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Why doesn't Riot do mini hotfixes to champs instead of waiting until full patches?

Chud Bubson·4/6/2016, 12:54:55 AM·7 votes·2,749 views

Recently (past few months) Fiora has been commonly banned across all ELOs. Riot changed her in 6.5 so she's a bit more tolerable now, but my question is, why wait that long? With champions like Fiora, Udyr, Poppy, Soraka, etc. riot waits until patches to change them. Why not skip the month before the patch when they are on near permaban status and do small changes like lowering base damage by 5 or ad by 2 or something to make them more difficult to abuse if no one bans them? From a technical standpoint, would it be too stressful for the servers, changing more often, or can our feeble minds just not handle the unforeseeable long-term consequences? Would the game end up changing too rapidly? Could someone help explain this to me?

23 Comments

RiotMeddler4/6/2016, 2:05:52 AM11 votes

Hotfixes have a much shorter testing time available to them than regular patch changes. That means a much increased risk of serious bugs that compromise game results, cause champions to get disabled etc. As a result we only use them for cases where a champion's really out of line or has an urgent, high impact bug.

Wînter Fox4/6/2016, 2:30:36 AM3 votes

she's a bit more tolerable now

This board I swear...She literally has Urgot level win rates now

hh the thinker4/6/2016, 12:59:17 AM1 votes

i would believe that the changes aren't urgent enough. some champs have gotten hot fixes in the past, but their cases were much worse or bugged. fiora is just one of many champs they want to change. they could just keep changing things, but that would make a mess of things.

everyone likes to know of the changes also, if they keep doing things not on the big patches, then it can confuse people as the information they believe is one way, is just changed.