It's hard to balance a game

Doodlzzz·Feb 14, 2018·22 votes·1,235 views

Especially when there are 130+ champs to balance, and when there are 200+ items to keep track of, not to mention, a ton a different play styles to account for.

Think about it, a change to just one champion or item affects the balance of everyone one of the thousands components to this game. It's not a no brainer, and the Riot balance team isn't stupid.

I still think it's good to bring out issues about the game, but seriously, balancing a game that changes so often is hard stuff.

42 Comments

deadlychuckFeb 14, 201813 votes

Doesn't explain why they make decisions that lead to it being even harder to balance.

Ok sure but whyFeb 14, 20187 votes

Especially when you're too busy making skins

DoodlzzzFeb 14, 20183 votes

well, someones gotta make a living lol

Kai GuyFeb 14, 201814 votes

Are you aware that skins and balance are teams comprised of completely different people?

LeAzirFeb 14, 20185 votes

well, money spent in developing skins is money not spent in balance, although there would be no money without skins in the first place.

Kai GuyFeb 14, 20186 votes

This is accurate logic, how ever lets move on to apply real life applications. Do you think their Balance and gameplay departments are under budgeted then? that their other divisions eat up a much higher % of their budget creating high enough overhead costs they are unable to properly finance departments related to game health? Or do you feel they are understaffed to save on Annual costs?

If something else, please clear it up how you feel the money spent towards other divisions of the company would have any detrimental impact on the gameplay and balance departments. if you don't think there is, then your point is still correct but also could be a bit misleading as some folks who will read it and think oh gee riot does not finance their departments so that's why things are the way they are.

Ok sure but whyFeb 14, 20183 votes

Yea, 999 people in the Skins team and 1 in balance

BarkleyFeb 14, 20182 votes

Ok sure but why

Ok sure but whyFeb 15, 20182 votes

Boards: Hey, Vayne is kinda overpowered!

Riot: Is that so? Let's make a legendary skin for her and nerf her two weeks after!

Kai GuyFeb 15, 20181 votes

Is there any time where vayne being a good pick does not cause boards to call her overpowered?

What Is SmiteFeb 14, 20187 votes

They have a server dedicated to running 100,000 tests a day, it's possible for them to do things we believe to be "impossible." Technology has advanced to the point where millions of variances can be tested in a short timeframe and data can be collected with ease.

T4underboltFeb 14, 20187 votes

There are things that are obviously visible and easily fixable but riot is too lazy or favours certain champs/classes/mechanics. We have lack of balance not because it's too hard but because of riot attitude towards it.

CrystalyskFeb 14, 20186 votes

Nobody forced Riot to release 139 champions. It's impossible to balance this amount of champions but there is no excuse for them making only 30 of them viable and 110 completely useless. I'd rather have 100 champions with 80 being viable instead of 139 with 30 being viable. First option offers more variety despite having a less amount of total champions.

Learn to walk before you can run.

Kai GuyFeb 14, 20185 votes

50% is impossible for mobas, there can never be balance as long as champions have individual kits and require different levels of mechanical skill to function. Viability varys over the Elos. Azir is a decent example of this.

Madsin25Feb 14, 20185 votes

All they need to do is lower the damage. I mean my god it is so simple.

Atleast give me the illusion that I am meaningful participant in a teamfight.

The game feels so bad because everything happens to fast.

TranscendVirtualFeb 14, 20183 votes

{quoted}

All they need to do is lower the damage. I mean my god it is so simple.

Atleast give me the illusion that I am meaningful participant in a teamfight.

The game feels so bad because everything happens to fast.

Lower the damage for all champions in the game

Ginger976Feb 14, 20182 votes

{quoted}

All they need to do is lower the damage. I mean my god it is so simple.

Atleast give me the illusion that I am meaningful participant in a teamfight.

The game feels so bad because everything happens to fast.

It used to be like that. I've been playing since '09, so I can't remember the season, but I do remember specific complaints to the tune of "I'm a BURST mage/FED ADC, why does it take me 15 minutes to kill a tank??!?!?"

