@Riot, so what exactly is your next move? Lots of us are dying to know.

It's a clear fact that the recent balancing jobs done to this game have been objectively slow and disappointing. I can understand the lack of any real changes done in patch 4.6 due to the fact that it's the patch that All-Stars is being played on, but 4.7 has also been just as lacking in any real substance, and I think it's fair to say that we are already looking forward to knowing what you have in store for us in the upcoming patches if only to restore some of our faith in your ability to make the game more fun instead of constant nerfs and seemingly homogenizing changes under the guise of being "healthy".

Looking at the two recent patches in the past month, it isn't hard to see why people are so up in arms about your balancing decisions. 4.6 was a barren and polarizing patch consisting mostly of simple bug fixes and tool tip updates (Okay), QoL follow-ups to Champion reworks (Again, okay), fixes to Heal stacking (Great), Cost efficiency nerfs to Feral Flare (Not so great considering a future point I'm about to make), and overbuffs to Null Sphere's magic shield (Terrible, as well as tying in to the same point relating to the Feral Flare changes).

Those last two patch 4.6 highlights are especially what caused me to have doubts with regards to Riot's ability to balance since both of them demonstrate a lack of a clear goal. Riot admits that Feral Flare wasn't addressed in the right way until 4.7, and Kassadin got a .5 ratio increase to his shield that immediately got reverted in 4.7. This is why I and several other vocal people (Including certain pros) scrutinize Riot's balancing choices because it was pretty apparent that the Null Sphere buffs were a bad idea in two ways: contradicting Riot's stance on having adequate counterplay, and their stance on not having any hard counters. I'm sorry, but how is having a shield that is impossible for mages to trade with while being useless versus AD casters not encourage hard counter mentality? You have effectively made Kassadin a hard counter to mages, while simultaneously making ad casters a hard counter to Kassadin!

This also leads to the point where if Riot takes an average of 3-4 weeks for a new patch to come out, and even then not much progress is made into balancing the game to be fun to play with a wide variety of champions, what happens when Riot makes a mistake like what happened with Kassadin's shield buff? Buffed only to realize it was a bad move on Live Balance's part and immediately reverted in the following patch. In that case you have effectively doubled the rate at which we can expect any real balance progress to that of several months! And even then, that's still not a guarantee that the changes will be to the benefit of players who are sick of seeing mostly nerfs to popular champs while underpowered/unsatisfying champs are left in the dust.

Having a nerf-centric balance mentality will only take you so far, as there is more to the champion roster besides just a "few outlier power spikes against a whole pantheon of champions who are struggling against the outliers" as Pwyff put it. It isn't just as simple as having most of the champion roster being one side (The "balanced" side) versus a few outliers on the other side (The "OP" side). You can't expect to apply Occam's Razor, nerf the outliers, then expect champions like Zac, Nautilus, Maokai to be played now that the OP's have been toned down (Some of them just right, others to the point where they join the ranks of the underpowered, which is what Riot is seeminly content with having).

Consider the following hypothetical scenario inspired by the mess of Season 3: Only five champions are considered competitively viable at the moment in the mid lane:

Riot applies Occam's Razor, then proceeds to play whack-a-mole with these "clearly overpowered" champions. Okay, done. Now everything is peachy keen and we can expect better variety in the mid lane right?

Wrong!

Okay so we got four new champions in the mid lane, BUT at the cost of four of the old ones? That doesn't make things much better. You still have a stale meta of only five viable champions at one time, but instead of buffing other champions so that they can compete, Riot's policy is to nerf because those champions were clearly overpowered from the start, despite the fact that they became popular because you nerfed the champions ahead of them.

So now we get to where we are today:

Still not a lot of variety here unfortunately. Though to be fair, there are instances where some other champions are brought out, but oftentimes, you see them STRUGGLE just to achieve the same results as the ones listed above. And rather than give back buffs to the champions they nerfed in the past OR to champions that have been unviable since forever, Riot's stance is seemingly to just nerf these champions! And it's all going to happen real soon to both Soraka and Leblanc if the patch forecast holds. And that's extremely disappointing to hear, when the last champions who are fun, satisfying, or otherwise viable are being nerfed instead of perhaps buffing the overshadowed champions to meet them halfway.

