Grading the balance team on their Final Trial: This Preseason

If you remember this post, you will notice how much I took stupidity said from Rioter balance people just to display how lacking they are at their job. From "Supports need to be broken to be popular", "Sterak's is just as good as Black Cleaver", to "Cho'Gath isn't broken."

Note this at the end:

The balance team has worked on the game for over 4 years now. The gloves are off, and there's no excuses left. They couldn't or refused to balance season 7. Now the game is in total chaos from a lack of checking numbers, despite apparently working on preseason instead of fixing the remaining season 7. I give them until the season officially begins to solve this chaos, and everything they refuses to fix in season 7 that still remains. If they cannot reach, "a state of the game where no class(es) are ungodly overpowered in comparison to another, splitpushing is a viable tactic and not negated by taking Baron, solo kills are meaningful, teamwide snowballing isn't as high as it currently is, no class(es) or items invalidate another class." by half way minimum, then they have failed.

And here's Riot's report card:

No Class(es) being ungodly broken compared to another: F Splitpushing is a viable tactic: F Solo kills are meaningful: D- Teamwide Snowballing Reduction: F No classes invalidate another: F No items invalidate a class: F

Considering Riot said they weren't going to balance the rest of season 7 due to preseason preparation, they needed a C average to pass. They failed considerably. Remember how they made a patch, 7.24b, that would supposedly fix top lane? Look at top lane right now. Has it changed at all?

Thing is, you can't buff bruisers to be better in this environment. Bruisers operate on moderate defenses and moderate melee damage. If damage gets too far jacked up, then they can't survive. If defenses get too far jacked up, they can't deal damage. They're also melee, so if you jack up CC, they can't really do anything. Shocker to absolutely no one, if you buff how good tanks are with low item costs and powerful keystones and make supports better, bruisers can't deal damage. When you allow supports to buff ADC damage and ADC items are too cheap, they die too quickly. When you tack on too much CC, melee champions tend to suck. Even if you tried buffing bruisers with better scaling base stats, it just means mid lane suffers from lacking the same powercreep, and then the objectives on the map would be too weak due to the same lack of powercreep.

There are numerous ways to fix these issues too. It isn't even that anything to fix this gets stuck on the PBE or anything; they simply are unaware or don't give a shit. Instead, we get things like Riven and Yasuo buffs because they aren't good for the exact same reason every bruiser/skirmisher isn't good. We all know it's biased; There's a Riven main and a Yasuo main on the balance team, but, unsurprisingly, there are zero actual bruiser players on the balance team.

I could name a fairly decent changelist to fix a majority of this. Doesn't matter. Balance team has made it clear they don't listen to suggestions or feedback for a long time. Back in seasons 1 and 2, you could complain about something on the Forums and Morello or Guinsoo would come into your thread and actually discuss. Sure, you could argue that the Gameplay Boards now are very circlejerky and tend to be, overall, not so smart. What if that wasn't the case? There would be no excuse to not communicate. You could argue Meddler's occasional gameplay thoughts foster discussion, but when he mentioned things like buffing Tryndamere and Yi you have to think, "Why is he talking about poor designs like Tryndamere and Yi being buffed while top lane is still bleeding?" It would be much more effective had he bring up discussion about the Rune system, since bruisers have 0 dedicated keystones while ADCs have 3, despite bruisers having twice the number of champions. Or discussion about certain runes being so much better than their competitors, or some runes just sucking.