@Riot Why Are Some Balance Changes Not Tested On PBE?

I don't think you answered his question.

He's asking why some balance changes don't appear on the PBE before going live.

Unless it's a rework. The people running it tends to ignore most of the 'I don't like how this changes the champion I play' and just resolve to fix it with numbers later on.

Problem is Riot rarely reacts to even those first impression reports either.

And when an issue hits live it takes several patches until an adjustment follows up.

{quoted}

A few of you mentioned this, but the PBE isn't great for robust balance testing. **We just don't get the participation that we do on live. **Players may try out changes and your feedback and predictions on how things will work is still really valuable, but we just don't even get a fraction of the quality games we will get when a change goes live.

Maybe increasing the people allow to have a PBE account would help...?

We do a lot of internal testing and we do listen to PBE concerns but we also just try to react quickly when a change goes live that is dramatically overtuned or undertuned. I'm also skeptical that we could come up with some kind of motivation or reward to get players to take PBE balance seriously that wouldn't incentivize weird behavior. PBE is great for functional testing, finding bugs and the like. It's great for first impressions, look and feel feedback, and exposing early concerns.

Could the reason players don't take PBE balance seriously be duo to a lot of advice I see there ignored? (ie, players saying how it was almost impossible to land Veigar W with the E delay, and there are changes to it months later...)

{quoted}

A few of you mentioned this, but the PBE isn't great for robust balance testing. We just don't get the participation that we do on live. Players may try out changes and your feedback and predictions on how things will work is still really valuable, but we just don't even get a fraction of the quality games we will get when a change goes live.

We do a lot of internal testing and we do listen to PBE concerns but we also just try to react quickly when a change goes live that is dramatically overtuned or undertuned. I'm also skeptical that we could come up with some kind of motivation or reward to get players to take PBE balance seriously that wouldn't incentivize weird behavior. PBE is great for functional testing, finding bugs and the like. It's great for first impressions, look and feel feedback, and exposing early concerns.

idk why this is getting downvoted when you consider how small the PBE playerbase is and then you have to subtract those people that just use PBE as a way to get free stuff and then you have to remember the fact that MMR is fresh for each PBE account so a lot of players won't get an accurate test if they're playing vs. what would be a pre-30/low elo while being of two or more* ranks above their opponent themselves.

In general, most Riot employees just don't care about the playerbase or the feedback and suggestions we give them. They have a god-complex that makes them think they're above us and many players tend to worship them, which just fuels that fire even further.

Even if a change is unanimously opposed by players and PBE-testers alike, they will still force it to Live regardless. So long as that champ isn't part of Riot's current roster of #LC$BIGPLAY$ champions, like Lee Sin was. He had a complete and viable rework already finished, but was scrapped because of "community backlash."

More likely, they were on the PBE but they just weren't datamined. It's worth remembering that our PBE patch notes come entirely from datamining, not from anything Riot releases, and datamining has a hard time detection certain changes. Certain things are very likely to go undocumented until Riot releases the actual full patch notes.

{quoted}

Chances are that those changes were on the PBE, but not discovered by the dataminers...

Except they did this last year too with one of his nerfs, it was never on PBE and yet they put it in a patch anyway.

{quoted}

Some of the stuff that you see on PBE never makes it to live anyways, or it takes forever for it to.

That extra regen below 50%... will we ever see it?