The case for smaller changes on a faster timescale

The midseason has a lot of people talking about how Riot handles changes in their game. I thought I'd weigh in with my two cents. My point here, to spoil my punchline, is that smaller changes done over time would be much better for the game.

The crit rework has been really interesting because it's something that players have been talking about for a couple of years now; that's an important point because it means that we've waiting a good, long while for changes to the crit system. We've known that the exponential damage that marksmen were doing to squishy targets has been problematic; that's not a recent development, but it took this long to get around to it because Riot really staunchly believes that major changes should wait until a certain time of the year.

That's a fine approach, if you believe that this will necessarily cause a huge disruption. My question is, why can't we change one thing at a time to address one problem at a time? This is a lesson that I feel Riot is learning very slowly; we had to go through 3 class reworks before we decided they class updates weren't working, for example. It was easier to just update the champs that needed it the most and tweak some items.

So for the crit rework, my "hindsight 20/20" proposal is this: let's just change the passive on Infinity Edge. Remove the "+1.5x extra crit damage" and try out this "+x% true damage" idea. Don't even change the stats. This change, by itself, solves the problem caused by a rushed Infinity Edge by making that item a much less attractive starting item.

Now some of you will say "but that's not the whole problem! They fixed a lot of other things with this major, super-duper update!" Yeah, maybe, but it's actually hard to tell which changes helped and which hurt, and why, because they all happened at once. Why not do those things one or two at a time, so we get a good handle on how each change affects Marksmen? With the full data of the live environment behind each change, we'd get to see how what each change is doing, which not only allows us to make better changes, it also gives us levers to pull later, since we know what each change does to marksmen! By doing them all at once, you significantly decrease your ability to predict the outcome of those changes and you lose valuable information about them you could have used later.

So here's the "plea to Riot" section: consider doing some early brainstorming on problems and restrict it to one thing that you want to solve. I think the two fighter items coming into the game are a great example of this thinking, by the way: by introducing two items and not changing much else about fighters, it's going to be crystal clear what's to blame for any problems with fighters that patch. Each item has a specific purpose, and if either one isn't fulfilling that purpose, you can fix it quickly.

If Marksmen would need stat changes and reworked crit items after changing the passive on Infinity Edge, fine. That's cool. There's no reason you can't do that. And if you did that infinity edge change sometime last year, we wouldn't even lose out on the bigger changes this mid-season. This approach allows you to make changes quickly without disrupting the game so badly, and if the small disruptions don't have the desired effect, then by all means, do some stat changes during preseason! Change all the item costs! Go for broke! But when you do that and change how 2 items work and add a new item, everyone is completely disoriented. Very few people find that experience fun in a competitive environment.

I haven't done this myself, so I'll count on you commenters to help me out here, but I suspect that if we look back through the patch history, what we'll find is that small, high impact changes turn out better in the long run than the Big Balance Projects. Discuss!