Latest "Quick Gameplay Thoughts" about Irelia, Aatrox, Akali make me question the design team

GelsominoKiller·1/26/2019, 11:53:47 PM·4 votes·891 views
Quick Gameplay Thoughts: January 25

I read the recent intentions with the balance team and I am both excited and baffled.

Excited because FINALLY the balance team acknowledged there is a "frustration, counterplay and fairness" problem with the up mentioned champions that goes beyond strong, weak, and winrate.

Excited also because they seem aware of the fact that number nerfs won't do the trick in this case, and that they need to start trimming mechanics from overloaded kits, and add some weaknesses and counterplay.

Baffled because in all honesty we look at the list (we can throw Galio, Camille and Zoe in there too) and notice all those champions are very recent releases that should have been conceived with the most modern design principles.

I read the prospected changes and I understand that there is work, debate, exploration and time put into trying to make those champions fair.

And my question is... Is it worth it? Was it really unavoidable to make those mistakes? If we look at the chapion pool, there are a whole lot of champions that could really benefit from changes of this scope. Wouldn't those usually older champions be much more deserving of the balance team care and attention?

Instead we are permanently stuck in an endless chase for balance, massively nerfing and buffing the most recent "flashy outplay machines", achieving nothing.

Of course, balance team is so heartbreakingly slow to act, that we must endure months of this shit before anything meaningful (-5ms omegalul) happens. In the best case, those new monsters only warp and disrupt proplay leaving soloq rather untouched.

I only wish that people on charge of designing new champions would put much more effort into "how does it feel to play against my own creation?", because currently their shortcomings are really crippling the LoL experience.

Seriously, akali had a 60% banrate with a 42% winrate. How frustrating can a champion be in order to literally make its opponents give up a statistically free win to avoid playing against it?

4 Comments

Dope Solo1/27/2019, 4:28:33 AM3 votes

Yasuo Still on welfare.

haaaaaaalp1/27/2019, 4:21:58 AM2 votes

As much as I like to bash on the design team, I’m not sure it was all that avoidable. There was such a strong backlash against “stat check” champions from everyone that I think riot was forced into trying all of the crazy overloaded designs. In retrospect, we realize the game was better back when all or the majority of champions fell into what is now referred to as “stat check” champions and those should be the design targets of new champions and reworks.

However, even you or I or any number of individuals can go back and say “see I told you right here x years ago this would happen” there were too many players who demanded the hard overloaded kits could do firsthand before accepting they are a mistake.

Also, to riot’s both Neeko and sylas have been better implementations of champions with an interesting concept that isn’t completely unbalancable (although I would argue sylas still has a smidge too much mobility).