Why This Season Feels So Bad
No, this isn't a post where I rant about balance. This isn't a post where I call the game stupidly broken or swear an excessive amount and curse the name of Riot Games. I actually think they've been handling the amount of stuff they're breaking relatively well for what they've been doing.
For those who aren't aware, some lady in the higher-ups of Riot decided that they should change the patch format to be a big patch, then a little patch, and repeat the cycle, just for an experiment this season.
Sounds interesting on paper, like it might be a good idea at first.
The big issue is that the big patches are all enormous compared to the size of a regular patch during season 7 and prior, and even "small" patches are sometimes almost as big as the previous big patch.
The idea was for the small patch to exist for Riot to react to things in the big patches. However, there's too little time between sets of big changes for them to adequately respond to balance outliers. This is getting to the point where I think that they may need to completely stop making changes beyond simple numbers tweaks for a few patches to fix things.
After they fix things, then what? Return to the old format? They could, but I personally do really like the idea of centralizing more major changes to a specific patch and then having the next patches be to follow up and fix the balance outliers that came from the big patch. So, here's what I propose just as another test that they could run to get this format to work.
Huge Patches: Preseason and Midseason only. Include huge changes, such as the Marksman item update that just went through. Designed to shake the meta up a bit.
Larger Patches: Followed by 3 small patches, these include reworks to individual items, as well as mini-updates to champion kits.
Small Patches: 3 small patches for every 1 large or huge patch, these are numbers changes only that are designed to fix the problems caused by the larger-sized patches. Any major balance outliers, such as things like Banner of Command after its recent buffs and before its removal this past patch, can be changed as necessary to bring them back in line.
Any patch may include a champion release or full VGU, if one is ready.
And before the people questioning "well what about the PBE? Isn't that for testing?" even show up, I'm gonna edit this post to address them: the PBE is not a balance testing server. It's a bug testing server. It's for finding things like the Spirit Guard Udyr bug I found and reported while playing on the PBE a while back that caused the whole game to crash every time he pressed his E. Skin got taken down while bug was fixed, bug got fixed, and skin got re-released before that monstrosity ended up in some poor sap's ranked game. The issue with the PBE and why any PBE content can't be used as accurate balance testing is because you're mixing everyone from all over the world together. Challenger vs Bronze, NA with 70 ping vs Koreans with 180+ ping.