Please, Riot Listen to us a Little More

Riot, I want you to take a good, hard look at the new duskblade and the changes to Xin Zhao, and then I want you to look at some of the community feedback that came through while they were on the PBE. The community overwhelmingly disagreed with both of these changes before they went through stating them as both unneeded and just downright blatantly overpowered. And now, a few days into their live server debut, lo and behold, they are blatantly overpowered and just outright defining the meta right now. ADC's are building Sterak's Gaze just to counter the influx of assassins.

But this problem goes beyond just the current state of the game. We plead with you on a regular basis not to release certain changes, but our cries always fall on deaf ears. Look at the juggernaut rework of Skarner, Mordekaiser and Darius; all three of them were grossly overpowered upon release. Both the PBE and the boards had given you overwhelmingly negative feedback about them, but they were pushed through anyway. You then had to spend the next several patches nerfing the hell outta them to make them balanced, when it would have been so much more beneficial to have just held them back and have them in a better state upon release.

Cassiopeia's rework had problems of it's own. It just didn't feel right. We didn't like where the changes were headed and we were very vocal about it. She saw maybe 2 patches of play after her initial release and while sure, her balance state was okay, she didn't feel rewarding to play anymore. she was then promptly abandoned by most people, both veteran Cass players and new players alike. And it wasn't that she was incredibly weak, there was just no real reason to pick her. She didn't have significant easy burst, mobility, or reliable damage. The fact that she was a scaling hyper carry didn't really come into play very often because we were in the middle of a very fast paced meta upon her release.

My point is this: please consider player feedback more when making game changing decisions, please Riot. We may not always be right (popular consensus before Yasuo was released was he was a bit underpowered and then once he hit live he exploded), but when a significant portion of players who actually respond to the changes of the game are telling you that those changes are too strong or too weak, at least go back and take another look rather than push through with no regard for our advice. It saves headaches, time, and probably a lot of money spent in future balance playtests.