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Rant about Riot's balancing this season

KarmaWhore·9/14/2015, 10:50:40 PM·5 votes·470 views

So before you call me out like "noob git good," I just want to point out that overall I've had a really positive time with League. It's just that this season has been so aggravating for me that I don't exactly know where to talk about it except for here. Apologies in advance for the wall of text.

The biggest appeal of League of Legends was that it isn't DOTA. People who got into DOTA instantly understood how difficult that game was to learn. League was more community friendly and far more accommodating to the average player. For that reason, I instantly fell in love with the game. This season, however, has been completely and utterly terrible for the normal player, and there's a few reasons.

  1. Buff/Nerfs
  2. Inter-lane Balancing
  3. Skilled Champ nerfs

  1. Riot has never been the best at buffing and nerfing. When they buff a champion, they always seem to make that champ too strong. When they nerf, well sometimes there's Olaf. But there shouldn't really be excuses for that. After all, Riot has a PBE to test champions on. And even if they didn't, it wouldn't kill them to release new champions/reworks slightly weaker then tone them upwards as necessary. If Cinderhulk, Sated Devourer, or the whole Juggernaut patch was released slightly weaker than they were, their effects on the game wouldn't be so outright devastating. Instead, they would be slowly eased into the meta as people figure out their strengths, rather than getting people all on the bandwagon of "OP instaban" then toning the champions down so they actually get ranked play. If Riot learned to release content at a little weaker than their current level then tone upwards rather than their current status of release OP then hotfix, we wouldn't get weeks on end where blind pick normals is saturated with broken Skarners.

  2. Riot has been really bad about understanding inter-lane balancing. While they say "champion diversity" like a broken record, Riot seems to fail to understand that when they buff a particular role as a whole, it shuts out every other role. Cinderhulk created a tank meta, where while it added to the diversity of champions, shut out the usefulness of carry roles. Carries would get squashed by supertanks who actually did damage and never took any in return. The Juggernaut meta has created a similar effect. What this means is that in the act of trying to open up and strengthen a new role (which I wouldn't say is unwarranted), Riot doesn't consider the effects of the average player in other roles. We can't all kite for days on Vayne, so it's hard to say that a buff is fair simply because characters in that role are balanced. Riot's forgetting that while pro teams can create that front line for their ADC, it's pretty hard for a randomly put together solo queue team to have that level of coordination. From what I've seen, Riot has rarely taken this into account in their Season 5 meta shifts. I'm not 100% sure how Riot can address this issue, but I think a start would be to do things similar to what i suggested above. Imagine if Skarner came in this patch without the speed to charge past your team and annihilate your team's ADC or if Mord came in without the armor to tank for days despite doing truckloads of damage. Riot needs to look at the PBE more and preempt issues rather than just trying to come in and fix them later.

  3. The third thing here is more of a personal preference and a lot of people could disagree with me on this. I personally feel like when you play a difficult champion, you should expect to be rewarded as such, with extra mobility, safety or damage. In other words, you play Vayne well, you do truckloads of damage, you play Yasuo well, you annihilate the enemy team as they try to catch you, etc. The problem is, Riot's completely neglected the average player in favor of making the pro game balanced. The thing is, like I said earlier, I like League because it's not DOTA. I used to feel like Riot cared how much fun the average player was having playing the game. That's why League support roles, for instance, were made more fun in response to everyone hating it in season 1 to season 2. With season 5 meta shifts especially, it seems like Riot no longer cares about its player base, opting to try and create diversity for pros. As such, champions with extremely high skillcaps that only the pros can really reach are nerfed time and time again, champions that the average player will never be able to master. Meanwhile, brainless champions like Garen and Skarner are buffed ridiculously to try to give "diversity." Problem is, when the rewards are lower for these tougher champs, the average player is discouraged from learning them. Who wants to spend time learning Kalista when Caitlyn outputs the same amount of damage? Why bother learning Azir if he's just going to get nerfed? I really like playing difficult champions, but I feel like the rewards for doing so are small, if nonexistent. Just because Riot knows the pros can do well with them, they think everyone should be able to do well with them, and that's a pretty big issue to me.

Anyways, I kind of want to hear what everyone else thinks about this, so please post comments, whether or not you agree.

4 Comments

UberAffe9/14/2015, 11:12:22 PM1 votes

Thats the problem with having such a broad range in champion difficulty and player ability along with a pro scene. The Pro scene is where a large portion of riots profits come from so they HAVE to make sure that stays interesting so they can keep the game going. At the same time, in my opinion, riot is a company that appreciates it's casual users and wants them to have fun also, which means they have to find a balance somewhere in between. And I can't blame them for erring on the side of the Pro's as that gives them better stability as a company so that they even have the chance to continue.

Woook3r9/14/2015, 11:25:03 PM1 votes

THe pro scene might make some money but at the end of the day that money stems from the size of the player base. WHere are the streamers without the plebs?

Guy Fox Teemo9/14/2015, 11:32:46 PM1 votes

I don't think you know how to play any of those champions if you think there rewards are smaller then that of of simple champions like caitlyn. Azir is EXTREMLLY powerful when played well, probably the best champion in the game Next to Zed, and Yasuo when played to perfection, there are very few champions like them compared to the amount of simple there are in league and I think it's perfectly fine that low elo players don't play them are discouraged to, because there are different levels of difficulty for each champion and there all not meant for everybody.

