Boards›Gameplay

Unpopular opinion: The game should be balanced around Gold,Silver or below players.

thornmailed·3/12/2019, 12:18:45 PM·10 votes·1,763 views
Figure 1.1

Hi everyone,

I started playing League since season 2, and at the moment I think League is much worse than it used to be before season 6. I have thought and read about different things that could be the reason why League is less and less balance. Those reasons includes many which have been dicussed multiple times on the board, naming: damage creep, less vision controlling, too much gold bonus from turret plates and shut downs, Dynamic queue, Conquerer, etc..

In my opinion, the actual reason why League is heading in the wrong direction, is because it has not been balancing around its main audience members: Gold or below players. Have a look at Figure 1.1 , (Op.gg, 2019), you can see that Gold and below players together make a 87.28% of the total player base of League of Legends.

So saying that Riot shouldn’t balance the game around professional League is not enough. In fact, Riot should balance the game around average and low elo players.

45 Comments

Critmaster Garen3/12/2019, 12:38:59 PM7 votes

no one gives a shit about low elo.

the idea to balance around gold or below, or even plat after the ranked update is completely ass backwards. infact the game should be now balanced around diamond+ since the lower plat ranks are now there, where gold 1 and gold 2 were last season mmr wise.

grandmaster was added infront of the other ranks in a way, where masters is now what diamond 1 + 2 and lower masters lp used to be.

diamond is now where the higher plat ranks and d5 to d3 used to be.

its not up to riot to make the game easier on you, but up to you to learn how to play the game.

letsfeedtogether3/12/2019, 12:26:13 PM7 votes

why should a game be balanced around the bad players?

DuskDaUmbreon3/12/2019, 12:47:33 PM5 votes

The target for any balance decision should be to prevent any champion from being OP at any tier. It's best for them all to be balanced at all tiers, but the next-best option is for no champion to be OP at any tier.

OP champions in low tier removes the playerbase. OP champions in higher tier removes the incentive to become better.

hrooza dota 3/12/2019, 1:35:29 PM5 votes

as a silver player i would say, hell no.

if you want to do good on azir or whatever champion that is weak in low elo then get good on it. and every low elo cry about a diff thing because they only want the game to favor them and it will end up being impossible to balance for them.

out side of reworking some noob stompers to be less noob stompers and more viable above, they should not balance around low elo or it would be a huge clown fiesta.

Frosted Tips3/12/2019, 2:12:10 PM3 votes

Why should a complex game be balanced around casual players?

JuiceBoxP3/12/2019, 3:00:18 PM3 votes

If the game was balanced by low elo player performance, you wouldn't have anything to get better at.

deathgod53/12/2019, 12:45:44 PM2 votes

{quoted}

A game should always be balanced around the best players that play it. If you balance the game around players you get a lot of problems:

  • The balance problems in Iron and bronze would still stay the same as the game is still not balanced for them.
  • It would make it so that the more you improve the less fair the game gets for you.
  • In a vast majority of the time it really wouldn't change patching this much.
xDogMeatx3/12/2019, 12:21:59 PM2 votes

i see the reasoning basically to appeal the market=earn money potential. im pretty sure gold and below just want to play a balanced game instead of pulling a dark souls impossible 1v5 chain cc for eternity. i just want vision/jungle (fun stuff) back to normal smite bonuses also. the top lane is a please camp me harder 2v1 currently due to this vision nerfs. i mean when a jungle camps you so hard you start to wonder why not buy a support item.

Dynikus3/12/2019, 12:38:03 PM2 votes

Do you have a single argument as to why you would ever balance a game around players that frankly don't know what they're doing, other than them being the majority of players? Because there are a lot of reasons why basically every successful competitive game balances around the top of the ladder.

EyesOfTheFox3/12/2019, 3:03:45 PM2 votes

The problem at lower elo isn't a game balance problem. It's a player's mental balance problem, which may or may not be solved with in game experience depending on how said player chooses to approach the game. You wanna pick Yi into a Rammus jungle? Welcome to low elo. You wanna not pick a single front line tank to protect your marksman in team fights cause all you wanna play is assassins? Welcome to low elo. You see the enemy team has 3 tanks so you pick Teemo and say "I'll build tanky"? Welcome to low elo. You just got autofilled and forgot all prior knowledge of how the game works? Welcome to low elo.

HeeroTX3/12/2019, 2:57:28 PM2 votes

I agree with OP for this reason: The game SHOULD be balanced around low/mid elo (gold & Silver) because then it will be more STABLE. High elo is where people play the game a lot and have a LOT of experience at the game. As such, any changes are "figured out" really quickly. Tryndamere got a damage buff? Diamond recognizes that quickly and he's suddenly META and dominating the game. Silver probably doesn't notice for weeks, if ever.

Now I say this as someone that believes ProPlay SHOULD see the same thing for a full season (or get more bans, either way). It's idiotic that "competitive" play can see MASSIVE swings in power due entirely to capricious decisions of the development team to change the META. The fact that a player who depends on this game for their paycheck could go from "god tier" to "meh" in a single split simply because Riot decided to nerf their particular champion pool or even entire role is ridiculous.

But balancing around High-Elo means that mid/low elo players can pick a champ and build and play it for a few days and get pretty good and then suddenly start to suck and for a sizable percentage, they will have no idea WHY the things they'd been doing for days suddenly don't work anymore. And while its fair to say "read the patch notes" and "dig deeper into the game", for a LARGE number of low elo, they're there because they don't WANT to turn this into a (second) job they just want to have fun playing what they like, and it can get very frustrating to need to keep dealing with all these changes which seem entirely arbitrary at their elo.

TL;DR : High elo is ALWAYS going to "solve" the game, trying to avoid that is a waste of time and just causes frustration to the majority of the player-base.

King Braum3/12/2019, 4:05:24 PM1 votes

Idealy they're atleast kept in mind so that the game for a low ranked player doesn't feel like torture, but no it shouldn't be fully balanced around lower elos.

Gildarzt3/12/2019, 3:04:58 PM1 votes

Yeah, let's balance the game using people that doesn't know how to play the game, what can be bad?

MankeyMadness3/12/2019, 3:25:02 PM1 votes

Balancing around low elo doesn't mean making silvers look like pros. It means letting Galio do what he was doing and nerfing Yi and Darius while finding ways to make them playable below mid plat since they have near 100% banrates

Yasuo does too but that's not a matter of power. He could be Akali'd and would still be double banned in every game

nm10103/12/2019, 3:40:04 PM1 votes

Bad players can always get better, good players can't outplay bad high level balance.

Linna Excel3/12/2019, 3:40:11 PM1 votes

I think the game should be balanced around the abilities of the balance team to keep everything in a decent spot. It doesn't really matter which elo you pick if the designers keep handing over designs that the balance team has trouble getting right.

Salron3/12/2019, 4:03:44 PM1 votes

You do not balance a game around monkeys who do not know how to play it

Moonscourge3/12/2019, 12:20:19 PM1 votes

How would that work exactly? The moment you enter high elo you get to play on a different version of the patch?

It's currently balanced around both, with a couple of exceptions.