@Meddler: an open letter to your team(s)

Hey Meddler! This is an open letter to you and your team.

Once upon a time, you talked to be about how you wanted to design runes and masteries before their second keystone rework. You said things like runes/masteries as "pre game customization tool" to be more of early game oriented, as you go into the game with them while the items you build will go into effect later and are more late game oriented therefore.

Yet I see so much scaling on them. Many runes are scaling into late game from their level scaling. Others are scaling with items. Only very few options are really early game oriented. The thing is: the system which was considered to be early game oriented as a whole is inconsistent doing that.

A similar thing happens to tanks. You are constantly pushing their AP ratios making them go AP heavy itemization builds. The sad thing is that you worked on tanks in a full class rework - but you didn't touch the system at all. Now we have full AP "tanks" like Galio running around the cliff which makes my heart bleed when thinking about designing a game with defined classes.

While we will systematically be looking into the Tank class as a whole, we will be primarily focusing our kit work on initiating tanks, which we call Vanguards.*

We want tanks to get a much greater benefit from tank items than other classes, so they can correctly play the role of being the tankiest champions in the game.*

You didn't touch the system but you tweaked some tank numbers and introduced new ones. Now you have the same problem still because you didn't fix the system behind it: Ninja Tabis are too weak on tanks and too strong on non-tanks.

We want Ninja Tabi to remain a core purchase for tanks who need to be able to take punishment from marksmen and other basic-attackers, but less for marksmen who just want some armor to survive against assassins.*

While I don't see the process but only the results, I think that you and your team are working too unsystematic. The best example you ever did was the rework of base health regeneration and base mana regeneration which was all across the board, changed the system it was working mathematically and came up with a solution that was a) not easy to read b) extremely effective in solving the problems that occured. And yet you refuse to go that route away - you want your options to be easy readable, don't want to make big changes becaus eplayers will not adapt to it - and therefore leave the problems as they are as long as you are only tweaking numbers in situation where reworking the system from the foundation should be the better approach.

With that in mind, I'm afaid of the work you're doing on marksmen (crit) changes for mid season. Of course you can prove me wrong and time will tell that I'm stupid, but as long as you just change numbers here and there when the system itself is flawed will not solve any problems on the long run. This is your game - it has become scientific in the way people argue about it - but it is not given by nature: you can change whatever you want. You can change the foundations and rebuild everything, the game internal systems don't need to stay the same for the sake of being consistent. You can design the game. Just my two cents here.