha, nope. With just one button she can make half the champ cast irrelevant while crippling the other. Oh, and it gives her energy, so it is essentially impossible to use this ability poorly. Easy, reliable CC that has been the halmark counter for assassins is virtually useless against her should she decide to press a single button. Seriously, there has never been an Akali shroud cast that gives you the thought of "she used that sub optimally, I can directly punish her for this!" Instead, no matter what situation she finds herself in, no matter how badly she could have been playing up until that point, it is suddenly up to you to put in the extra work to outplay her. It's basically just a "for free" button. So all she has to do to be a relevant threat all game is poke you in lane, out sustain you, and then shroud if literally anything goes wrong. Then of course there's the ult, which gets both damage and utility just because it can. In almost any given situation Akali finds herself in, her ult will help. Fleeing, dueling, diving, whatever. It's almost impossible for it to be useless. There is always more pressure on you to outplay Akali than there is for her to outplay you, period. This isn't even covering the entirety of her kit! This is the polar opposite of what as assassin should be, and the fact that Riot had to literally tear parts of her kit out because they where powercrept that hard is testament to that. An assassin should have to work harder against her class counter, no the other way around. Good to know she is STILL an absolute balance nightmare high elo, good on you Riot.

Anyway it got me thinking, why is any of this allowed? Is it because she's still not considered OP top or mid when you have champions like Riven running around? That couldn't be, since Riven is essentially in her own tier. Akali wouldn't need to catch up to champs like that, champs like that need to be brought down. Then I realized it, that actually IS the reason it's allowed. Akali is such a lost cause of balance, and Riot is so clueless on how to balance her, that historically brutally oppressive champs like Darius and Riven are intentionally kept as strong as possible so that players don't realize just how fundamentally broken champs like Akali are. The classic distraction, of course!

Jokes aside, after that rant I remembered a comment CertainlyT made on his champion design. That he sees the most rewarding type of gameplay as ones that are challenges that are overcome, thus champions he designed are supposed to feel inherently challenging and you have to work hard to overcome them. And that's juts... fuck you dude. This isn't Dark Souls, you don't seem to understand that there is a difference between challenge and difficulty found in a single player game and a competitive multiplayer one. There's a human element involved that's not present in single player games. In fact it's impossible for it to perfectly reflect a human matchup there, so devs need to cheat a bit. They can't program in mind games and optimal pathing, they can't mirror the creativity and unpredictive nature of human players. All they can do is work with mechanics to instill a sense of challenge. All of these mechanics are technically in some way unfair. More health, more damage, unique, broken abilities that are only programmed to come out every so often. They still need to limit themselves, as an enemy who will for example constantly frame perfect parry you will be challenging, but not any fun. Still, the most rewarding fights once conquered in all the history of gaming would be outright impossible to beat if that conflict was directly controlled by a human. So WHY are you trying to instill that sort of challenge in a competitive game? The players don't want a challenge more than they want to win, if they did then they wouldn't be playing League. Yasuo's shield isn't intuitive and challenging, it's annoying and unnecessary. Akali's shroud isn't provoking and engaging, it's just hilariously overpowered. A fact that is now undeniably true because once again a mechanic had to be outright removed from the shroud in order for it to ever even hope of being balanced. You're not a trailblazer for overtuning a champion, anyone can do that. You are just unique in that you think you are innovative for doing so.

But that doesn't change the way the world works. People do BL1 runs in Bloodborne because they want to be challenged, people DON'T pick Kirby into Fox at Melee tournaments because they want to win. It's true there's room for both in any given format, I do like a good challenge even here. But it needs to be a balanced measure, and balance is something you very clearly don't understand.