Unpopular Opinion: People complain about League's balance while not knowing enough about balance

People constantly get on Riot's case about balance in the game being bad, and the game revolving around "a few top tiers that Riot just cycles around", right? If that's the case, why are people complaining about the new changes Riot's introducing?

Let me break this down so it's easily understood:

• When people normally talk about a balanced game, they're talking about how different characters in the game should have a "relatively even" chance of performing well. The better the balance, the higher the odds that any individual character in the roster won't be significantly outclassed by someone else. To achieve this, even if there's slight advantages here and there, most match-ups need to be as close to 50/50 as possible.

• When people talk about balance in a strategic game, that's when things become a bit different. It's not necessarily about "every individual piece being as strong as any other piece" more than it's about the bigger picture of strategies and compositions that should be balanced and lead to fair shots at winning the game. If you pick up a team comp of 4/4 healers, odds are you're not making it too far in whatever game you're playing. If you skip out on healers entirely, you can't clear large scale boss fights because you'll run out of sustain. If you have no tank, the second some enemy does a high burst damage attack, your party's wiped out. So on and so forth with this example.

The thing about League is that solo queue's been balanced like a fighting/racing game for a long time, where people just expect to pick their favorite champion and just do well into almost any odds all the time. All AD team comp? I'll pick Pantheon. No tank? I'll pick Pantheon. No scaling because my bot lane's Lucian and my mid's LeBlanc and my jg is Hecarim? I'll pick Pantheon. I'm support? I'M GOING TO PICK PANTHEON.

Riot has been tasked to balancing the game as it's meant to be played (a strategic game) as well as how people like to dick around in solo queue playing it (as a game where you style on nerdz so hard your mom makes you uninstall). Naturally, this leads to balance issues. You can't have a strategic game where everyone has similar odds to win in most situations while resembling any sort of balance, because then, on a holistic level, the game's now unbalanced. If we're able to magically clear a whole RPG with nothing but healers, sure the healers have an equal shot to win as anyone else...but that's not a balanced RPG because now the healers are significantly stronger than the other units on a holistic level. The healers now can cover their own weaknesses that would otherwise make you want to balance your party out. Then you have to do this for every other class. THEN the game becomes a big fiasco of "who's the most efficient at doing everything enough" rather than actually balancing the roster.

Translating this notion to League, let's say Orianna's odds of winning against lane opponents can be close to 50% for most of the roster. Remember that time in season 6 or 7 when people were complaining about how busted Orianna was when she had a 50% win rate and 10% pick rate, simply because she had no match-ups where she'd legitimately LOSE, and thus Riot nerfed her resistances so she'd have to have her ball on her to have decent resistance stats? It's kind of like that. Sure, Orianna wasn't super oppressive, but she was imbalanced because, strategically, you could just always pick Orianna. It's the same reason Maokai was reworked, because when you needed ANY tank, you could always pick him. A balanced League of Legends would see that, sometimes, you being stubborn about playing X simply because you want to/like to means you've significantly increased your odds of losing by being either stubborn or unwise with your champion selection.

People complain that Riot's gone off the deep end when it comes to balance for ages, and sometimes they're right . However, for changes in this direction, Riot's actually HELPING League's balance by sharpening and carving out niches for champions so that you can answer champs that may be generally powerful with stronger counter-pick options, which increases presence for more of the roster and allows us to have answers for certain picks without just abusing the ban button. These changes are largely healthy for the game. I honestly think we'll need more changes like them in the future.