Boards›Gameplay

"balancing" has more to do with finances, than how broken champs are.

ItsCalledALance·3/4/2016, 3:46:13 PM·8 votes·466 views

I'd bet my life.

Why nerf a champion that is selling hot? people will stop buying causing Riot to literally lose millions in champ and skin sales.

How secretive and vague they are about their reasons for making changes is evident enough.

Take Ahri for example, there has been thread after thread on how inaccurate their reasons for nerfing her charm were. Riot hasn't clarified it any. Simple explanation is that she isn't selling as much as some other midlaners she potentially counters. (just guessing there)

they are releasing a new champ soon. If Ahri - who doesn't sell hot - counters this new champ mid lane, it could potentially hurt that champs sells numbers.

preemptive nerf to Ahri would likely increase the sales of the new champ. Really no idea,

But i am certain they wont nerf a money maker.

its bad business. They are doing ALL of this to make money. Riot is not a charity.

Some people seem to forget that.

15 Comments

CrimsonCobra33/4/2016, 4:07:18 PM3 votes

{Ahri has always been popular.}

I've analyzed how Riot speaks about its balance changes, and I think that, in general, they are trying to maximize each character's potential. Some characters are simply so popular they don't want to nerf them or make an substantial change to them even when they probably should. And some champions are so unpopular that they don't worry about them. (Taric for example.) But I think that, in general, Riot is trying to produce a quality game. The main issue could be that Riot is huge, and so, just like in other huge systems, (hint: Beaurocracy) change takes a long time to be decided on.

If you add this to the fact that the community doesn't always have the correct opinion on something, (for instance, I've seen a lot of posts calling for Lux to be nerfed, but I've never had a problem with Lux) it is probable that Riot employees probably want to make sure that whatever change they are making is the best one. And spend the time appropriate to that task.

But it is true that at the end of the day, money wins. If Riot thinks something will decrease its revenue significantly, they won't do it.

53436278DEL13/4/2016, 3:51:04 PM2 votes

same for tryndamere

Meep Man3/4/2016, 3:49:19 PM1 votes

This is a little off because Ahri is acually one of the really popular Middle Lanes right now and always has been so nerfing her would decrease her sales and therefore their finaces. While she might not be "Top Played" she has always appeared in every meta and every Middle Lane so nerfing her would dent their income from her.

Valderis Vandala3/4/2016, 4:15:20 PM1 votes

Somehow I doubt nerfing or buffing champions does anything to affect the billions of money they make.

Your logic kinda breaks down when you consider that no matter which champion they buff or nerf, no matter how much the meta changes, there will always be hot champions people like to play and buy stuff for so it doesn't matter. If your reasoning is correct and people buy shit for champions that do well then Riot stands to gain a lot more from changing which champions are hot from time to time so that people keep flocking to different champions and keep spending money, because there is only so much money people can spent on a single champion.

Don't you think its more profitable to just bring out more stuff that people like to buy? Like say, champions and their skins? Sounds a lot more reasonable then the buff/nerf hocus pokus conspiracy bullcrap you're pulling out of your ass.

As for the reason why they don't give concrete reasons for every little change they make, have you see how many little changes are made and how many people work on this shit and how much they test and how much stuff changes internally? Keeping track of it is a nightmare, let alone keeping track for the specific reasons for every specific little change. This isn't a court of law where everything gets recorded, its just a bunch of coders and artists.

I would love to know myself the exact reason why everything happens the way it does but its just not gonna happen and its unproductive to come up with these crackpot theories.

blfUvZ8Ybu3/4/2016, 4:23:38 PM1 votes

Lux is still op.

Sightless663/4/2016, 5:25:44 PM1 votes

Simple explanation is that she isn't selling as much as some other midlaners she potentially counters. (just guessing there)

The problem here is, I don't see any actual evidence for this. I don't see any evidence that she isn't selling as much as other champions. Her popularity doesn't support that argument at all. It looks to me like you're suggesting the fact that she got nerfed as evidence that she wasn't selling well, without actually showing any evidence that this is their policy. It's an after-the-fact justification. Very unconvincing.

If anything, I'd imagine Ahri sells a ton of skins, which is why they keep making them for her. Her not being a moneymaker fails the sanity test for me. If anything, I'd say they went light on her because she is a moneymaker.

Besides, we've had multiple cheap champions stay overpowered for extended periods of time. To me, that would be pretty strong evidence against that point.

How secretive and vague they are about their reasons for making changes is evident enough.

I don't agree. They explained plenty about the Ahri nerf. In addition to the patch notes explanation, they went into it in quite a bit of detail in a forum post. There were people who disagreed with it, but that will always be true. That doesn't make them secretive. It does mean the community gets angry when it doesn't agree with something Riot does.

But i am certain they wont nerf a money maker.

If they were only in this for the short term, I'd agree, but that is a bad long term business strategy. I'm not jumping along with a conclusion based on the idea that they have to be taking the most short-sighted business strategy possible. That is not sufficient evidence for me.