The Trifecta of Influence - The static meta. What can we do? [very long post]
After following/playing this game for a couple years, there are some interesting trends I’ve noticed about how League progresses. This is simply an opinion piece from an average player, as well as a long and convoluted post, but I hope it facilitates some discussion. Hopefully a Red can contribute as well.
We all need to be more open-minded with how we approach League, and when I say "we" I refer to three groups of people:
- professional players
- the general player base
- Riot
Right now league is characterized by a slow cycle of professionals, and therefore players, reaching a stale meta equilibrium, which is then altered by Riot, which then settles again, etc…
The pros discover what's strong, and they spam what's strong out of necessity. They want to win (and in the interests of career, they have to) and so they are afraid of trying anything unorthodox. I’m always ambivalent when a new pick is introduced in an LCS match…it’s exciting to see a change, but I know if it doesn’t work then the standard champion pool is only being reinforced. One can't really blame them for this, but the general assumption is that they have essentially optimized League...that they have found the best champions, strategies, team comps, etc, for maximizing chances of victory. I think this perception is a bit illusory (more on this later)
The general player base wants to win as well, and so they'll generally copy the champions/builds/etc that pros use. This is so ingrained that many players are afraid to do alternatives because they will get flamed for it.
Riot sees the above trends and adjust accordingly, albeit arguably too quickly or drastically on occasion. It also begs the question of the change being really necessary in the first place (strong doesn't mean too strong). The attention a champion receives from nerfs may in turn reinforce faulty judgement (i.e. “see? I knew [insert champion] was OP, he just got nerfed”) if not frustrate players.
Going back to professional trends, I think there's more power in League than "what the pros do," especially with champion selection. I'm not saying their picks aren't strong. And I'm not saying some of the neglected champions aren't weak...but not all of them are. The reason I say this is because there are occasional cases of champions breaking through, and it seems to telegraph, thankfully, a competitive scene that isn't tediously optimized, or perhaps even a scene where the players don't know as much as we think they do. An example is Darien's Warwick. When everyone was playing Mundo/Shyv/Renek top, Darien picked Warwick. It hasn't become a popular pick, but it was noticed enough to earn a ban against Gambit, and other teams in both EU and NA LCS picked it up a couple times. Before this, I don't ever remember Warwick being considered competitively viable. The same could be said for Pantheon jungle, Lulu mid, Riven mid, etc.
“But random guy, that’s how this game works. With continual patch changes, different champions become top tier. It just takes some time to develop”
Yes and no. Of course champions become stronger/weaker with patch changes, but there are examples to the contrary. Let’s discuss the most infamous example of a meta shift independent of any patch: Annie support. Annie was almost entirely off the map in the competitive scene last season (in NA/EU anyway), much less so as a support. Then everyone watched Royal Club and how much of a power pick Tabe’s Annie support was in the Season 3 Championships. Now she’s a very popular competitive pick. Obviously, Tabe’s Annie was before the Season 4 changes that gave supports more power, and looking at Annie’s patch history, she was untouched between June 2013 and January 2014. Essentially, if she’s strong now then she was strong for a while and yet was under the radar (yes, this ignores other variables like nerfs to other champions, but I think it’s safe to say that Annie was strong in her own right). This begs the question of how so many professional players missed this pick for so long. It’s this kind of phenomenon that suggests we should be wary of blindly following the patterns professionals set (not only with what they pick but what they don’t).
One problem with the general player base is that we need picks to be validated by professionals/competition. I’m positive there are people out there that have thought about—and have ventured to try—Annie support many months ago. And they were likely raged at because the community has such severe confirmation bias. The reasons were probably: “Annie support is bad because her only utility is her passive. She has no heals, no hastes/slows, no shields, no auras, she has no mobility and she needs flash to engage. All her spells are damage spells, and yet this would be putting her in a position with no AP”
Now that she is highly contested, it becomes: “Annie support is great because her passive stun is strong and her AA range is great for harass in lane. Her ultimate AOE stun is difficult to dodge, and you can get off two AOE stuns in team fights”
There’s truth to both of these statements, but people will only care about the statement applicable to what is or isn’t being played. There’s been instances of this for a while.
