@Riot: Law of Unintended Consequences plagues your balance decisions
Hello rioters and fellow summoners, I am Frightning on the NA server, and I have been playing League of Legends since March of the Season 1 (nearly the beginning). I have very much enjoyed this game, and have become overall decent at it (somewhere in the high Gold to low Platinum skill level). As a player, game knowledge is one of my major strengths; I understand this game far better than I play it! I have been an observer of riots efforts to balance and adjust this game's design thought most of its history, and have accumulated a track record for making accurate predictions of the consequences of various balancing decisions (at least 80% of the time I am correct in predicting the impact of a given balance change). I have observed a rather troubling trend while I have been doing this: Riot games perpetually falls victim to the Law of Unintended Consequences. They see a problem, a real problem that definitely needs to be addressed. They engineer something that will address that problem (great), and then implement it (makes sense right, well...). However, that change brings with it other consequences that I find Riot usually fails to anticipate. This is what's bothered me for several seasons now regarding game balance: Riot continues to make the same fundamental mistake as they go about trying to improve this already pretty fantastic game. That mistake is not also examining the full scope of the consequences that a given change will bring.
Speaking of examples of the Law of Unintended Consequences, the current Pre-Season changes look like they're going to have some consequences that are really unhealthy for the game.
-The changes to minions supposedly were going to help the defending team have a chance to get safe farm and hence be able to get back into the game; that's not what's going to actually happen and here's why: The buff to minion DPS is going to cause the lanes for a team that's ahead to start automatically pushing (because they will out DPS other team's minions), hence a winning team now gets minion split-push for 'free' (they didn't have to actually go and manage the creep wave to set it up). Hence all they now need to do is group up as a 5-man in mid and wait for the minions to do their job all the while pressuring mid turret (and preventing the enemy from being able to send someone to farm those creeps without losing mid turrets (and have the remaining 4 or fewer members get tower dove in the process). This is, I am fairly certain, NOT what you guys at Riot had in mind and it's going to make it nigh impossible to come back from a non-trivial level/tower deficit (Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again!).
-Related to the issues the above was trying to address: Vision changes and their ramifications. Let's talk a bit about vision in past seasons to help understand what's going on with vision in the game as it today. I remember in Season 2 (especially towards the end) when Pink Ward spamming (Vision Wards were also stealthed back then) was making it so that once a team had a sizable lead, they could just spam pink wards and completely shut down any attempt by the enemy team to get vision in important areas. This made comebacks essentially impossible in high-level play. To address this Riot made Vision Wards no longer stealthed and also brought in ward limits (which had the nice benefit of enforcing the vision game as a team effort). In season 5 Greater Stealth Totem was introduced and then buffed (I was surprised when they buffed it because it was already really good, and they made it even better). Because of how good it was, and the fact that Sweeper wasn't as spammable, coupled with Vision Wards being visible, it became really easy for teams that were behind to be able to force vision in most areas they really needed by simple burning though available enemy Sweeping Lens' uses and still having wards left to place. This meant that losing teams were able to reliably maintain vision on important objectives and hence the winning team couldn't safely take these objectives and snowball their advantage, hence we had all the 50+ mins snooze-fests in Worlds this year. What I think Riot want to have happen is for teams, whether behind or ahead, to have opportunities to make plays that have the potential to help their team towards winning the game. The current vision changes have reduced Ward availability, which means it's harder to keep everything important warded (this creates gaps in vision coverage), hence opportunities to exploit those gaps and make plays. However, the positive benefits of these changes aren't going to be realized if the minion changes aren't scrapped for the reasons explained above. Moreover, there's another problem that's been longstanding regarding vision: Ward placement range is well within the 'danger' zone of the area you want to ward (many a player knows this from first hand experience: if you don't have vision in an area, it's dangerous to go there and resolve that problem because in order to ward it, you have to get dangerously close to it, and hence might get jumped on and blown up). Increasing the range wards can be placed at would reduce this risk significantly and encourage players to get vision out in unwarded areas, at the same time, if Sweeping Lens was as spammable as ward totem wards are, vision denying in key areas would also become much more feasible to achieve (especially if you force the enemy to ward elsewhere some for immediate safety, then move to a different area (say dragon, and deny vision there; since you drew out some of their ward totem charges, you have more vision denying than they have wards to soak up). This creates the a very robust and active vision war that gives both teams opportunities to create advantaged situations though vision control. It's important that the ward placement range be increased in order to lower the danger in actually engaging in such a vision war (at current cast ranges, squishier champs are rightfully terrified of even getting within ward placement range of a bush they think might have an enemy in it). At the same time, doing so without increasing Sweeping Lens availability would just be giving the losing team an easier time securing vision of important areas. The current vision situation, with everything else that's current going on (including increased gold income rate speeding up game) is making LoL REALLY snowbally this pre-season. Which is also not fun because it makes comebacks a rarity and hence the playing out of the remainder of the game almost a formality (remember assassin meta? Well, this is probably even MORE snowbally than that).
-I feel like Seasons 3 and 4 were the best overall for the game thus far: In season 3, we had a lot of exciting transition plays, and picks and such happening (granted, this was largely courtesy of OP assassins back then), and in season 4 the meta was very diverse and the vision situation was, overall, pretty healthy for the game (which also allowed for a fair amount of exciting transition play). I think this needs to be brought back into the game; League is, imo, most fun when this sort of skirmishing and very proactive kind of playing is well supported by the state of the game.