Madsin25Feb 14, 20182 votes

Atleast I have some interaction with the unkillable tanks.

This whole "Race to one-shot" BS is getting annoying.

To each his own though I totally understand how some people could like the way it is.

Ginger976Feb 14, 20181 votes

{quoted}

Atleast I have some interaction with the unkillable tanks.

This whole "Race to one-shot" BS is getting annoying.

To each his own though I totally understand how some people could like the way it is.

My example was the other side of spectrum where people didn't actually like having TOO MUCH interaction because they felt that part of the fantasy of being a carry was immediate deletion of enemies on a whim.

Jinx HunterFeb 14, 20185 votes

Lame excuse. They know exactly how to balance it. They just don't want to balance it for the player base. They keep trying to balance it around people that watch LCS. They want LC$BIGPLAY$ to make the watchers get all excited.

VonyaloFeb 14, 20185 votes

It's hard to balance a game that has bad game design

xelakerFeb 14, 20184 votes

it's hard to completely balance a game, it is much easier than riot makes it look lol

taleofsonataFeb 14, 20183 votes

It's not hard to balance a game, I'm pretty sure riot balance team is argueing with each other and never having a conclusion or deciding on the path to choose. Teamwork OP!

Kai GuyFeb 14, 20181 votes

List me very well balanced moba please, and list a multi player PVP game you consider well balanced as well.

Brain Errör 404Feb 14, 20181 votes

Vainglory was an incredibly balanced and skillful game to me around the time I played it. That's when they only had about 15 champs though. No one is asking for perfect balance for league anyways. Just that they actually make the game enjoyable and less frustrating.

Jungle Lux GodFeb 16, 20182 votes

Rivals of Aether is a platform fighter that tends to be pretty balanced. It only has 11 characters, but the stages and ability to counterpick the opposing character to a wide variety of legal stages allows for the game to effectively balance a much larger character roster.

ZephyrDrakeFeb 14, 201810 votes

{quoted}

It's not hard to balance a game, I'm pretty sure riot balance team is argueing with each other and never having a conclusion or deciding on the path to choose. Teamwork OP!

not hard to balanced a game... the words of someone who has never tried balancing any sort of game in any capacity

Jungle Lux GodFeb 14, 20184 votes

If you're that confident that it's not hard to balance a game, then you should go ask Capcom why they haven't balanced Street Fighter yet despite having 30 years to get it right with character rosters of 40- characters and no other variables to account for.

MuffledGarbageFeb 14, 20182 votes

To be fair, The BlazBlu series has been insanely well balanced with every character viable in SOME capacity so it's definitely possible

Jungle Lux GodFeb 16, 20181 votes

I really have to give credit to Ark System Works, since so many of their fighting games tend to be balanced to some degree (excluding games they just publish, since Merkava and Gordeau were super busted in UNIEL). I don't play them myself (fighting games are about as hard to get into as MOBAS, only on a different spectrum), but I love watching them. They still tend to have some degree of balance problems, but it's not a distinct case of certain characters being so strong they just crowd out the rest of the cast or so weak that you lose to worse players just because of your character pick.

Blazblue is especially well designed on this end since their drive system allows for every character to express their gameplay in a way that's extremely unique to them, and is arguably one of the most innovative fighting franchises on this front. I theorized that players pick up characters either because they like the character's thematics, they like the character's playstyle, or the character is just generally strong. Too many fighting games set up their system such that different characters have similar enough playstyles that they are interchangeable for players looking for that particular playstyle, so players will just pick the better option, but Blazblue's drive system lets characters of similar archetypes have different playstyles to a large degree relative to their similar style of their archetype.

Ok sure but whyFeb 15, 20181 votes

Same reason Riot doesn't

[sg-ahri-3]

AnateraFeb 14, 20183 votes

It is hard, but it would be a lot easier if they did things that actually made sense.

JackMcSnipeyzFeb 14, 20181 votes

If you think listening to the boards = making sense, you are not right.

