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You guys ever wonder if the balance team's decisions are sometimes PR cover for the dev team?

deadlychuck··3 votes·949 views

There seems to be a pattern that when the hot topic in the community is something that's a critical design aspect of the game, you see some extremely controversial, illogical, or just outright bad balance decision being made that completely changes the focus of the community discussion for a few weeks until they forget about the core feature or design aspect that they were criticizing before the change hit the PBE...

Like this time it's the yasuo/lee sin buffs, when the community was pointing towards the new rune system as a failure and a cause of a lot of the recent power creep causing more problems with the game's damage.

Like, it might just be created due to the development and release schedules, and I can think of a few other circumstantial explanations, but the way that it lines up sometimes is just uncanny but admittedly also circumstantial... and it's not anyone would put it past riot to manipulate and silence people and ideas that they don't want in their community.

9 Comments

Takazaki1 votes

no, because riot has explained before their design philosophy multiple times when it comes down to game balance and design.

Like this time it's the yasuo/lee sin buffs

Riot is buffing Yasuo because outside of bronze the man sits at a 47~% winrate, is easily fucked over if you properly play around his counterplay and play style, and has a very restricted build path for core items allowing little to no flexibility unless the Yasuo player is abusing something ( like BorK or BC & FM when his pen applies to all his autos not just crits ).

Similarly, there isn't a single division for leesin that he doesnt break past a 48% winrate ( all divisions other then bronze have a 47% winrate)

simply put, without even accounting for player skill differences ( aka the reason why master yi/katarina/ the other low elo pub stompers aren't nerfed into the ground ) its statistically shown that picking these 2 champions is detrmental to your team's chances of winning

double so for yasuo players as riot went on record to say ( paraphrasing here for lack of the time to actually find the qoute )

Yasuo mains do not achieve the same level of success as mains of nearly any other champion

No matter how much time and effort you put into yasuo, as it currently stands your statistically unlikely to see the same amount of success as anyone else just because you picked that champ.

Is that not reason enough for a buff?

Alex h87213 votes

Hahah dont even try to talk to these kids about yasuo, just mention that he's a bad winrate at any elo that isnt bronze, and especially has it rough in diamond + and the will all REEEEEEEEEEEEE in your face and say "bUt HeS A hArD cHaMp" blah blah blah, they dont wanna listen and dont care about logic.

Sona Ping1 votes

{quoted}

no, because riot has explained before their design philosophy multiple times when it comes down to game balance and design. Riot is buffing Yasuo because outside of bronze the man sits at a 47~% winrate, is easily fucked over if you properly play around his counterplay and play style, and has a very restricted build path for core items allowing little to no flexibility unless the Yasuo player is abusing something ( like BorK or BC & FM when his pen applies to all his autos not just crits ). Similarly, there isn't a single division for leesin that he doesnt break past a 48% winrate ( all divisions other then bronze have a 47% winrate) simply put, without even accounting for player skill differences ( aka the reason why master yi/katarina/ the other low elo pub stompers aren't nerfed into the ground ) its statistically shown that picking these 2 champions is detrmental to your team's chances of winning double so for yasuo players as riot went on record to say ( paraphrasing here for lack of the time to actually find the qoute ) No matter how much time and effort you put into yasuo, as it currently stands your statistically unlikely to see the same amount of success as anyone else just because you picked that champ. Is that not reason enough for a buff?

Look, I know a lot of Americans are really big on this whole "we are the worst at everything" thing but it's getting a bit too far when you call Challenger and it's 53.54% win rate Yasuos "Bronze" as an argument. Especially when all that win rate stuff isn't at all factual outside of that pretense.

Takazaki1 votes

challenger is literally the WORST data sample to use as it a fraction of 1% of the player base. Every single division outside of that has an lower then average winrate across the board. just because someone played 10 games of yasuo in challenger to change his overall winrate doesn't outweigh the literal thousands of games played by everyone else of relatively high ranking ( riot primarily focuses on plat-plat+ when making balance decisions )

deadlychuck1 votes

Hmm, what's ryze's and azir's win rate looking like this week?

No matter how much time and effort you put into yasuo, as it currently stands your statistically unlikely to see the same amount of success as anyone else just because you picked that champ.

This is inherently always true for some subset of the champion pool. That said, there's nothing that dictates that yasuo needs to be in that > 50% win rate pool. When yasuo moves up in win rate, you'll undoubtedly see a few champions move down to a sub 50% win rate.

Takazaki1 votes

ryze and azir and inherently busted and are purposely left over nerfed. every incarnation of ryze has gone through the same life cycle of , weak on release to extremely oppressive when mastered, azir took only a handful of months to reach that same status. Yasuo had to abuse a item combination and oversight in his kit ( primarily speaking the armor pen on all autos he use to have ) in order to reach the same level as those to did without the help of a beneficial meta/ build paths.

you might as well have said pre-reworked poppy winrates justify yasuo's being that low.

This is inherently always true for some subset of the champion pool. That said, there's nothing that dictates that yasuo needs to be in that > 50% win rate pool.

but there is nothing that justifies him being objectively weaker then majority of the cast?

deadlychuck1 votes

but there is nothing that justifies him being objectively weaker then majority of the cast?

inherently busted and are purposely left over nerfed.

There's your reason.

Takazaki1 votes

But he Isn't inherently busted. It took a lot of things working in his favor to put him in the same positions as the aforementioned champions who are inherently busted. Yasuo is no where near the levels of trouble of Azir, Ryze, kayle, and pre-rework poppy.

He's a high risk candidate for a buff because of his popularity and ability to perfectly played , but unlike ryze or Azir he does it at a range in which you can kill him and/or has to put himself into a fight in order to deal damage.

deadlychuck1 votes

He's a high risk candidate for a buff

By nature, giving him a buff for being "high risk" makes him lower risk.

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