Which leads to the heavy backlash that Riot has been receiving in the past few months, particularly with the Skarner and Rengar reworks homogenizing their respective champions and sucking away all the fun and unique skills they had to offer, and the would-have-been Lee Sin changes that almost homogenized his playstyle that made him so popular to watch in the first place. I would sympathize with Riot and say that the response was unjustified and hyperbolic, but it is considerably hard to do so with how poorly they have been handling the balancing lately. And it's not because we as a community want to be as hateful and spiteful as possible when we are hyperbolic no, but it is because we genuinely want Riot to do their best to make League of Legends the best MOBA game the world has ever seen. But with their recent mistakes, and the seemingly long extended period of time it takes for Riot to make any real progress with the balancing, it becomes more and more difficult to defend Riot in this position, especially when they haven't been very open with most of their upcoming plans, and have been really unreceptive to feedback given tho their recent reworks.

So what can Riot do to make League of Legends a better game for everyone? Simple. Increased communication with the players, being more receptive to player feedback especially when their favorite champions state is on the line, doing a better job judging what changes will be good to make and what changes they shouldn't make if they will regret it in a single patch (Diana after IPL5 anyone?), going back and seeing what buffs we can make to champions that fell out of favor because perhaps we nerfed them too much? And overall having better empathy towards people who may seem toxic and/or aggressive but maybe just frustrated that they are struggling to find enjoyment in this game but are turned off because their favorite champion's playstyle is homogenized and no longer viable/satisfying/fun/unique.

Other than that, a good first step is for Riot to get a head start on that 4.8 forecast, instead of leaving us in the dark on what's going on, causing lots of players to assume the worst with regards to the game's balancing.

After that, consider looking at what's holding champions like Zac, Nautilus and Maokai back, maybe completely removing Zac's tenacity and reliable disruption was a poor decision considering what similar champs like Vi can do while also dishing out better damage. Perhaps give a look at champions with binary strength like Singed or Ahri and thinking about what we can do to make them less overshadowed and have more meaningful gameplay overall. Having an AoE slow, one single target melee displacement nuke, a steroid ulti and running in circles with poison trail waiting for CDs to expire is not good gameplay IMHO because it either becomes too strong and impossible to deal with or too weak and exploitable that you would be better off playing a more reliable top laner. Come to think of it, I highly doubt that with his current kit, Singed won't be part of the ongoing top lane buffs which saddens me considering he is one of the first champs I really enjoyed back in Season One, and in the event that he gets a new kit, I really hope it's not just another kit that's similar to another one. Also, some other examples of overshadowed champions like Ahri are also a frequent subject of controversy. Sure you can do great with her, but consider the amount of effort and resource management you have to put with her to achieve a similar effect to what Leblanc already does, and I fear that if and when Leblanc gets nerfed it won't make Ahri get played more, it will just mean that Leblanc gets played less. Graves versus Lucian also has a similar relationship. One champ does something similar to another but better, and having said champion nerfed won't make the other be played more unless the nerfs are so drastic that the champion is considered to be "Olafed" (Which I remind you is something that Riot is allegedly trying to move away from).

So perhaps better reliability on Ahri's damage is in order? Perhaps lowered mana costs considering how skillshot and combo oriented she is not only on her abilities but also for her sustain passive? Maybe giving Graves some more interesting mechanics in his kit besides an inappreciable smoke screen, a weaker trading tool in the form of Buckshot versus Piercing Light, a dash with an attack speed steroid that's also very hard to appreciate given that unlike Lightslinger, it doesn't help you take down turrets as much given that the CD doesn't get reduced by attacking the turret?

But I digress, there are a lot of things wrong with the game that I'm sure Riot is currently fixing and I have full faith that they are capable of doing so, I just hope that their balancing work is more visible to us the community and that they make less "one patch wonder" changes like Kassadin's Q and Diana's post IPL5 butchering that get mostly reverted all after one patch. I am aware that Riot expects us to be patient but the question is by how much? I'm pretty sure not everyone is willing to wait five years for the issues to maybe get resolved.

TL;DR: The community would be much more appreciative of Riot's balancing jobs if they were more receptive to feedback/criticism, more open and punctual about their plans for the future, and overall making more informed decisions when it comes to changing something (Less "buffing Kassadin's shield only to revert it the following patch" sort of deals).