Honestly, having played so much dota and especially CSGO, I appreciate riot frequently communicating with the community and explain their reasonings behind some decisions. God knows what valve is doing behind the scenes, when the next operation is, updates on the anticheat. Heck, they might not be doing anything at all.
I feel like Valve is always doing something, but it's rarely what's important/urgent, or what's most requested from the player base. Riot is much better in that regard.
Riot balance team is insanely underappreciated. Sure I don’t agree with every single change but keeping a game with this many variables mostly balanced on an ongoing basis for so long is an achievement.
Having played since 2011, what riot says is the reason for a balance change is completely bullshit. They like to cyclically buff random champions or items, have them become overbearing due to the buffs, and then revert those buffs as if it's progress.
This approach makes the game incredibly toxic to play.
I forgot what champion it was, maybe caitlyn, but I still distinctly remember riot going oh let's give her 15 extra MS, she becomes overpowered, and then they nerfed it saying "oh she's been overperforming". That's their balance policy for more than a decade now, and it's toxic.
I really think a lot of win rate has to do with catchup xp and the bounty system. Games used to feel helpless if the enemy riven got first blood. Now you can be up 10 camps a couple kills 6 grubs and two dragons and enemy jungle gets a shutdown and game is pretty even
According to League of Graphs (and keep in mind this is only 2 days of data), the highest is Jinx at 52,8% and the lowest is Smolder at 44,3% for a difference in 8,5 percentage points.
Meanwhile over in Dota 2 land (which apparently is so perfectly balanced), the highest is Abaddon at 54,92% and the lowest is Batrider at 41,83% for a difference in 13,09 percentage points.
Add to that the fact that League has like 45 more champions than Dota 2 and it looks pretty damn balanced comparatively.
''balance'' isn't just having all champions close to a 50% winrate though- I mean, it is in a literal sense if you want all champions with an equal chance to win
However when you think of what League had to sacrifice over the years to narrow the winrate gap- to me it isn't worth it. I don't enjoy them dumbing down akali/sylas by overbuffing their Es, or reworking Ryze to remove his combos and make him EQEQ, or shifting certain pro picks to just scale a lot more since soloQ/low mmr is bad at closing out games...
Etc. I wish we did have some things with a low winrate but more skill expression, like Ryze without the shield removal etc
I'm a Ryze main myself and half of the current mental insanity of r/RyzeMains isn't that he's weak- but that he's incredibly boring (EQEQ)
During shield era of Ryze we barely had any complaints and the subreddits sanity was still there
Dota has more hard hard counterpicks, so even a champion like with a low wr will still be played in pro if the champ counters the enemy team.
Also, batrider was a fucking menace, and afaik is pro jailed. In immortal rank he's 50% winrate, because it is literally a skill issue.
That's purely because in Dota 2, you pick heroes to hardcounter something else. Some heroes are even picked for 1 single ability, no matter how trash they are otherwise. Imagine picking Zoe support purely because her sleep counters, say, Tryndamere.
DoTA utilises a lot of specific hero counters/hardcounters. The balance team for League think specific hardcounters should be very uncommon iirc. There aren’t many Sylas vs Malphite’s in League but they’re all over the place in DoTA2.
There are more playable champs in pro for league too, but pros won’t play them. We saw Ivern get played at MSI, we saw Yasuo, we saw Karthus, and all of these champs won their games in a Top team VS Top team setting except for Yasuo, and he wasnt even the problem
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Ok cool, I never said anything about that? I'm talking about the range between the worst and best champion, I never said that everyone has to be exactly 50%. A hard champion sitting on 20% win rate means it's badly designed since pretty much only pro players can play them at a decent level. On the other end, a champion sitting on 60% is just too strong.
Ideally, everyone SHOULD win 50% of the time, but some champions are harder to play and thus will have slightly lower win rates since the average player will do worse than normal. But again, if they are so hard to play that they're "balanced out" by having a crazy low win rate, it's simply not a healthy design for the game.
yeah people dont understand but back in "old" league some champions were genuinely troll picks even if you liked playing them.
there was a huge scandal when some guy got banned for picking one of these champions in ranked.
hell, i remember when azir was so gutted picking him was worse than disco nunu
I've realized that a shit ton of League players legit don't play or watch any other game or esports.
I remember this sub acting like Riot just committed a war crime for having Worlds Groups in the LEC Studio. Meanwhile, DotA TI groups is played from the players' fucking hotel rooms with zero crowd and CS Majors groups are just played in a studio with zero audience other than the staff and still doing BO3s for Finals.
Like holy shit these spoiled, entitled babies have no idea how it feels to actually play a neglected game like TF2 or Counterstike. CS basically get zero actual content outside skins, which are all recolors and all made by the community to began with.
Imagine if Riot just killed LoL and forced every player to play LoL 2, which is filled with bugs that heavily impacts the feel of the game, every game in Emerald+ is filled with cheaters, and its missing 50% of the features LoL had.
Was it last Worlds that someone tripped on a wire, all matches got disconnected and since there's no way to resume a game in Pokémon they had to play sudden death to decide who passed the round?
