Riot will never balance their game

Clockwork Mouse·Sep 21, 2018·3 votes·961 views

Anyone else would have been able to make their game balanced by now. Either they are just this incompetent, or they just like mixing up the meta constantly, all the time.

8 Comments

RewtSep 21, 20182 votes

there is so much shit in the game that minor changes can make huge waves. Its not an easy game to balance. sometimes there are characters who are straight broken, but a certain flavor of the month champion completely negates that champ so no one realizes how broken that champ is. Then the flavor of the month champ gets nerfed and you end up with the champion being uber broken coming out of left field with 0 changes.

LoL is quite difficult to balance, especially with how riot likes to keep introducing new things to keep the game fresh. But you know what? at least its better balanced than SMITE.

Clockwork MouseSep 21, 20183 votes

I doubt it is a difficult game to balance. People make video games, and after a patch or two, or sometimes 3 or 4, the game is balanced. They come out with around 20 patches a year, and the game gets more and more unbalanced.

RewtSep 21, 20181 votes

and most of those games have 1/100th the items, 1/10th the characters, and dont care if they leave 30% of their characters in a state of complete unplayability.

The only MOBA-esque game that I think is even close to being balanced is Battlerite. But even that game has a clear hierarchy of characters. there are supports that are objectively better than all the rest, same with ranged and Melee.

And Battlerite doesnt have to worry about items. they just balance the champions based off of the things innate to them.

PhieldworkerSep 22, 20181 votes

[{quoted}](name=Clockwork Mouse,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=G1rcUEj7,comment-id=00000000,timestamp=2018-09-21T21:30:33.978+0000)

I doubt it is a difficult game to balance. People make video games, and after a patch or two, or sometimes 3 or 4, the game is balanced. They come out with around 20 patches a year, and the game gets more and more unbalanced.

I don’t think you understand coding and game balance. It’s impossible to test every item interaction with every champion interaction. And same thing with every single last champ ability against another’s. That’s why they have been trying to get better at listening to the community so when something is off or makes the game a “whoever does it first they win” they can go ahead and balance the best they can. But adding new champs and new items will always throw off the balance.

Think of it like this, a family of 2 parents and 3 kids decide to have a 4th child. This is going to throw off dynamics in some way and there will be unforeseeable things that come up because each child/parent has different personalities AND each one interacts a little different than the other.

Nik NikersonSep 21, 20182 votes

or they just like mixing up the meta constantly, all the time.

You figured it out.

YljinSep 21, 20181 votes

The point of these patches IS to mix around the meta. It's meant to keep the game interesting (which it does), and even if your favorite champ isn't in meta now, it will eventually, giving everyone a taste of op-ness. If every champ was equally powerful, the playerbase would be so much smaller.

DuskDaUmbreonSep 21, 20181 votes

Okay. So let's say we balance crit items. All four Zeal items have equal worth with each other, none is pushing ahead of the other except on a champion basis.

Now we've unbalanced crit ADCs by doing so, because they were balanced around old crit. So we have to fix crit ADCs. All of them have equal 50% winrates. But now we also unbalanced the other ADCs, so we have to spend the greater part of a year getting all the ADCs in line with one another.

Now they all have 50% winrate. Every single ADC is equally viable, except Draven and MF are stronger in low tier than in high tier, and Ashe and Kalista are stronger in high tier than in low tier, because that's inherent to their kits. So we rework those four, so they're equally valuable at all tiers. Except now they're not balanced with other ADCs, so we have to do another couple months (at least) of fixing them.

Yay! One role is balanced! Except...we screwed up the balance with tanks and assassins relative to ADCs, and supports are wonky now that we spent a year and a half fixing ADCs. So we spend ages fixing tanks first, and repeat the process that we did with ADCs on them, including reworking the pro-strong champions, and reworking the pubstomper...Wait, yeah. Just one pubstomper tank, Malphite. Oh, but by doing so we fucked them up in relation to ADCs, so guess who we have to fix again?

So after we spend the next year or two getting ADCs and tanks in line with each other, we decide to get back to supports, after these...Let's call it 3 years. We already handled tank supports with the tanks, so we just tweak tank support items a bit and...we broke toplane again. So another month fixing tank itemization. Again. Now we can get to enchanters! We buff and nerf ardent and redemption and all the enchanter items and all the enchanters, and rework a couple of them in the process to make them more interactive. We also fix Ivern here, because he's basically an enchanter.

Of course, though, we break tanks again. Or at least we break Taric, and create a new build for Alistar to where he gets Ardent. So we go back, fix Taric, and then we can go back to mage supports!