(I'm not gonna respond the rest of the post since it's just a rant that personally to me is rather in accurate, and holds no merit.)

Silents4299/15/2015, 3:36:20 AM1 votes
  1. Riot has never been the best at buffing and nerfing. When they buff a champion, they always seem to make that champ too strong. When they nerf, well sometimes there's Olaf. But there shouldn't really be excuses for that. After all, Riot has a PBE to test champions on. And even if they didn't, it wouldn't kill them to release new champions/reworks slightly weaker then tone them upwards as necessary. If Cinderhulk, Sated Devourer, or the whole Juggernaut patch was released slightly weaker than they were, their effects on the game wouldn't be so outright devastating. Instead, they would be slowly eased into the meta as people figure out their strengths, rather than getting people all on the bandwagon of "OP instaban" then toning the champions down so they actually get ranked play. If Riot learned to release content at a little weaker than their current level then tone upwards rather than their current status of release OP then hotfix, we wouldn't get weeks on end where blind pick normals is saturated with broken Skarners.

Not how balance works, their is no real sweet spot for where to put everyones power, for all you know the Juggernauts might have been even stronger before getting pushed out. But the PBE is a terrible spot to test out any changes, which is why it's rarely used for that. If they had released them weaker, everyone would have just complained again anyway.

You want excuses for why they have to do a tedious buff and nerf system, then you need to learn how fragile buffing or nerfing is, and how massive of an impact it can have.

  1. Riot has been really bad about understanding inter-lane balancing. While they say "champion diversity" like a broken record, Riot seems to fail to understand that when they buff a particular role as a whole, it shuts out every other role. Cinderhulk created a tank meta, where while it added to the diversity of champions, shut out the usefulness of carry roles. Carries would get squashed by supertanks who actually did damage and never took any in return. The Juggernaut meta has created a similar effect. What this means is that in the act of trying to open up and strengthen a new role (which I wouldn't say is unwarranted), Riot doesn't consider the effects of the average player in other roles. We can't all kite for days on Vayne, so it's hard to say that a buff is fair simply because characters in that role are balanced. Riot's forgetting that while pro teams can create that front line for their ADC, it's pretty hard for a randomly put together solo queue team to have that level of coordination. From what I've seen, Riot has rarely taken this into account in their Season 5 meta shifts. I'm not 100% sure how Riot can address this issue, but I think a start would be to do things similar to what i suggested above. Imagine if Skarner came in this patch without the speed to charge past your team and annihilate your team's ADC or if Mord came in without the armor to tank for days despite doing truckloads of damage. Riot needs to look at the PBE more and preempt issues rather than just trying to come in and fix them later.

You are very fixated on PBE and I don't quite know why, do you know how much data can be collected from live versus a few people on PBE ? PBE is to push out changes and to fix critical bugs before they go to live, that's really all it's good for.

And champion diversity isn't every champion, role, and item in League is picked 50% of the time, it's having as much viable as they possibly can, and in that regard they have technically succeeded. We don't have champions that simply don't work anymore, and the tank meta love was just people blinding themselves, it wasn't any different then any other meta. (Coming from a tank main)

  1. The third thing here is more of a personal preference and a lot of people could disagree with me on this. I personally feel like when you play a difficult champion, you should expect to be rewarded as such, with extra mobility, safety or damage. In other words, you play Vayne well, you do truckloads of damage, you play Yasuo well, you annihilate the enemy team as they try to catch you, etc. The problem is, Riot's completely neglected the average player in favor of making the pro game balanced. The thing is, like I said earlier, I like League because it's not DOTA. I used to feel like Riot cared how much fun the average player was having playing the game. That's why League support roles, for instance, were made more fun in response to everyone hating it in season 1 to season 2. With season 5 meta shifts especially, it seems like Riot no longer cares about its player base, opting to try and create diversity for pros. As such, champions with extremely high skillcaps that only the pros can really reach are nerfed time and time again, champions that the average player will never be able to master. Meanwhile, brainless champions like Garen and Skarner are buffed ridiculously to try to give "diversity." Problem is, when the rewards are lower for these tougher champs, the average player is discouraged from learning them. Who wants to spend time learning Kalista when Caitlyn outputs the same amount of damage? Why bother learning Azir if he's just going to get nerfed? I really like playing difficult champions, but I feel like the rewards for doing so are small, if nonexistent. Just because Riot knows the pros can do well with them, they think everyone should be able to do well with them, and that's a pretty big issue to me.

It is literally impossible to balance this game around all skill levels, So they choose Platinum+ because those on average are players who put best use to champions. The rest of this was just going in circles, and throwing needless insults towards Skarner and Garen for being "brainless"

Season 5 wasn't the pinnacle of this game, but It was the ruins that will set up season 6 to be something really great, a lot happened this season that required Riot to get down and dirty, and really shake things up with the game, and by the time Pre Season 6 is done, I know everyone will be enjoying themselves much more.