This video needs to just be literally glued to this forum

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This is an amazing video, their explanation of "perfect inbalance" makes a LOT of sense and is what riot should try achieve.

Unfortunately, we can see that it isn't the case. The problem with league is that the core mechanics of many champions give them significant enough advantages that they will ALWAYS be one step ahead, and that there aren't other champions that are available to counter them. And even if a champ is balanced, they may be incredibly annoying to play against. Ex, Fizz and Yasuo.

What are you talking about? Fizz only became relevant in recent seasons only to repeatedly get shat on when the big tournaments came.

Yasuo.. I didn't see much of the S5 stuff but he was hardly relevant outside of a few tournaments before they made more changes to him. There's been a lot of trends outside these two champs.

Additionally beacuse of money (ex. riot being extra careful with champs like zed/ahri/lee because they make plays at the LC$), so therefore we can't ensure we'll have a game that achieves perfect inbalance.

What money are you talking about?

Btw those 2 of those are champs that were declared to be an example of where they wanted this game to go. The last is part of a set of champs used to set the standards. It has nothing to do with money, that's just how you manage a project like league of legends with limited manpower, time, and coordination.

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Let's examine chess:

Chess is not balanced. It is well-known that the game favors the player who gets the first move.

incorrect.

chess now favors white by less than 1% Over centuries of play the favored side has changed frequently but rarely ever more than 1% advantage for either saide

"A collection of fixed strategies end up getting established: not because chess is balanced, but because the rules of chess do not change.

this is also incorrect. The rules of chess have changed, but even ignoring this your implication is incorrect. Balanced or imbalanced the game will have fixed strategies established overtime and the nature of the game will change even if the game itself does not. This has more to do with the playability factor

As another example of this, consider tic-tac-toe. The first move gets the advantage. All strategies are worked out.

false implication, tic tac toe has been solved. 500 years later chess still hasn't been solved.

Balance has nothing to do with why games get stale. Any game that remains the same over time will eventually get figured out to the point that the only thing left is execution.

The video on "Perfect Imbalance" is good, but misses the mark. The best that it does is to maybe help players to understand that RIOT's main focus isn't necessarily to make the game perfectly balanced, but to keep the game interesting to play. The game doesn't have to be perfectly balanced to be interesting to play. That doesn't mean that imbalance is what makes the game interesting to play!

I think its you who's missed the mark.

Balance has everything to do with why games get stale.

Chess will be solved one day but it has not been, unlike tictactoe

chess is still played by a great many people as well, professionally even.

That's because complexity of strategy can prevent a game from getting solved and balance goes hand in hand with making this work.

Another way to look at this, when you are balancing on one foot you cannot realistically do so by simply being still. Your muscles are spasming and your body is in motion when you stand on two legs let alone one. The action of walking is actually a very calculated falling pattern. Perfect balance in a game complex enough to evade being solved is not realistic. But perfect imbalance is. Balance is not a tightrope act. Its more flexible than you may think. But Riot likes to highlight certain, more healthy game aspects to balance everything else around or things to remove for a similar effect.

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video was made 4 years ago. When they did not have as many champs, with all the butt load of champs they have now I doubt it be close to balanced as it used to be.

that is partly why this video is important. It becomes more important as the game increases in complexity

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I wish people would stop using that video as an excuse for any and all failures Riot make in relation to balancing the game. No, a YouTube video is not going to convince people that they should just deal with whatever broken champion is currently doing the rounds.

Its not an excuse for any and all failures. Its just that a lot of this isn't failures, nor accidents. The assumption that riot needs to carefully balance the universe on the tip of a pin is ridiculous and misleading. There's a lot of misconceptions this video offers a counter idea to

[{quoted}](name=Don Cingulum,realm=EUW,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=ki8jpLOW,comment-id=0009,timestamp=2016-06-14T04:34:35.509+0000)

a great video, though it has a big error in it. But good points non the less. The big error in the vid is that they implie that imbalance creats an evolving metagame, which is dead wrong. What creates an evolving metagame is change. If you don't change an imbalanced game, it will share the samfe fate as a perfectly balanced game, they will evovle the same fix set of strategies and tactics one has to learn and then execute perfectly, just most likely worse for casuals and pros because the imbalance causes less strategies to be valid compared to perfect balalnce. However, you hardly can change perfect balance without the loosing the perfect balance, which is why imbalance is a requierment for change and thus also for an evolving metagame.

Also, what really should get stressed out is the part form 0.40-0.50: You want imbalances, though not big ones but carefully crafted subtile ones! If the imbalances are to big, the optimal strategies become to obvious and it once again becomes all focused on executing the known strategies rather than developing some on their own. Small imbalances allow slightly inferior strategies to work out with better execution and overall allow a higher number of viable strategies so people can develope new strategies for a longer time till a clear meta has established, which is the point where it becomes mostly execution focused as the optimal strategies/tactics are all well known, which means it's time for new changes. This is what makes the difference between PERFECT-imbalance and just imbalance, and this is what one would/should consider as 'out of balance', which sadly applies to lol atm. In the past, many balance shifts were rather subtile and strategie was more evolveing, now the balance change either don't impact the meta hard enough, as they don't change the direction of imbalance, but only the amplitute, which does nothing if the meta already us well established as it mostly impacts how long it needs for the meta to establish, or they creat a to strong imbalance makeing the superior strategies/tactics rather obvious so it doesn't take long till a stagnat meta estaplishes once again.

I think youre initial premise is off... I think you misunderstand what an evolving meta is.

if you look at chess for example. Lets say we add an extra row to board.. that's it. This alone would destagnate the meta and create a void in the fixed strategy for maybe another 25-100 years. Evolving strategy doesn't require a balanced game at all actually. If the game changes rapidly enough and in enough ways so that you never have a chance to establish a single solid meta then you will have a constantly evolving meta.

Now whether or not that's a viable business strategy is another story but that's how an evolving meta works. League does and will pretty much always have an evolving meta as long as anything ever changes. Proof of this is the fact that EU, KR, and NA server and even tournament strategies do not match. While NA is whining about fiora, fiora is getting shat on in EU and KR.