Powercreep in LoL and how to prevent/solve it.

First of all I want to say that I am by no means game designer, but i think that overall I can deliver a good constructive argument, from my expirience in LoL and other games I have played over the years (and their ways of dealing with this issue). With this in mind let us continue.

1.Meaning- Power creep Power creep is a process that sometimes occurs in games where new content slowly overtakes the power of previous alternatives. This leads to players abandoning previous options in favour of the latest and more powerful alternatives, resulting in an inevitable increase in power throughout the game.

Now, most of you are saying something like: "But Lexy123, LoL does not have to worry about powercreep. We have patches every 2 weeks, and every champion is more or less playable to some degree. This leads me to..."

2.The problem of power creep in LoL

So here is the problem. As new champions and items get released, every other champion and item needs to be compared to that one. This has led to a creation of 2 major classes in LoL. Generalists and Specialists. Generalist would be some older nonreworked champion which is usualy OK in every situation. Specialist on the other hand is a champion which will do amazing in certain situation and is usualy less powerfull in others. But problem is that in some metas, generalists will usualy overtake specialists and/or specialists would get the abbility to buy certain item which will cover their weakspot and make them better then generalist in any circumstance.

Next we have the powerbudget.  The powerbudget of many champions has gone up over the years because of new champions doing all sort of cool s***. This in turn makes some champions feel straight out bad and unfun to play against. As a perfect example of this we can take a very very interesting thing into consideration. Mobility. In early days of the league it was rare for champion to have a mobility spell, and even if they had it, it was just a minor jump (Trynda,Yi) or movement speed boost (Kenen) even and if they had it, they would probably suffer in other parts of their kit, such as lack of hard cc or damage. Today its not hard to see champions that have way more mobility, some of them even having couple of mobility spells such as Kayn who has 2 mobility spells and AOE CC on top of that. These new champions in turn make some old champions feel weak and just unable to catch up to them. For example Mordekaiser will always have problems catching up to Kayn or Yasuo, since he has no hard CC or mobility spells to catch up. This in turns means the old champions need to get some sort of buff. Since most Mordekaiser mains would object to Mordekaiser getting a huge Kha'Ziks like leap (both from gameplay and lore perspective), Riot has little they can do, except buff the numbers. Buffing numbers however does not solve problems in the long run.

Power creep of Masteries, Runes, Summoner's spells, Items etc.

While this part was fairly easy to balance I want to brush up several interesting points users have made over the years. -Certain champions are balanced solely around the fact that some of the upper things exist. For example: Akali (and hybrid champs)- Hextech Gunblade Kogmaw (and imobile adcs)-Flash and IE Splitpush toplaners-Teleport Hecarim-ghost Rammus-Thornmail

This is bad because over the years it is going to build up a huge powercreep behind it. However this is fairly easy to balance since we have 2 things to nerf/buff in order to get rid of the problem.

-Removing several "additions" would make a huge improval of the meta, since it would remove power creep tied to them. Best example being flash. Flash is utterly imbalanced spell that allows several types of both offensive and defensive manouvers. However since everybody has flash it's equivalent to one player getting a shield and another player getting a sword that can only be blocked by that same shield. However Riot will never allow for a removal of this spell because of proplay and specific combos tied to it. However there are some champions which can make better use of flash, and as more champions of that type get released the power creep only grows and grows.

Map Power creep. Turrets, jungle monsters, plants and map. There is not much to say here, and i would end up repeating my words, but I have/need to talk about one thing. Jungle pathing.

If you ask most junglers in high elo if jungle pathing matters, they would probably tell you that until mid-high gold, there really is not much to learn and worry about. This is a problem because there is a clear weakness to be exploited and used, and thus creates a power creep for champions that can abuse it. Take for example Shaco. Since that is a champion with amazing possibilities when it comes to clear, he can start at enemy raptors/krugs , without losing much exp for his clear and set enemy junglers behind. Now take Ivern for an even better example. He has pushed this even futher being able to take any enemy camp without losing a single thing. Currently we have only 2-3 other champions that can do this. But if this power creep keeps growing, other junglers will be pushed out of playability because of inability to do this.

3.The solution. The solution here is to closely monitor champions powerlevels as well with how satisfying they are to play. The moment we see that champion has had a low playrate we want to establish why. We dont want to buff the numbers, instead we want to slightly alter the champions kit so it feels more fluid and starts excelling at what champion should do, thus increasing how satisfying champion is to play, not how good he is.

We also want to see what champions our champion struggles the most and if there is any other champion outclassing him at what our champion should excell. For example if Vladimir struggles against Fiora, but Fiora provides everything that Vlad does and more(tanking, damage and healing and some crazy mobility on top of that), then we want to either nerf Fiora, or buff Vlad in some aspects. Preferably we dont want to change any numbers, but instead focus on key strenghts and weaknesses each champion has. For example we can say something like this: Ok Fiora provides AOE heal per sec to her entire team, does good vs tanks, and has a nice AOE DMG due to hydra.

Vlad provides self heal, he does ok against tanks (but can burst squishies if fed) and he has pretty nice AOE dmg.

In this case we want to enchance Vladimirs strong side. So we will give him much larger AOE burst on R and E, that can burst squishies, but will leave tanks almost untouched.

However we can look at it from another perspective. We can easily go and make weaknesses more profound.

In this case Fiora will have to be nerfed. We can do this in several different ways. We can make her healing proc less often, or nerf the interaction of her Q with Hydras, thus reducing her AOE which gives her crazy 2v1 potential.

Either of these creates a typic niche for both champions to be used, thus solving the biggest part of the problem. The rest is all brushing up numbers.

I also want to say that Riot has kept the game fresh over the years, and mini-reworks are what I think is their way of dealing with powercreep for champions that have been put very far behind on the VGU update list.

5.The end Fore all of you that are still here... Hope you enjoyed the read. :D

(Leave a small :) in comment just so i know how many people actualy got till the end.)

P.S. I am not proposing for any of these to be implemented in reality, I am just giving a what if example.