Why the Mordekaiser Rework Was Destined to Fail (A Deeper Look into Riot)

Well the Kog'Maw revert discussion has opened Pandora's Box, and already there are discussions on which champions should be reverted and why, and we could go on for days until the cows go home.

I'm not here to talk about Mordekaiser's potential for a revert, although the subject of potentially reverting him is what inspired me to make this post.

In all honesty, we Mordekaiser mains have become sort of an in-joke I feel within the league community, and I'm frustrated as all hell because I'm almost positive we won't see any meaningful changes for Mordekaiser because Riot seems to want to focus on entire VGU updates rather than just addressing his gameplay state, and because he was reworked relatively recently we're on the backburner for another rework.

I don't want to act entitled and say Riot should prioritize Mordekaiser's rework for something asinine like some perceived debt (or to quell the Mordekaiser forum hurricanes that make landfall every now and then), and there are other champions who honestly need a rework just as bad as the Huekaiser does.

So we're stuck in our current state, aware that we have to wait for potentially years before we get our due, and all because of Riot attempting to break a meta that they themselves eventually accepted as standard.

I have no intention to start a 'Dota is better at X than LoL' story, but Dota has much more variety in how lanes can be played other than the league standard 1-1-2 lane with a jungler, and while there are several reasons for such, ultimately it's because the Dota designers have created an environment where there isn't one standard that everything is balanced around.

That is why Mordekaiser's attempt to be pushed into an alternative for the bot lane ultimately failed: in a different world or a different game a champion like Morde could have easily functioned as a different choice for a bot laner, but Riot failed to go further and try to lessen the restrictive nature of the meta.

One of the biggest signs of this problem is Riot's handling of new builds and ways for champions to be played, when things like Black Cleaver and Youmuu's Ghostblade rose to prominence with ADC's like Lucian and Miss Fortune, Riot eventually stifled the items and/or champions to discourage the item builds use on these champions by players. If they wanted to promote more diversity, what they could have done was to simply buff the other options, and if needed buff means to the counters but allow said items to retain their effectiveness.

Or they could have created new answers, maybe new items or something else entirely that could respond to unexpected builds that are quite efficient.

People cite things like Tank Ekko/Fizz/Yasuo being problems and being inherently toxic, and Riot is forced to nerf these champions in any way to discourage these types of build paths on said champions, and in my opinion this is a failure of Riot and not the playerbase: instead of creating an answer to a problem, they just hack at the problem until there is no problem to answer, figuring that since it technically gets the job done that they shouldn't have to invest in the first option.

Riot should be finding ways for players to be able to answer these problems, there should be ways for people to play champions in the ways they want and their opponents to have answers to these questions, whether it be new masteries, items, or some brand-new brainchild system.

With the way the meta is standardized, there will always be the problem of champion balance being mostly about what champions are strongest numbers-wise if they're being asked to answer the same question, and the questions are almost always the same: what ADC is strongest currently since we will need an ADC in bot lane, what mage or assassin is strongest since one of the two will be going mid lane.

For Mordekaiser to have become the first of many new champions designed to break a meta standard, he would have needed to be followed with something more substantial than mere insane numbers, he would have needed Riot to change the game, and they had the chance before.

With the introduction of marksman junglers like Quinn, Kindred and Graves, the option to sever the nigh permanent binding of marksmen to the bot lane was possible, and if other marksmen had been updated to also be equally viable in other lanes besides bot lane - and Riot had done whatever they could to encourage this - then perhaps Mordekaiser's rework could have succeeded. Then we could see other things, perhaps carry-supports in the mid lane for greater objective control, maybe having both a top and bot assassin to face against an all-squishy team, perhaps sending the fighters that would dwell at top to bot instead since they can solo dragon more easily than they ever could the Rift Herald.

The potential was there, and the rework failed because Riot didn't try to unshackle the meta, perhaps they were scared to shake things up that much, perhaps it would have disrupted the competitive scene too much, perhaps Riot gave in too quickly to the backlash from the rework and didn't try and/or succeed to follow up with the new design philosophy.

We may never know.

TL;DR, Mordekaiser's rework was a failure from the beginning because ultimately, Riot didn't go the extra mile to create an environment where Mordekaiser could succeed in his new state without being numerically ridiculous.