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Strats : Remove them if annoying, or keep them because it's a strat like any other ?

Shrek will rek·11/23/2018, 11:54:12 PM·1 votes·576 views

Hello all, I was going to post this on Gameplay+ at first but got too stressed out to actually do it, hoping to see some people answering it all around.

First of all, no I'm not a high elo player, actually I rarely play ranked games. I've been around for quite some time, but mostly following the game "from behind the curtains" (I don't play a lot, in fact my account isn't even level 30, but been interested in the game for some time and watched a lot of streamers / pro-players).

So here's my question :

Should a strat, being too annoying to some players, actually get deletted from the game by the balance team or whoever works on this ? if so, where's the limit ?

First of all, I want to start of with one that kinda made me angry. The "gold funneling strat" (MasterYi Karthus jungle, and Taric mid giving out his lane xp to the hypercarries, giving them a huge advantage) , entirely forbidden and removed from the game due to the jungle item changes. Yes, as much annoying as it might have been, there wasn't anything about "cheating" or "breaking" the game by doing this. Players were following the rules, it simply was an original way to play the game. It really saddened me to see that it was the path taken by Riot, removing it because players didn't want to deal with it, rather than trying to adapt to it.

Recently, a bit related to it was the fact that "APC" were being playable botlane, and some were indeed strong early in the game. ADC players , being not really happy about getting shat on by some of those APC, started calling the marksmen class "garbage, unplayable, etc..." when in fact, they just got countered by a better pick. Result : item 3095 got released, item 3086 price got reduced, and those marksmen were able to have a higher impact early in the game, while still being monsters into late game and kinda "shooing" away those new APCs from that lane.

Now, we've got the inting Sion strat. Yes, I've seen people deal with it, yes it's extremely tilting, but does it break any rules ? Is the player cheating by focusing on objectives rather than fighting a player ? I don't see it any different as an average splitpusher : Tryndamere the splitpush king requires you to either stick to your lane and deny his farm so he can't be a bully and splitpush while making your teammates coming there because it's either he takes down your towers or kill you. Most complains I've read about on the boards are "you need your jungler to take him down without him destroying your tower", once again, wasn't this the solution against any splitpusher since the beginning of LoL ? So why is that a problem from now ? Why should this strat be forbidden too ?

All in all, my own opinion is that as long as something isn't against the rules of the game, or exploiting the game (Jhin item 3124 or Shyvana in ARAM stacking armor and mr with ghost poro), Riot should have no rights to completly remove a strat from the game. Meta is always changing, heck I recall in s1 (or beta ?) players playing Ashe mid and calling her really strong, or the 6 item 3071 "bruiser build". You don't want to deal with something, it doesn't give you any right to remove that thing rather than trying to counter it.

Yes, sounds like a bit of a rant here, but hope some people would reply to this, I'd really love to see you opinions on this matter (and sorry if my english might be clumsy here and there, it isn't my first language and it's getting late around here)

1 Comments

hi ìm groot11/24/2018, 12:12:10 AM1 votes

The strats weren't being removed because they were annoying, they were being removed because they lacked counterplay. It is kind of the point of balancing a game is to keep strategies from becoming to strong while remaining to simple, and contributing nothing to the depth of the game. Also you're confusing causality on alot of issues here. You saw they lowered the cost of adc items because they were getting "counter picked"? If you're being counter picked every game you play a entire role, that's not counter picking, thats your role being trash and it needing fixing lol.

You're talking like riot is banning players for using strats, they never said they were doing anything wrong, they just patched what they were doing because the strats were basically an exploit. The support items were never designed to be used by laners, but when the game became so fast paced that you couldn't reliably push to a late game where most players were full build, then being down a solo laner in order to auto-snowball a hypercarry became worth it. That is the evolved meta, no one got punished for exploiting it, but it gave no depth to the game and was just being abused by people to get into elos they didn't really deserve.