✿✿✿Split normal balance from Ranked/Competitive balance✿✿✿

Desiderium·Jun 28, 2014·1 votes·540 views

If anyone here has played Guild Wars, you'd know that they split skills from PvE with PvP. Some PvP skills are nerfed or otherwise tweaked to better suit the different gameplay.

Why doesn't League do something like that?

Instead of nerfing champions for EVERYONE because they are too powerful in high-level play, why not just split the balance from competitive gameplay and normal gameplay? DON'T STOP READING YET I'm not asking for champions to "stay OP" in normal games. No. If something is op, it should be nerfed regardless of which mode of play it is in.

However.

Something should not be nerfed/tweaked just because of its high level use for everyone else.

Take most Zed players nowadays. Most aren't too good, and just like to play a shadowninja and walk away from explosions. How do you think they felt when the shadow speed got nearly cut in half, and the cooldown of E went up by 1 second (which was far more of a nerf than most people think). If Riot stays by this logic, every champion Faker plays will get nerfed. They need to grow out of this. Either by splitting champion balance from Competitive play and Normal play, or nerfing things that actually ARE overpowered instead of being played skillfully to good effect.

7 Comments

NinjaFiferJun 28, 20141 votes

I do agree with your premise, but your approach on changing it is unappealing. People use Normal games to practice for Ranked games, so causing there to be a difference in characters between the two systems will cause more people to "practice" in ranked matches, possibly increasing the toxicity in the game.

DesideriumJun 28, 20141 votes

Normal Games would still be used as practice. Think of it like training wheels on a bicycle. Once you switch from Normal to Ranked, it's like taking the training wheels off. It gets a little harder but it's still fundamentally the same champion. The only people that would be jumping straight into ranked for "practice" would be illogical, and we all deal with people like this on a daily basis regardless.

At the very least, we could split the live game's balance from the Tournament balance scene. Normal and Ranked would have the same balance, but no characters will suffer from being nerfed for everyone who ever plays the game due to high-level tournament play.

NinjaFiferJun 28, 20141 votes

This game functions on precision. Things like Zed getting his shadow speed nerfed would throw your whole game off if it switched between Normals and Ranked. You also need to know exactly how much damage you can inflict on your opponent, so flipping that between the two would throw your game off too. The only thing I can see working is actually having a Tournament scene, and a normal scene. Make it so only people who are really serious about entering tournaments and competing for money will be able to go there. That still presents the problem of more work for Riot. They already have a serious problem balancing one game, if they have to run two different balances for two different scenes, you can bet that the pace of updates and new content in this game would slow significantly.

DesideriumJun 29, 20141 votes

you can bet that the pace of updates and new content in this game would slow significantly.

I am personally completely okay with this.

NinjaFiferJun 29, 20141 votes

That's fine. I personally am not.

DesideriumJun 29, 20141 votes

They've already slowed content release anyway. Remember when Diana was announced literally two days after Zyra?

We've gone two months without a champion tease. Not even a reveal, not even a hint. We've gone two months without a single remote teaser.

If dual-balancing (which, if you think about it, won't actually take that long) will prevent content release even more, well, it's alright. They've already dug the hole anyway.

NinjaFiferJun 29, 20141 votes

What they're focusing on now is updating champions. I can understand why they're not putting out new champions, since doing a complete rework of characters like Sion requires the same effort as putting out a new one. I know they've slowed down quite significantly already, but slowing down even more for something that's not hugely important is not worth it in my opinion. I love seeing all the new content, and watching the game evolve. I'm not one to get super excited over things, but seeing patch notes makes a squeal a little every time.