CrystalyskFeb 14, 20183 votes

He didn't even say that o.o

Teridax68Feb 14, 20183 votes

I agree with the general assessment: League is a vastly complicated game where even the seemingly smallest of changes can cause huge disruption, so all in all I do think the Live Gameplay team is doing a pretty damn good job of preventing such a system from teetering over the edge even with weekly patches. I think we as players also both heavily underestimate the difficulty of balancing, and heavily overestimate our own understanding of the game's balance and design, which is why there are so many armchair designers around here who would sooner call Riot a bunch of incompetent fools, rather than question whether they themselves are missing some critical piece of understanding on their end.

Having said that, I also don't think we can really totally excuse Riot here, because League's difficult balancing problem is one purely of their own making: Riot wasn't just handed these complex systems to work with, they created them from the ground up themselves, and both changed and built upon them further as the game evolved. It is therefore, in the end, Riot's own fault that their game is so difficult to balance, particularly since part of their development model has included fairly frequent and disruptive changes that do not aim to improve balance. Riot's responsibility is thus to not only balance the game, but to also adjust the design of their game in such a way that it becomes as easy to balance as possible, while still staying true to values such as diversity, interactivity, and so on. As with balancing, this is much easier said than done, and Riot has in fact changed a lot of their game's core systems and mechanics, but it still feels like some of these changes have been detrimental in the long run, and so because the scope for those updates was improperly set (Riot's roster updates could likely have turned out a lot more successful if the devs had relaxed their schedule, and taken more time to do a deeper dive on the systems they were changing, for example).

SwiftKitten88Feb 14, 20182 votes

yes it is defintly hard to come up with the proper nerfs and buffs for champions to buff or nerf them the exact right amount... especially when u may not play that champsion.

whats NOT hard to do is to see which champs are broken.. and whats NOT hard to do is talk to the mains of said champ to dicuss what buffs or nerf should be given and still have them fun and viable.

the issue i for the most part have had with riots balance team (although i will say 8.4 is looking FANTASTIC and is the best patch with the most correct balancing i have seen in well over a year) so if we ignore the great job riots balance team seems to be doing this one patch, and we look at previous patches the last 2-4 years.

the isnt is BOTH they are addressing what needs to be addressed, and when they DO address it they do shit that crazy overbuffs or over nerfs it. they also didn't listen warning that say "if you do "X" the likely result will be "Y" here is the data and this is why it will happen the best example was when i told riot that removing strength of the ages will nerf nidalee winrate by 8%

hence the famous ( at least for a nidalee main like me) winrate from from 48% to 38% in ONE PATCH (the other 2% was the gutting of item 3116 )

what data did i show riot... i whoed them the winrate of the average nidalee who took strength of the ages was 48% i showed them the average winrate for nid whjo took thunderlords was 40%. form that data... it really donest take a freaking geniius to put two and two togther than if you make ALL nidalee take "thunderlords" the winrate is going to drop by 8%.

and yet TWO MONTHS before strength of the ages was removed. i told riot about this. and i brought it up on the forums constantly.

except back then everyone hated nidalee, so no one cared..

at least now riot seems to be fixing things that need to be fixed.

UnboundHadesFeb 14, 20182 votes

it almost like riot did fuck all for a while after preseason while having one of the longest preseasons and still manage to fuck things up dont just say its hard to balance with no reasons besides things affect eachother these are the kinds of posts that i fucking hate where you just give a garbage statement that can be shot down so fast then hope that people that agree with you give you actual reasons

rtbf221651412Feb 14, 20181 votes

Shhhh don't get their hopes down.

GoogleCardboardFeb 14, 20181 votes

Thank god they're constantly adding more right?

MicbranFeb 14, 20181 votes

this is wrong, clearly if we nerf yasuo everything in league will find it’s balanced state.

AMYS GRAVEFeb 14, 20181 votes

Of course its hard, that's why they get paid well to do it. If it were easy they'd give a homeless person a ham sandwich to do it. That doesn't excuse them not doing the thing they get paid for.