A Summary of Balancing and Suggestions on How To Fix It

Like most, I've witnessed the balancing to League take a nose dive over time. I joined at the start of Season 4 after having 100 hours on Dota 2 and loved it instantly. League was way more action packed and exciting than Dota 2. Then, season 5 hit and everything became tanks. Games would take forever, games were often boring, and games were filled with tank champions. Basically, ADC's were useless. Season 6 came around, and it persuaded me to get back into League again after season 5 really turned me off. The mastery changes seemed intriguing, tanks were no longer over bearing and bot lane and mid lane could have a much more meaningful role in the games outcome. Season 7 came out and honestly, at first, I didn't have a big problem with it. But, clearly now, it's become quite a mess.

Let's start with what I view are the instigators which are causing the balancing problems:

1. Forced champion reworks. None of the major reworks, to date, have been successful. In my view, all of them failed from juggernauts to adc's and even assassins. All they accomplished was either creating a bunch of insta ban champions or a bunch of non-playable champions. In both cases, the champs don't get played and it leaves a sour taste in everyone's mouths. Champ reworks should be done one at a time, and more precautions and testing should be done before releasing it to the public. Incremental updates rather than large sweeping updates.

2. Understand kits. Though, Riot is typically good with keeping balanced kits, they've failed in many regards as well. Any champion which doesn't require mana is inherently given an advantage. Having one less resource to manage, makes spamming abilities have no real consequence. Garen, Akali, Katerina, Regnar, Leesin these champs have always been OP as far back as season 4 when I joined. Energy replenishes way too fast (especially with blue buff) and there's really no point to the lack of mana concept at all. For pete sake, make Rengar's stacks count the same way Ashe counts her stacks to use Q; there's absolutely no reason why Rengar needs to count his stacks instead of mana.

As well, let's look at overpowered kits in general. Gangplank anyone? His kit stands out to me as one that has almost everything in it. Damage, heal, movement speed, empowered attacks, a ranged attack, a global ultimate, etc. etc. There's no reason why a kit should have this many aspects to it. Where's the weakness in gangplanks kit?

What I'm saying is, a champ's balance is only as good as its kit. This plays into point 1 as well because all the sweeping changes to champs all the time causes point 2 to suffer. Finally, there's no reason for any champs not to use mana.

3. Understanding skill cap. To demonstrate this point, let's view a matchup between Syndra and Master Yi. Arguably one of the hardest champs and one of the easiest champs respectively in League of Legends. In a 1v1, Syndra only wins if she can land her E, which might I add is fairly easy for a master yi to dodge by simply hitting Q. Oh well, then the Syndra must not be kiting well enough right? How do you kite a master yi R unless you have a bunch of towers to hide behind. And, even if Syndra lands her E on master yi, then Yi simply hits W, heals through her ulti, and then proceeds to Q her and use his double strike stacks to decimate her. Now, I'm not saying a champion like Yi who is supposed to get all up in your face shouldn't kill a mage 1v1, but translating this to team fights isn't a heck of a lot different.

The point here is that Riot has introduced a champion pool with a wide ranging set of skill caps, but seemingly isn't able to balance it accordingly. This, again, fits into point 2 to some degree. Giving fairly basic champions like Akali and Garen no mana and a low skill cap (not to mention fairly strong base stats) means they become fairly consistent bans and overpowered picks. Giving point and click champions like Garen, Akali, Yi, and Darius strong stats and scaling means they don't have the weakness of having to land many skill shots, and yet have stronger base stats then most other champs. I've played at a lot of different ELO's over the three years I've known League. From bronze to plats, I've seen a lot of different sub-meta's, and a low skill cap pick often steam roles a high skill cap pick.

4. Balancing items and stats. Riot has a tendency to add, remove, and change items quite significantly and often. It hasn't worked very well over the last three years, and I don't see it improving in the future. Think about the jungle changes in season 5, devourer anyone? Now we have night's edge. Every season seems to have a set of items which are way too strong, and way too weak. Not to mention adding in gimmicks to try to solve some of these problems #Lethality. So how then, could they fix this? Well, when adding an item, intentionally keep it under-powered. Undershooting will cause a small disturbance compared to over shooting. Then, over the next updates, slowly (and I mean painfully slow) and incrementally, buff the item until it becomes reasonable. It may take 4 or 5 patches to get an item to a good spot, but Riot seems to love a pattern of under shooting, then over shooting, then under shooting again over and over. If a new item isn't used right away, that's okay! It's better then the item being purchased on 3 or 4 champs on each team every game. Take your time Riot, rather than buffing something without restraint to get more player use out of it.

