Balance Theories and Suggestions

Okay, most of here, or at least most of us who post, have beef with the balance team and while I see some constructive suggestions here and there for specific changes they're still only a small part of the whole. So... the point of this thread.

Most of us have some idea of how we'd want to balance this game -a balancing philosophy of our own. It'll likely be tempered with gaming experience beyond the scope of LoL. Share your design philosophy (without raging) and actually show the Riot balance team what you want. It's easy to figure what we don't like, it's harder to say what we want.

I'll start off I suppose, much of my balancing views are pulled from other competitive games that do a wide variety of things right. So long as two champs with different kits exist, it will be impossible to find balance. You can come close to simulating it, but you'll never achieve it because one will excel in certain areas while another won't. This comes down to some experience with trading card games (Magic in-particular.) The possibilities for building a deck in that game are massive, but if you find a them you like and hammer it in the workshop 'till you can't hammer no more you'll likely come out with viable deck. Even then, there will be some discrepancy. I'll come back to that.

Fighting games, I believe, have mitigated imbalance the best out of any gaming genre out there. There are certainly tiers for any fighting game, but skill plays and overwhelming role in any fight the tier is damn-near negligible -this is at least the case in Tekken. This can be said of any game that is actually perceived to be balanced. Skill outweighs the imbalances.

Then we come to LoL. Thhe format of the gamecounters many of the things it sets out o do. LoL is supposed to be a team strategy ame, however, because of meta (online videos and LCS feeding it) many players who try to experiement are put at a disadvantage. It loses much of its strategic diversity as the game will always be exploited for the most mileage. That is the nature of games and gamers. That's why multiplayer has become so popular. AI is easily exploited. Some ignorance is necessary for variety. The other problem working against this game's balance is the weight of skill vs. stats. Card games get around this issue by the deckbuilding process. You know going into MTG that there are over 17,000 cards to choose from and all the rules you must abide by. You pick a theme and push it to its limit, test it, make adjustments or change strategies repeatedly until it's time to play competitively. Then when your deck gets countered, it's because of weakness you overlooked or allowed to funnel strength into another area. It's still your loss and no one feels butthurt because the deckbuilding process is just as important as the match itself. It's your arsenal and toolbox. LoL is unable to mitigate that because of the way the items and champions are. The items only buff stats by varying degrees with little other reason to pick them up. That being the case, we have the standard mage build: Rabadon's, Zhonya's, Deathfire, Void. There's one way to max efficiency with each champ whereas a complex game like MTG has thousands of variable viable methods of doing a specific deck function.

This item/champion relationship is allowed to exist because of the core issue, stats > skill. There gets to be a point when skill won't save you a losing battle, and its difficult to even say the game has many levels of skill considering the room for player agency pales in comparison to other games like fighters and shooters in that we don't have many arenas to let pure skill outshine one another. Our ability to move a mouse and press keys at the right time may seem similar to a fighting game, and to be sure, it is, but with functions like point and click and the inability to allow skill to overcome any game obstacle when applied correctly, the game stonewalls itself into an arena of who can snowball first or who can strike objectives fastest. The game naturally leads to stat snowballing. Once you have a lead, you tend to keep that lead (assuming your team doesn't throw for whatever reason) because your stats are already higher than the enemy team's. This makes it easier to keep growing and get further ahead. That's the nature of the game. When it comes to the point that an adc clicks on you and you can't dodge, take cover behind anything, etc. it's longer about skill, it's about stats. Now the argument would be you can have multiple allies in bushes and whatnot, but this is only exploiting an imbalanced system rather than the system itself being balanced. 2 is better than one is most situations. The design philosophy should be, I'm a fighter and I'm against Ashe who can kit the crap out of me. Worse, I'll say I'm Shyvana. She's fed, I'm not. There must be some way for me to kill her. She doesn't play well. If this game is balanced, my superior skill should overcome her free stats. If that was the case, new strategies could be tested and this pigeonholing of roles to lanes would vanish. The meta wouldn't have the ironlock it has because we don't trust each other.

Which brings me to meta. the meta exists because it's a safe expectation we have of the community to follow it. We don't trust each other to go against the meta because we all know the matchups outside the meta are incredibly one-sided. Take a fighter botlane and you will likely be crushed by most of the adc/sup comps out there. This goes back to the stat-based factor of the game.

None of this is to say that skill doesn't matter, only that skill doesn't have the room to overcome stats which can get out of hand with one mistake. Often times, you could liken laning to walking on a circus wire. The first slip up can cost you a game if you're at a natural disadvantage -like say, Annie vs. Zed. As soon as he gets a kill on you, it'll be real hard to comeback and skill won't save you. You have to rely on ganks which may or may not be effective depending on so many other factors.

So the core of what I consider good design philosophy for any game would be, characters should definitely have strengths, weaknesses, and a unique style, but skill should more than make up for any weaknesses any character has. Cheap shots you can't avoid shouldn't exist, but the game also shouldn't lend itself to freely allowing anyone to be able to that by exploitation. It must be skill-based (looking at games like Ikaruga and various Capcom games.)

So, what do you think is good design philosophy? I doubt many of you would agree with me. We're here to share with Riot. Tell them what you think.