Will There Ever Be Balance in League of Legends?
What do you guys think?
Credit to Stonewall008.
16 Comments
As long as Rito continues to employ their current "balance" staff, this game will never be balanced. As long as Fearless, Jag, Meddler and Repertoir continue making changes based solely on their own biases and lackadaisical efforts, this game will just continue to decay.
It is not humanly possible to create a 'perfect' balance, unless you made every champion have the same skills and abilities.
We must wait for the Chosen One to bring balance.
So I can't watch the video at the moment and this next comment may be entirely out of context but:
No. League right now has 128 champions and counting. In order to make sure that this vast number of possible champions and champion combinations have any meaning to them, each champion must fulfill a particular niche for the job they do. Of course however, not all niches are made equal. Reset champions who backload a lot of their power budget on the ability to sweep teams for example are incomparable to engage champions that intentionally frontload their power to give their team a head start in a fight. Yet, we can always tell when one is definitely better for which situations. This is only balanced in the sense that Rock Paper Scissors is balanced. Yes, you will win RPS approximately 50% of the time based on random chance, and maybe League's more convoluted Rock Paper Scissors Spock Interactions can be balanced so that each individual player tends towards a 50% win rate in an environment that reflects their skill level, but the fact remains that interaction per interaction, Rock will always lose against Paper. Scissors will always beat Paper. I don't even know what Spock does but I'm sure it relates to my analogy as well.
On a micro level, League must always maintain these imbalances so that each individual champion has a place. Even if the game is ever statistically balanced on a macro level, there will always be matchups where one champion is clearly better than another in a certain job because that's just how you need to design champs in a game as large as League. That's simply the reality.
I feel this could help deepen conversation around the state of balance in League of Legends, particularly since most of the above video includes a lot of saltiness targeted at the community. What I think Stonewall gets wrong, as well as many other players, is that he thinks true balance implies every champion should end up always being equal in power to any other champion in all situations, and therefore equally picked with equal win rates. This clearly can never happen, since every champion is unique (or is at least supposed to be) and so will have different synergies, playstyles, difficulty curves, etc. that will cause their success and popularity to vary depending on which other champions they're interacting with, and who's playing them. In fact, if champions were to somehow be "perfectly balanced" in that respect, it would be boring, since League would become a completely static game, with no sense of variation.
The end result is that, if there ever were to be "perfect" balance, there would still likely be a meta, with some champions and comps being more popular than others. The key difference relative to the current state of balance, however, is that this meta would be completely fluid on its own, and would only need player input to answer dominant comps and picks with counter-comps and counterpicks, which would then set a new temporary meta and so on, without requiring Riot to manually tinker with the game's systems to get them moving again. Stonewall is right that there is no shame in picking flavor of the month champions in order to win, and I think that highlights the balance issues still present in League, since an ideal state would allow for those picks to be answered organically by other champions or strats, which would then take their place in the spotlight, instead of requiring a later patch to tone them down.
True balance isn't homogeneous -- each champion should be good at something, and horrible at other things. So it's up to the player to recognize those strengths / weaknesses and capitalize on them -- be that through playstyle, items, champions, etc.
However, League isn't balanced by any logical means. We have champions who are vastly superior to other champions in nearly every way, and champions who can do almost everything (Lee) very well. We also have pathetically easy champs that just dramatically outperform much harder, more complex champs -- which isn't really fair by any stretch of imagination.
So, no, League isn't balanced, and I don't really think it will be. See, Riot is an F2P company, and true balance isn't lucrative for an F2P game; if every champion was strong, then Riot wouldn't be able to sell skins as well, since none of the champions would be super popular. Right now, we have popular champions that are popular because of their strength over others: Ahri, Lee, Riven, Zed, Vayne, etc. You very rarely see skins for champions that aren't top-tier or popular - meaning any "average" champion - because it's just not profitable. So, Riot will try and create FOTM champions and classes to make more money off of us gullible whales. In cases like Lee $in, they just make sure he's top-tier and viable no matter the meta, so that he will always be a popular pick that sells well.
Thanks to F2P, true balance will never exist in League. We'll always have waves of champions that vastly outperform the rest of the roster, and we'll always have static power picks. But hey, you kids enabled companies like this. So don't complain.
The fact that the meta shifts proves that balance is not possible in this game on a grand scale.
As long as people only focus on the most viable tactic, then we won't have stability.
The game is an arms race and that's what keeps it alive.
I don't feel we can have balance when Riot change drastically the game every season.
Now, I don't complaint about that, it actually keep the game alive (IMO), but when you see that DOTA can't achieve perfect balance even tho, there havn't been any real changes in the game core mechanics for a while now, with less playable characters and more counter for each of them (compared to Lol), i don't see how League of legends can manage to fo it.
Also don't forget guys, we're still in pre-season, the most "YOLO" part of balance in the year.
Balance is a fool's master.
Perfect Balance where everything is equal in terms of strengths & weaknesses regardless of the meta?LOL nope,maybe in someone dreams.
lol when you have old champions, who are designed to do one thing insanely well and nothing else, and new champions with five different roles, twenty combos, and require at least one PHD to play, you're gonna have imbalances. As one of my dearest friends used to say to me, no shit sherlock.
It's always going to be a revolving door simply because Riot can't tweak every single champion every single patch and then also look at them from a macro perspective to make sure they're on the same level.
yes as long as riot employee can think ahead of... i see many pvp games that can do balance so well... because they spent a lot of time to test then gather data then finally balance them...
most time, riot just rush to create something new... they never check nor test... they are lazy to gather data from pbe and or game to balance them...
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