Please Stop Complaining About Riot Games People. Please.
I just want to put this out there as a player instead of a person working at riot. Stop complaining about everything riot does. They are people. They WILL make mistakes. They WILL do things that have a negative impact. But the point is, they almost always fix it in time. Now for some points about the balance team and prices.
Balance Team:
-The game is focused around counterplay and strategy, not spam all your buttons to win, so when they buff the raw stats of champions which can be counterplayed and slightly nerf the raw stats of champions that have no counterplay, it actually makes them both balanced.
-The balance team can't predict how the player base will react to a change or new champion. There's a huge amount of players in the game, and for example when they "nerfed" khazix to balance him and everyone was happy, but then somebody found out how to play khazix jungle after the changes, people started ranting about it saying it was op and why did they even buff someone who was already strong. Literally nobody predicted that bruiser khazix jg would happen, so they didn't take into consideration how strong that would be.
-When a champion obviously needs a nerf, it makes sense to implement a small change to test the waters before they go full out. If when Ekko was released and i was in the position of riot games, i would do the exact same thing as they did. Add a mana cost to his ult and lower his damage by just a bit. This would show whether the problem was in his utility, overall combination of his kit or stats. In this case it WAS his raw stats, so they nerfed those further until he was balanced.
-Not everyone can be satisfied with changes. One person wants a Lee Sin buff, the other wants a Lee Sin nerf. At least one will inevitably be dissatisfied. It's extremely rare (maybe even impossible) that the entire player base agrees upon the same thing unanimously, and in those cases where an overwhelming majority were unhappy changes happened in the next patch, (Ezreal on release was nerfed almost instantly).
-People complain about the dev team focusing too much on the competitive scene. That does have a piece of truth to it in my opinion, but honestly focusing on the competitive scene is actually just focusing on the higher level of play, where people think and actually strategize, which is what the game is about. In bronze certain champions win A LOT but the champion is actually balanced but simply has a mechanic that players are not willing to think about counterplaying. Early, early on in the game katarina is a really overpowered pick because players at that point don't have the skill or understanding of the game to counter her. In bronze, some people still complain about her. In silver, maybe 1 or 2 in 100 find her challenging to play against. In tiers where the game is almost fully understood almost nobody finds katarina overpowered. You can't start playing a Chopin piece as soon as you start learning the piano, but nobody complains that it was too difficult and should be made easier.
Prices:
-Its a company. They need money. Without money they can't run servers, hire people, change the game, create things like the LCS, and all that good stuff. Buying things in the game is COMPLETELY OPTIONAL. It's rare that a game makes itself completely free to play with all the impacting content free. So what if you have to pay to buy a COMPLETELY OPTIONAL skin that you like. Some skins are even offered free as rewards to people. The only reason you would need to spend money on this game is if you want to buy some skins or if you REALLY want to accelerate the process of unlocking all the content.
