Rito Address The State of the Game

So as you can tell from the massive amount of your own fans flipping their proverbial lids; most players are not happy with the state of balance. My first point i'd like to address is "balance" itself. I just read an interesting response from a member of the balance department (and god i'm hoping they see this excessively long rant). His response touched along the lines of the direction of balancing. Whether to balance for pro play or silver/ bronze players (that is 77% of the player base). I remember back in season 4 there was both. In fact this response of it being unrealistic to balance for both was the exact opposite of riot employees in years past. We had just seen jungle changes, bot lane had been cemented as adc/supp (since season 2), unreasonable things were getting nerfed/removed (except DFG which was removed in season 5), everything felt like it had counter play (except annie w/ flash). Fast forward to today where we have an update that breaks core fundamentals of the game every 2 weeks (if that). What changed? How do we fix this? Will League last another year as a game? Should league just move to eSports? I really want to tackle all of my thoughts at once but i'm going to have to make the best possible organized list i can. Starting with. . .

A: Balancing is hard when you keep throwing things into the blender. Honestly Riot i know you guys are hard working individuals with many different sects that try to harmonize. I think the first step into solving ANY of your problems is to slow down. Were seeing new champions, reworks, item changes, patches, jungle changes, and a plethora of other EXTREMELY valuable assets changed almost weekly. There is no number of employees that can keep up balancing the new while we still have annie, master yi, and garen stuck in the olden times. What i mean by this is that were seeing a dissonance between creation and balance. In low elo exclusively: you have VERY abusable champions like garen. In pro play/high elo (making up less than 20% of all players) these champions are almost a non issue because the extent of game knowledge and mechanical prowess don't allow for such a simple champion to breathe (even though i've seen garen carries played in high elo). The solutions to these things may take some time to fine tune, but it is SO obvious what needs to be fixed.

B: Some hot fixes. Some of those things that are so obvious to me can be solved by asking the same meandering phrases that you all use in champion updates / skins. HOW IS THIS CHAMPION SUPPOSED TO FEEL? (hint: tanks don't do massive damage). Here is a list of easy to do hot fixes that i think can improve the happiness of your community off the top of my head.

• Take away lethality scaling with tanks (garen, sion, and poppy should not be able to build cleaver / youmuus and full combo bruisers)
• Nerf general damage on tanks and buff their sustain/tank stats. Again, tanks should not be able to assassinate targets. They are supposed to be played as damage absorbers that, if left alone with carries, will out sustain the fight when the carry doesn't have peel. OR nerf the natural scaling tank stats so that if a tank wants to off-meta build full damage they are easier to kill. There needs to be a trade off.
• Create more items. I know this sounds contrary to what i was stating earlier. There are and have only ever been set build paths for champions. A huge problem with balancing tanks vs adc is that when adc's are super strong its because they are critting for 1000's or when that lethality adc phase was hot. Theres not enough versatility in flat stats on items where you can truly build based on a situation. Just 3 patches ago it was mandatory to have a crit adc & i think that there would be better options for different situations if there were MORE variations. (for adc) The only % health being botrk, the only lethality items being assassin based, and the only armor pen items being LW items is really limiting in terms of building for the situation. Crit was only so popular because doing 1500 damage per shot was more worthwhile vs tanks than any of the penetrating items. This applies to mages as well in that a lot of the mage items are bruiser items with really good unique passives. Meaning if you want to build pen you're also going to have to build health because the only penetration you can build thats not void staff or boots is 300+ health. More variety = less static builds.
• Mages in general are in a pretty good spot DO NOT TOUCH THEM.

C: Not everything has to have a complicated purpose. I know that everything new in the game would ideally be something flashy, exciting, and sporting the flavor of the week. Unfortunately We are approaching a max capacity to unique passives, true damage, and point & click abilities. Gone are the days where final items/passives/ability descriptions had flat stats. I know its boring to have an item that just adds stats. I know its not jaw dropping to have someone's passive be a scaling magic sheild. True damage is definitely awesome.... in moderation. You get the point. Touching on the more items things you could generate a lot of items that have flat stats & that will add so much non abusive versatility to the game.

D: Sometimes we have to warm up to things. I'm not trying to take all the wins here and just rip on rito. There may be some merit to some of the things that we currently are disgusted by. I for one think that true damage will play a really big role if its shaped up better. I remember a time when i HATED the thought of RNG in this game, but i've honestly warmed up to dragons having that element as it creates a sense of urgency in decision making on objectives. Rito if you're hellbent on making something work go for it, just please remember that most of your player base are not pro players.

Even pro players are not enjoying the game at the moment. I was going to make a lot more points but i think i'll just end it here. Hire me or something. P.S no one wants to fight over scuttle.