The other thing I wanted to mention here is the obvious. If attack speed has a cap, and cool down reduction has a cap, why not give stats such as lethality and %pen a cap. This solves so many problems without trying to re-balance a bunch of items all at once again, which causes the problems discussed in the paragraph above, and buys Riot some time to figure out how they want to deal with the lethality and %pen stats given by Masteries, Runes, and Items all together.

5. Balancing to balance vs. Balancing to change meta. This is probably one of the most significant points I can make. Riot has stated they balance to influence the meta. They want to balance primarily by looking at the pro scene, and use this to change the meta. And it works for them. Creating a suite of OP champs, and then every 3 months making a different set of champs OP will indeed change the meta. However, this causes all of the 4 problems I've already stated, creates a toxic atmosphere of OP champs in all ELO's, and creates a cry for more bans and nerfs constantly. Riot has to start balancing champs such that they are balanced with all the other champs, rather than tweaking to get under played champions played more and over played champions played less. In fact, balancing to balance will solve the over-played and under-played problem all on its own.

Remember Riot, although esports is profitable, I'm sure most of your income comes from the millions of regular players who play your game and not the few dozen of pro players which you seem most comfortable balancing for.

6. Too much content. When it comes to balancing, the more there is to balance, the harder it is to balance. When we talk about League, there's often ~20 champs that get picked most often, ~50 champs which are picked consistently, and the rest are hardly touched at all. Think Urgot, Skarner, Mord, Mundo, Udyr. League was averaging a new champ nearly every 40-50 days, and not Riot isn't really dealing with the fact that there's starting to be too many champs. It's becoming a barrier for new players. It's really hard to learn how nearly 140 champs work, and new players have to invest 100's of hours until they can finally stop saying 'What the hell just hit me, how does that even work'. We are a species which can learn to play instruments, learn to drive cars, and learn calculus all put together in less time than it takes someone to learn the basics of how each champion works in League. Now, those of you like me who have played for many seasons had it easy! There was a fraction of the champs to learn in the earlier seasons than there is now. Try playing League for the first time in Season 7 and see how fun it is. It's becoming increasingly hard for me to persuade friends to learn League as time goes on because Riot is making the barrier to entry higher and higher rather than smaller. There really is no benefit to having too much content. However, there is a benefit to having enough content.

I don't really have a good way to solve this problem. Retiring old and barely used champs? Maybe bringing them back here and there for special events? I'm not sure. I think there needs to be a cap on how many champs there are. A random number I might throw out is 100 because then you can evenly divide that amoungst 5 roles with 20 champs each. Perhaps even 120. But, at the rate we are going now, it's becoming overbearing, hard to balance, and a barrier to entry. However, a cap would force Riot to really consider what they want to remove when adding more content.

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So let's talk business and the ways I see Riot attempting to fix some aspects of the 6 points I've laid out. Kind of a Tl;Dr.

The biggest thing I can say is SLOW DOWN. Stop with the big sweeping changes mid season; save these for season end and test the changes more thoroughly before making them live. Maybe it's time to start increasing the player count on PBE. Ensure the changes you do make mid season are incremental to avoid the constant swing and miss approach you're currently taking. If you want to buff an item that's fine, but instead of doing it all at once, think about what you want the long term goal to be, and implement it incrementally over a series of patches. If the item fits into a good spot prior to reaching the long term goal, then it's fine! It's already good to go!

Riot, you have got to start figuring out why you're balancing. Why are you making the changes that you are? It would be nice to see more justification for each change then what is currently given in patch notes. I mean, patch note justification these days pretty much boils down to "This item/champ was too OP, so we thought we'd fix it by doing this." But, what I want to know is, why are you fixing it using the methods you did. What was the reasoning behind it. When it comes down to it, you have to start balancing to balance and not balancing to change the meta. You have to understand kits, and skill caps and the consequences of shoving so many champ reworks down our throats when a large chunk of the player base really doesn't want these reworks.

You have to understand that with all the content League has, that you're spreading yourself too thin. All the focus on esports, skins, and aesthetics means you cannot keep up the pace of added content which you have been.

Quality is always more important than quantity, and over the last few seasons we've witnessed a quality focused game become a quantity focused game, and it's suffering because of it.

Signed, A Optimistic League of Legends Player.

(I'm at work and spent a solid hour writing this, so I don't have time right now to go through and spell/grammar check. Excuse any errors. Back to my regular software development!)