An appeal to emotion is a fallcy and should not be considered valid for buffing/nerfing champions

"Appeal to emotion or argumentum ad passiones is a logical fallacy characterized by the manipulation of the recipient's emotions in order to win an argument, especially in the absence of factual evidence"

• From wikipedia

I'm doing this because I used to see a lot of posts on how cancerous Yasuo or Zed is, and how they need nerfs because they felt bad to play against. Even if they were in the dumpster, people would keep complaining about them. Just becuase something feels bad to play as/against doesn't mean it's unbalanced. There is obviously a point where the extent of unfairness in gameplay is so great that the champion will need some reworks of their abilities, but those cases are usually very rare and seldom seen.

Of course, there aren't many posts like that nowadays, but some new posts have been popping up about how Zoe needs some of her nerfs reverted. One post in particular, wrote up this massive text that contained a story about how Zoe made someone's life much better and brighter, sort of like when a person is in deep depression and then they find something that excites them.

The problem with this is that posts like these don't actually contain factual evidence for why champions should be buffed/nerfed. Instead, they appeal to the emotions of the reader in order to leverage support. Doing this can be very dangerous and counterproductive, because if the balance team really did use emotion to balance the game certain champiosn the balance team are biased towards would be in a very good spot whereas other ones would be in very bad spots.

It was kind of troubling when I saw posts like that getting upvotes and making it to the front page. Yes, it contains a sad story about how Zoe nerfs completely destroyed her, but no factual evidence whatsoever. It shows how easily people can be waylaid by emotion rather than reason.

I'm not saying Zoe doesn't need some of her nerfs reverted, it's just that arguing without factual evidence and appealing to the emotions of the reader is invalid. Besides, Meddler even mentioned how he would rather overnerf Zoe at this point and then buff her back up to a certain point.

TL;DR Using emotions to argue is fallicious and those arguments shouldn't be considered when making balancing decisions. If people want to make arugments for buffs/nerfs to a champion, then use justifications as to why it should be buffed/nerfed.