ALOT of analysis about a state of balance in league
Perhaps this post is the result of my exhaustion of patch 6.21 since it has now been three weeks since the last patch rather than the usually two. But still, I believe some of the things mentioned here hold some truth worth discussing.
I wish the game were balanced in a way that would make all champions viable.
I think an appropriate response to this would be to highlight the difficulty or even the impossibility of balancing a game with so many variables (items, masteries, champions, player skill etc.) then add onto that all of these things are always being changed and added to the game which creates more variables.
Has there not been other games that have achieved a state with a modicum of balance? And have they not done so in a timely manner?
I hate to see things that are quite evidently unbalanced exist in the state that they do for quite often months at a time. Examples of this would be Syndra, Graves, Azir (before and after he was dumpstered into irrelevance) and Ekko. keep in mind that unbalance refers to something being smothering/overwhelming because of its dominance and regarded as worthless because of its weaknesses.
An appropriate response to this might be, why not just play the OP champions?
As a player, I want to decide what champion I want to play and not have the game itself decide what champion I should play. Even players, high elo or nay, that only play the OP champions at the time will agree that it is really boring seeing the same 20 champions every single game.
The worst part is that champion select is a ripe template for beautiful gaming decisions and strategies. Both teams need to decide what type of team comp they would like to play and pick out of 100+ champions which of them will best suit their goals and do so without revealing to the enemy team their intentions all while the enemy team does the same thing in tandem. What I just described could be a game all by itself; most card games played today are basically this concept, like hearthstone. (take turns implementing your strategy and do your best to decipher your enemy without being deciphered)
But instead of this, champion select consists of trying to get as many of the top 20 or so best champions to yourself as possible while trying to deny as many of those champions to your enemy. Though there is a strategy to this, here are the problems with it;
Everyone goes into champion select knowing who they are going to play and who everyone else is going to play. This is very boring and takes a decision away from the player which is generally a bad game development characteristic, so I'm told.
Knowing what champion everyone is going to play also takes away the strategy of deciphering or predicting what champions your enemies are going to pick, so there goes another aspect of decision and strategy.
Also having the champions be predetermined also predetermines the type of team composition you are going to play. So instead of deciding what type of team composition your team wants to play and then picking to suit that goal, everyone grabs the most OP champion that they can when it is their turn to pick and whatever comes of these picks is the kind of team composition that you are going to play. So there goes another aspect of decision and strategy.
This next point might be rude and insulting but I feel I need to say it.
I will tell a brief story to explain my next point. To get right to the point, skip the next line of text.
I used to assemble bow and bay windows. There came a time in the winter when we would not have enough orders to fill a full days work. If we finished early we had a choice of either going home early or finding something to do which really meant "look busy". We were told to look busy because if a boss ever came around and saw workers not working due to lack of work the proper response to this would be to lay them off because they are clearly overstaffed. Both going home early and being laid off results in lack of pay. To avoid both of these options, we would work much slower than we usually would and create problems and messes for ourselves that we would then pretend to struggle to clean up and fix to create work for ourselves.
I understand that there may exist deep within the people of the balance team a fear of being "finished" with balancing the game lest you make yourself obsolete. So long as the development team is creating things, the balance team will have more than enough to do. The introduction of each and every item, champion, mastery etc. has the potential and prominent likelihood of altering the relative strength of literally everything else in the game which creates a lot of work.
In conclusion, I would rather have league be unbalanced because of too many changes rather than neglect.
To anyone reading this, thank you for your time and attention.
If you care to comment, please use sentence structure and logical reasoning. Thank you.
Being honest, I had a more refined version of this post written but I accidentally deleted it without saving. So I wrote it again rather quickly. So if I seem agitated at any point it is partially because I am demoralized about the current state of the game and partially because I'm a careless fool who accidentally deleted something he put a lot or work into.
