The Reason why everyone hates CertainlyT (as explained by ZenonTheStoic)

http://www.surrenderat20.net/2015/12/red-post-collection-follow-up-on.html

Taken from the article so you guys dont have to find it:

**Q: Why do you think CertainlyT gets so much hate? Is it just a scapegoat thing, is there something about his champions that angers people more than usual, or is he secretly designing champions to annoy people on the forums? It's the last one, isn't it?‎ **

A: (bit of an old question, but the subject warrants discussion)

I'll state upfront that I'm a huge fan of CertainlyT's work and as such am probably super biased.

Brad (I'll call him that; it's weird to think of him as CertainlyT) sees the game very, very differently from many other designers. Most of us see what is and what was; Brad sees what could be, almost instinctively. Sure he's been wrong many times (Kalista's passive, if I remember correctly, was born out of a desire to teach new ADC players how to kite. That's not what it's doing ;P) and he's pushed certain ideas until they broke, but our game would be infinitely duller if not for him.

Brad thinks about the game in a way that is liberating to me as a designer. There are no "we can't do this!" areas to him. When I was designing Lucian, my passive for the longest time was "killing a unit resets your auto attack timer", to get that double gun feeling. It didn't work very well and I was distraught. I really wanted Lucian to feel like a GREAT double gun champion (MF at the time wasn't it; Love Tap may actually have gotten her there, I've yet to play the new MF, but I have high hopes). So I talk to a bunch of designers and they suggest reasonable ideas, until I talk to Brad and he's like: So why don't you give each gun its own attack timer?

My first reaction, I think, was to say "is that even legal?" Joking aside: it does feel like we're all working within a certain framework and Brad sees right through it. There were issues with the independent timers (Xypherous and Brad helped me set the passive up in like a day. There was some black magic involved), mostly in that it felt much more like a shotgun dude (you went BAM! BAM! rapidly and then waited for both timers to come back). After getting strong feedback that this felt LESS nimble, LESS like a dual gun character we scrapped it and came up with lightslinger, but guess what, Brad found a home for a very similar version of that passive: Graves.

Brad has always fought tooth and nail for skills he knew needed to be in the game. I remember heated conversations about Windwall; the idea that we could just "destroy any enemy missile" seemed outlandish, impossible; now it's just a part of the game that everyone plays around. Just yesterday I saw qtpie on stream play Graves vs a good Yasuo, constantly following Yasuo's E dashes through the wall before attacking. The sign of awesome design: both sides get play around the mechanic.

Saying that something feels like a CertainlyT ability has become shorthand for something incredibly gamebreaking with awesome potential. Of course he misses sometimes: Mordekaiser's "get full XP where other champions would share" was maybe a little heavyhanded, but overall he drives game design as a discipline forward. For every incredible ability he ships, he influences or straight-up donates another ability on someone else's product.

Why does this draw hate? Because new is scary.

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Well said Zenon. Well said.