[Game Balance]: Quality over Quantity

[Disclaimer: I did some thinking about all the balance changes that have been made in recent patches & I think I might have found out why things feel the way they are.** I am not purposely trying to attack the Balance team** but rather, I would like to find out why most of the patches that have come out recently are so negatively recieved the way they are & possibly try to make sense of it all.]

    Towards the start of the Season, it was mentioned that patches were going to be handled differently, where the patches would rotate between being Large-sized Patches & Small-sized ones. Now things worked out well after a while, but I now believe things are starting to get quite outta hand. Large Patches would bring in game-changing things like New Itemization, New Runes & Champion-Related work (Reworks/New Champions/Balance Changes) while the smaller patches gives the balance team a chance to fix the smaller stuff. This keeps the game Interesting since there's newer stuff to play around every other patch, which is good & I think that's one of the things that they were trying to accomplish. However with every large patch that comes out, alot of things start to come out of line. This is where the Smaller patch comes in to essentially "Save the day", but what if that small patch just isn't enough? What if the larger patches are creating more problems than the small patch can fix?

Now I'm not sure what kind of work goes into making a patch, but it kinda makes sense as to why I think this might be the problem. Here's an Example, if your teacher gave you a project (Large Patch#1) to work on, you would most likely try to put as much effort as you can before the deadline (Essentially, this is the smaller patch). Now if your teacher randomly drops a new project for you to complete (Next Large Patch) before you finished that first one, how do you think that first one is going to come out?

Now I don't think there's an Instant Fix for this, but perhaps slowing it down on the large patches for a while might do some good. Perhaps doing 3-5 Small Patches followed by a Larger patch would be better, this way they can keep the game interesting & give the Balance team just a bit more time to find things that need to be looked at before the newer stuff comes in. Now you might say this is similar to how they did patches previously, which you wouldn't be wrong. However instead of doing one big patch during Preseason & Mid Season, why don't we do 4 Large Patches per year? It would look something like this;

• January: 1 Large Patch, 1 Small Patch (Time permitting due to the Holidays) February: 2 Small Patches March: 2 Small Patches

• April: 1 Large Patch, 1 Small Patch May: 2 Small Patches (Time permitting due to the holidays) June: 2 Small Patches

• July: 1 Large Patch, 1 Small Patch (Time permitting due to the Holidays) August: 2 Small Patches September: 2 Small Patches

• October: 1 Large Patch, 1 Small Patch November: 2 Small Patches (Time permitting due to the holidays) December: 2 Small Patches (Time permitting due to the Holidays)

Bottom line, I believe if the balance team had more time to look at the game completely & take the time to fix things, we wouldn't have so much chaos & perhaps less negativity with how things are going. I understand I could be entirely wrong about this, but I honestly feel like this makes much more sense than just simply blaming the balance team for everything.

If you took the time to read all of this, I would like to thank you for taking the time to do so.