Looks like the Riot Balance team has taken a month long holiday break

Not true, we had the whole "we actually do favour Lee Sin" shitfest.

It's called Christmas

In fairness, I would assume riot does give their employees a break around the holidays. As do most businesses.

Fuck's sake dude it's the holidays they're not robots. They have to get some time off to spend with family and friends and the like.

This game has angered me to no end and yet I still fucking play. I've been here since season 2 and these past 2 seasons have been absolutely horrid in terms of overall game enjoyment (if only for myself) High base damage champs that are not juggernauts are building one or 2 damage items and assassinating people like it's what they were designed to do.

I've lived through ap Yi. I've witnessed the horror that was 6 sunfire twitch. I stood by and slit my wrists while I watched league of cleavers take over the rift. I begrudgingly accepted the Veigar rework even though I still like his "rework" He's still not my old Veigar. And now I'm living through the tank assassination/bot feed meta....Fuck me.

It happens every year for the later part of December.

It's almost like they have lives outside of this game and the most celebrated holiday in the world was going on...

{quoted}

Not a peep in almost a month in terms of game health/balance discussion.

Honestly, do we ever get much of that anyway even when they are here? Meddler pretty much picks and chooses which thread he wants to pop in before disappearing.

The moment when you wonder, why is no RED talking anywhere, and you realize it's Christmas.

Yeah wow, its almost like these people want to enjoy Christmas + New Year with their friends and family rather than listen to us shitfuck their game to shreds for a few weeks.

In all seriousness, we knew patch 6.24 was the last of 2016 because they said so in the patch update. The next patch is 7.1, and some decent changes are coming.

You likely won't hear much or more importantly SEE much until the LCS starts. They get pretty lazy around this time every year (don't have to like it, but it is the truth). They drop the preseason stuff, pat themselves on the back while everyone is scrambling to make sense of it, drop patches sporadically, then just fall off the map for an entire month.

I understand it's the Christmas holidays and people deserve time off to be with their families and such, but an entire month without meaningful discussion about the state of the game is really troubling. Preseason is all about shaking up balance and following up on changes. This preseason we've seen virtually no follow up changes or even discussions about what was implemented in Season 7. Here are a list of things that Season 7 has introduced that haven't been balanced or even discussed for this entire month.

1. The assassin "rework" has been a failure. Currently the entire class is MIA outside of and . The rest of the class is unplayable with how easy it is to mitigate damage with exhaust/heals/shields.

2. The jungle is completely out of whack. Diversity is at an all time low. Can you keep up with clear speed and gank pressure? If so you can be played! If not? Well sucks to suck.

3. 5 man bot lane dives 8ish minutes into the game was a rare sight in LCS at one point, now it happens in virtually all of my games at gold/plat elo. First bot lane to back = auto lose lane and you instantly start the inevitable snowball. (First turret gold is bullshit)

4. top lane is an absolute mess. There is no reason for the jungler to head top. Top lane currently just waits for a fight to break out bot lane and TP down for hopefully a teamfight win that snowballs into a first turret + dragon. Rift Herald is just terrible. Takes too long to take and the buff is meh.

5. redemption + locket has virtually killed the assassin class for how strong and easy the damage mitigation is to activate. Op as hell and still 0 riot discussion on it.

6. Caitlyn has sat at a 53% winrate for most of the preseason with a 30% playrate. Still no nerfs in sight as she currently is killing bot lane diversity.

I could name a couple more but it's depressed me. My point is though that even if we are on break, there's no reason to at least have a couple of red posts here and there over the break discussing balance. The game is currently not balanced and has introduced a lot of game health issues that I think are worth discussing.

And? They put out a hot fix to tide us over.

More importantly, they aren't paid to come on here and respond to our angry anecdotal nonsense posts. They do that because they want us to feel like they're listening. It's not part of their jobs and every time they do they run the risk of someone using what they say in one specific situation to complain about a different stance that a different Rioter takes five months later.

Really, a month off is so little for them to ask.

Riots balancing team has been gone since s2. All they do is nerf 20 fotms every couple of months the change the meta because they have no vision on what the game should be.

It's not necessarily their job to talk to the community about their balance decisions.

They can, but they don't really have to.

You mean in two weeks?

Mods gone?

Still awaiting on Riot's available context for Yasuo's nerfs.

Also Meddler stated they would be taking a long break. Technically even the hotfix that came out after Camille's release wasn't even going ot happen. But they decided to act now. This time is used to actually identify problem cases because there is a longer time for the community and the meta to adapt. Giving you a better window of Champ strength. For all we know after the dust settles they will have less work to do than anticipated.

they do every year... last year we sat on only 1 viable keystone for little over a month, aka thunderlords.

Where are you getting a month from?

The last major patch was less than a month ago and there was a mini patch a few weeks ago. They also, said that the last patch of the year was going to be 6.24 so this isn't even unexpected.

Yeah Rito is on vacation atm so expect nothing for 3 weeks give or take, and when they do come back expect numerous issues to still be in the game and the patch to only address one thing

that's because there's been a holiday

Lol , " balance team". They should get fired and hire some proper ppl that can do that

lol you think people that get paid as much as the devs that work for big game developers work during December? Working in December is for plebs. Riot's balance team might be hyper incompetent, but at the very least you can't call them plebs. lol working. lol. Bitch I'm on my month long vacation from taking 2 ad off Vayne motherfucker.

They just did.