After the herculean task of somehow balancing Brand and Lux support in low elo, we realize that we've fucked the balance of the entire rest of the game in the process of fixing ADCs, tanks, and supports. It's been 4 years now, and Juggernauts, Skirmishers, Assassins, Mages, and Divers are still all over the place. Since we've already started on top with tanks, we head back there to try and tidy the rest of it up. We somehow make Nasus, Darius, Mundo, and basically all juggernauts not low-elo stompers and useful in high tier while still preserving their identity. We even fix all of Mordekaiser's bugs! Buuuut...Juggernauts were what was keeping tanks balanced. They go all over the place after the year or more we spend fixing juggernauts, so we go back, fix tanks, then go fix ADCs again since we screwed up tanks, then fix enchanters again because we messed up that...And then we go fix juggernauts again because someone found out that Ohmwrecker Nasus is somehow the most OP thing ever, then we make another passthrough of the roster that we have fixed...This process takes another year in addition to the one we fixed Juggernauts in, for a total of 6 years. And we still have 4 classes to go.

We're almost done with top, and just have divers and skirmishers to go. Divers are first, because we fixed some of them in the Juggernaut fix. Lethality divers stop existing because that shit was broken as fuck, and assassins can wait for us to fix their itemization for now. Zed mains whine, but they're ignored for now. All of them are fixed, down to a 50% winrate at all tiers, and they're actually made to stop being tanky assassins with no delays. Then we fix the other classes again, because J4 and Wukong being able to burst the ADC roster before you could blink was the only thing keeping them in check. Bam, instant 70% winrate ADCs. Repeat process of fixing the roster. Again. Another two years added to our time overall, for 8 years.

We're in Season 8, by the way, which means we've spent the entire lifetime of League now fixing classes, and we still have 3 more to go. Onto Skirmishers.

Starting with Yasuo, the entire fucking game breaks the second we even think to look in his direction. Fix Yasuo, desperately ignoring Twitch's ever-growing winrate because we need to fix Yas first, fix Riven, ignoring Sion's winrate getting higher and higher, fix Fiora, ignoring that Malphite's winrate jumped to 55% instantly...It's a tedious process, because these champions have huge playerbases, meaning breaking them makes every other champion drop a full percent of winrate at least. At last, we fix the skirmisher class. Yasuo still has a 50% banrate in low tier, but oh well. Now, another year fixing the rest of the roster, maybe two. 10-11 years now, but the end is in sight!

Moving on to mages, we fix them all. Not too many class changes here, mostly a lot of reworks, though, which takes two years to carry out fully, since we need to rework Veigar, Zoe, Annie, Azir, Anivia, Aurelion Sol, Fiddle, Karthus, Heimer, Lissandra, Malzahar, Ryze...Most of the roster. All of the rework team works on it night and day, and we feed CertainlyT coffee through an IV drip so he can somehow make Malzahar exciting to play. He's probably okay.

Overall, few changes to winrate in other lanes, actually. Most of it was just fixing their problematic parts. A few melees needed nerfs once Heimer was reworked, but it only took a couple of patches to work out most of their issues. It's been 13 years, and we finally have only one last class to fix: Assassins.

Riot sits in seclusion for a month. No word is heard from their company. The only indication that they're even alive in there is that Ahri, Lux, and Teemo got a skin line all to themselves, and someone keeps fixing the EU servers. Finally, we get a message from Meddler:

"We figured out how to balance assassins in low tier while making them useful in high tier". The community is ecstatic, as nobody expected this! It was a miracle they even fixed mage supports in low tier, and they're certain they can fix assassins the same way?

Riot buffs and nerfs and reworks almost every single assassin. You now have time to react to every assassin, and it's an actual contest of skill between assassins and their targets, but it's also fair for the assassin, because the delays don't feel clunky or artificial, they feel smooth and natural. It takes a couple years, but they fix it.

The rest of the game is basically on fire. Mages and ADCs are all over the place in winrate, causing tanks to be everywhere, fucking up bruisers and skirmishers...All the work Riot did is basically undone. Three more years, trying to fix everything, with so many issues that it's insane. Riot finally manages to get everyone else mostly balanced, now they just need to nerf Manaflow slightly to fix it...

And out of fucking nowhere we have Singed, Teemo, and Cho'gath become OP. The guys that nobody really knows what class they're part of. Riot sighs, then fixes them. Another half a year added to our time. League is now 18 years old since we started fixing the issues. League is literally old enough to be fucked now. 18 fucking years to fix it, but Riot managed to do it. If we count the last 8 years as well, League would be 27. League would be old enough to drink to forget the childhood horrors it had.

And...now what? Everything's...balanced. There's no meta changes, it's all skill now. As long as nobody comes up with any oddball strat, it should be fine. Hopefully.

But that's honestly boring. Everything's fixed, so...No real drive to look for some new strat, or to learn a new champion, or put runes together in an odd way to see how it works, because it'll either work or it won't, but it's already been found out whether or not it does.

DuskDaUmbreonSep 21, 20181 votes

tl;dr: It'd take almost 20 years to actually balance it all, if Riot started fixing it now. And it'd constantly be re-breaking the game. You'd be waiting years for assassins to be put back into check, or for some other class to be broken in the meantime. Riot would also have to pursue this to the exclusion of making new champions, items, runes, or anything else if it didn't directly pertain to the class they were fixing. It's better to have the game with most champions useful at most tiers, and with nothing too overbearing.