This problem is observable even within the professional community. Before worlds, I can remember watching Saint’s stream and he was explaining why Aatrox wasn’t a good jungler. He brought up a wiki of recent picks in OGN to show how Aatrox was missing. His argument basically was: “The Koreans aren’t doing it so it isn’t good.” Not only is this a defeatist approach (personally I think if you’re just gonna follow the Koreans then you won’t beat them), but it ended up proving a rather weak argument anyway, as we saw Korean, Chinese, and EU teams frequently picking/banning Aatrox at Worlds….
Considering the above, it’s a little concerning that Riot’s patches correlate so strongly with trends in play. Granted, some things have definitely been too strong (e.g. league of Black Cleavers), and sometimes a nerf has been very effective and balanced (e.g. the change to Zed’s ultimate), but knee-jerk reaction nerfs seem too common (at its worst, we now have an expression in “being Olaf’d”). It should be kept in mind that if some champs are undervalued, then maybe some champs are overvalued or maybe simply valued fairly. Popular doesn’t necessarily mean OP.
I’m not sure what we can do to have a more dynamic gaming experience, but it may be helpful if we all showed a little more agency.
Play within reason, but play what you enjoy. Let’s face it, statistically, most of us are not high elo players, and even less of us are (or will be) professionals. You don’t have to play what they’re playing, and that shouldn’t stop you from improving anyway. You want to play Nocturne but you think he’s “not good” because he’s hardly picked in the LCS now? That didn’t stop Ninjaken from reaching Diamond I/Challenger. Remember that neglected competitive champions isn’t a death sentence…take all that with a grain of salt. And if a teammate wants to try something unconventional, maybe it’s a legitimate experiment and not a troll. Also remember that professionals get a lot of ideas from solo queue; I believe Diamond even got a suggestion to play Evelynn jungle with a blue bot from his twitch chat (before the recent Evelynn change). They don’t pull things out of their butt in a fit of inspired genius. They’re not infallible.
I don’t really want to say that professional teams should be more innovative. There’s definitely a pool of (known) strong champions, and teams want reliable picks, so it’s hard to blame them for consistency. But they do seem to copy each other rather than attempt to surprise each other, which I think is kind of odd. Gambit seems to be one of the few teams willing to take some risks.
Riot is difficult to discuss because we have such little visibility on their internal processes. We only see the results. The odd thing about game balance is that as a qualitative skill set it is vaguely defined but it takes place in a very common realm. This isn’t a bunch of laymen telling a group of doctors how to diagnose a patient. It is a group of players that knows exactly what this other group of players, Riot employees, are working with. It’s easy to look at said results and think, if we don’t like them, “what the hell are they actually working on in the office?” when they’ve probably labored over these changes thoroughly. Nevertheless, I do think that Riot should be more proactive than reactive with their patching (this may be counterproductive to being a player-focused company, but I think you can be proactively address the needs of your customers and also surprise them).The jungle/support/vision changes for Season 4, for example, were a great redesign. When the Nasus buffs came out of nowhere a year ago, that was an interesting surprise. Other changes don’t seem as healthy, especially if they are meta-enforcing (like if Riot nerfs Lulu because of her recent mid play). I think another thing to remember is that while some champs may be popular because of their strength, they are also popular because they are simply fun to play. Ezreal is a good example of this. During the holy ADC trinity of season 2 he was very strong and then nerfed. He continued to be popular and was nerfed again and again. And while Ezreal is indeed a safe pick, he’s also very fun. He has skill shots. A global ultimate. He’s mobile. He’s flashy. People like to play him, and I think that gave a false sense of power leading to some undue nerfs.
In any case, it would be nice if Riot waited to see if players are creative enough to come up with counters to common picks, but many players in turn are reluctant to step outside their comfort zone once a meta begins settling in. They would rather cry “OP.” This makes it difficult to determine what is actually OP and what is simply a consequence of complacency (or other factors unrelated to power). I want to say that the professional game designers at Riot do know the difference, but it’s such an inexact science. And because these changes from Riot are so regular, players just work around it (i.e. “Well I might as well play this until Riot nerfs it”).
TL;DR There’s merit to the meta and why it exists, but there’s reason to believe it doesn’t have to be as static as it is. Unfortunately, players, professionals, and Riot influence each other in predictable ways.
Ziggs - as you said, still strong but falling off competitively. He was picked up because of his huge waveclearing buffs
Lee Sin - Never really got any nerfs (or buffs) but most likely fell off due to jungle changes affecting his first clear. Not to mention the state of Wriggles, his former jungle item. Still a strong early game jungle, not godly as he once was.
