Creating an Understanding of the "5 AD nerf" Complaints

This is regarding Zoe's "nerf and all of the players complaining about the fact that it doesn't address her real issue.

Riot doesn't make changes like this to say "This is what's wrong with her, now it's fixed!" Riot makes these "5 AD nerf" changes, as people call them, as a way of making a champion slightly less annoying in any way while they work on detecting the issue and finding a suitable fix. Most people say things like, "Just nerf her damage," or "Give her less of a window to fire her Q", but it's not that simple.

Riot does not want to simply gut a champion and cut them out of the meta. They want to make changes that keep champions in the meta while not being overbearing. Sometimes these changes are really obvious things, like Darius Q healing too much on too low of a cooldown and making him literally unkillable. Others, however, are not as easy, like all of the constant Ryze reworks and Skarner tweaks that never seem to work.

Let's put it this way. Say you're back to being under 18 if you aren't already, and you've broken your great grandmother's handed-down china. Now your mother is pissed. You give her what little money you have, maybe a $20 if you're lucky, to try to stitch things up while you think of some way of replacing it. It, by no means, helps the situation, but it's a small gesture to make a note that you are sympathetic and it softens the blow until you can think of a way to make things better.

Riot is the person who broke the china, and the community is the angry mother. Zoe is in an unbalanced state right now, and Riot is aware of that, so they make this small change to at least give players a little bit of breathing space and let the playerbase know that they're aware there's a problem, they just need time to fix it. They know Zoe is a problem at the moment, but they always need to keep in mind how each change, even the most minor of changes, will effect a champion or the meta as a whole. They don't want to just delete an entire class or champion from the meta. Just look at lethality item nerfs and adc item buffs. On paper it looked very minute, but as soon as we got into game we noticed assassins weren't able to 100-0 adcs anymore and adcs could take assassins down fast once they got Statikk and IE.

Give Riot time to think of something they can do to keep her viable but not broken. Don't bite the hand that feeds you.