Rewarding Incompetence

This is Riot's favorite thing in the world to do. Why? Well, because rewarding incompetence makes whales feel like they're good at the game, and makes them throw more money at you -- but then, a quality game is Riot's first and foremost priority. Money is just a secondary focus (or so they tell us).

Now, if you look at any other game that has real time ("action") combat, you'd notice a pattern: The fast, instant, reliable attacks are, more often than not, the weakest in the game. If you use only the basic attack, you don't do any damage, and you'd likely lose whatever fight you're taking part in. However, the slower, usually telegraphed, attacks are much stronger, and give you more damage. Chaining the two together is how you do the most damage possible. Doing a lot of damage requires you to be somewhat competent at the class you're playing. You don't get to just spam your weak attacks and somehow miraculously win -- that'd be silly, wouldn't it?

But then, we look at League. We have an entire class of champions that is built around them spamming the most reliable, safest form of damage in the game: Auto attacks. Now, you'd think, 'sure, they would have reliable, sustained damage, but they wouldn't out-perform anyone else'. And that would be reasonable, yeah? Yet, here, we have it entirely backwards; in this game, the champions who spam the easiest, fastest, safest, most reliable attacks in the game do the most damage, by far, in every circumstance. Where someone like Xerath has to visually prep his Q and then fire it in a telegraphed line doing a few hundred damage, Generic Clicker # 128 can waltz up, right click, and do twice that damage in half the time with no telegraphing or aiming required.

This class of champions is the easiest, with no resource on their primary form of damage, no counterplay whatsoever, no real weakness that isn't covered by items, no downside to their damage pattern, nothing.

People complain about Camille because of her true damage. She hits hard, right? Well, thing is, you have to let her do that. She's INCREDIBLY telegraphed, and you can easily stop her from doing anything with the slightest bit of CC, even a slow. Yet, people don't complain about a champion with four times the true damage at a fraction of the effort. Vayne walks up, right clicks on you from 550 range, and does an enormous chunk of your max health in true damage, on top of 1500-2000 physical damage. Vayne is dramatically easier than just about every champ in the game, yet she is one of the potentially strongest champs that exist. Why? What does she do to deserve more damage than a champ who has to go through all kinds of effort to do half of her damage?

And that doesn't just apply to Vayne. Literally any ADC in the game will out-perform everyone else in the game in terms of damage -- both short and long-term damage -- and will have more sustain than literally everyone, even champs BUILT to sustain better than other champs.

So, I ask why that is, and how anyone can pretend that's fair in any way.

• You could say, "Oh, they're squishy!" -- but then, so are champs like Taliyah, Xerath, Camille and so on who actually have to work for their damage.

• "But they die the second they get out of position!" -- yeah? Same goes for literally every champion in the game.

• "But CC destroys them!" -- and I ask: If a champion is so absurdly strong that the literal only way to deal with them is to prevent them from even using their kit, then in what world are they fair?

• "They're weak early game!" -- yeah, sure they are. Go take a level 1 ADC into a level 1 anything else, and see who wins. Then do that at level 2, and 3, all the way up to 6 if you want. Short of the ADC being CC locked... they don't lose, do they?

Thing is, it's not fair. It's not healthy. It's not balanced. Yet, none of that is really what Riot cares about. When the easiest champions are the strongest, that's the most lucrative state for the game. So, regardless of whether or not it's fair, that's just how it will be. In any other game, the easiest characters/classes would be weaker, but more reliable. The more complex characters/classes would be riskier, and not as reliable, but have a much, much greater potential power than the easier ones.

Go look at the champion lists on something like op.gg. Look at the top champions in every ELO. Tell me how many of them are even remotely challenging or complex.

So, someone, anyone, explain to me how this system is fair. Justify the bullshit that the easier champions pull off that the more complex ones could never do. Tell me how it's fair for literally any ADC in the game to walk up, click on you, and instantly win with their ball of stat powers.