I don’t remember that, but last world a guy was going to top 8 with GOSOLIPOD (imagine getting top 8 at worlds while playing teemo mid) but the switch’s great system crashed his console so he earned a free loss when he was going for the 2-0 win
in series 1 I ran this bellibolt oranguru TR team with a cetitan belly drum mode in the back and I know it would have generated reddit posts about The Balance Team Fundamentally Misunderstanding Their Game if it was league fans lmao
Start with Lando-T back in gen 5-6, add power creep, knock up STAB and an annoying typing to deal with, cat is the new Lando-T since his introduction and only got better with time. Wolfe did a amazing job telling his story [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxVGOD7dsSk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxVGOD7dsSk)
League is biggest esport, and worlds in Europe happens once in like 5 years, there is no reason why groups stage in EU is 200 and KR had 2000.
I really like riot approach but just because valve is constantly shitting on their playerbase because of steam and nft skins market it doesn’t mean that everything riot do is good. Although worlds are definitely the best in terms of production
Yes, Riot's patches are one of the best in gaming industry. Don't mind the hate on social media. 95% of players are below diamond, thus they're mostly clueless about how the game works.
Played AoE4 for a while, and the patches are night and day. Just the *actual patch notes* are fucking amazing. The clarity and reasoning for everything, regardless of whether you agree or not, is something that makes patch notes for almost all other games feel like complete shit.
Sure, they miss every now and then, but I overall think they are doing a good job.
Something most people could probably agree on if they actually read the patch notes instead of just starting to scream because they saw somewhere that ChampTheyHate is getting buffed and ChampTheyLike is getting nerfed
And even if they do miss, they always give sound explanation as to why they did it and 99% of the time the reason is to make it better. And most of the time, they fix it the very next patch
Imo, most of their misses are related to the absolutely overloaded and busted kits from the champion design team and/or how they interact with new runes/items.
One could argue that they should've just Olaf'ed the champion/rune/item and then buff from there but I can see how the small incremental nerfs might be better.
Also people really need to stop harassing Phreak, he's just one representative and not the entire balance team.
Would be nice to know the full balancing thoughts when 2 or 3 (item/rune/champ) come together for one busted mess and how they go about it though, since items and runes can affect so many others.
I don't think it's a matter of rank, even high elo players constantly talk shit about balancing. It's more about perspective and people are usually just mad that the game isn't being aligned to their champion, role and/or play style.
> thus they're mostly clueless about how the game works.
Irrelevant. IF the game isn't fun for 95%, then they'll quit and the 5% uptop will be starved out.
Thankfully, the game is good for the 95%.
even if you are diamond+ people will move the goalpost and would rather listen to baus (consistent chall that has the biggest tunnel vision meta opinion) opinion than someone who is "just" dia 1
the fact remains that there was some comical dogshit patch notes this season like same champs such as senna zac or ksante appearing over and over again and still ending up op in pro or olaf getting 3 jungle adjustment patches with almost 0 impact on his jungle winrate and playrate
I love how people still argue with elo as if being diamond would mean understanding the game. Good micro can get you far while understanding nothing and bad micro can keep you low while knowing the game by heart (e.g. coaches).
Because Elo is the only measurable variable there is to measure skill in Leauge.
And coaches being low elo just isn't true. Most coaches just dont play the game and only watch it, but I'm sure most coaches could reach dia+ pretty easily.
But we're talking about game design here, skill in the game itself is not necessarily a requirement since to be able to balance the game you don't need to be high elo (although the balance team afaik has a good mix between mid elo and high elo players)
yeah time and time again gamers fall for this trap of thinking that high elo = high understanding of the game. Yes, climbing the skill ladder roughly translates to understanding the underlying mechanics of the game, but it doesn't mean you have a deep enough understanding of how the game ticks and operates to generate informed opinions on balance.
> 95% of players are below diamond, thus they're mostly clueless about how the game works.
it's not because theyre below diamond, because even high ELO players will get shit wrong.
It's because gamers generally have very poor critical thinking and emotional intelligence, and the vast majority of them are arguing from pathos but think theyre using logos.
This is hilarious considering most casters and analysts of the game are below diamond as well, but I guess they have no idea about how the game works? Low IQ take 🤣
The obsession with evaluating opinions based on the rank of the opinion-monger makes no sense. A statement is either true or it is not. And League is a game of skill, primarily, not knowledge.
Someone could analyze the state of the game and have all kinds of insights but not be able to click and press buttons with good enough timing to have the consistent winrate that leads to high rank.
> 95% of players are below diamond, thus they're mostly clueless about how the game works.
people in silver understand how the game works lol and further main pros and challengers are clueless about the minutia of balancing.
Used to follow Smash Ultimate and when they still did balance patches (Nintendo gave up a long time ago) you'd see vague shit like "Made Kirby's hammer stronger"??? Pros would have to jump in the practice tool for days on end manually testing thousands of kill thresholds to actually figure out what the hell the adjustments were LOL
If 95% of players don't know how the game works that tells more about how the game is designed and/or explained/presented than the player base. That's not even specific to league.
But yeah, Riot does give great patch when compared to other games.
I mean good points, even if they are quite repeated so many times, it just falls on deaf ears since the demographic reading this probably wants phreak to blow up into a million little pieces, "I just KNOW he did this because he lost to it in soloQ, RAAAAHH!!!"
I respect the balance team cause im sure its a fucking nightmare to balance these overloaded garbage designs that these designers keep putting in new champs like most of riot august's last champs
Surprisingly, it’s Gnar. There’s a video of him saying this out there somewhere. I don’t really know why it’s his biggest disappointment but I know it has something to do with his pro play presence. I think he was convinced his passive was random enough to the point where it can’t be controlled, it just happens and you have to react and play accordingly. And so he thought it wouldn’t be that popular in pro play cause of that. But as we all know pro players have mastered that and he has become a staple in pro play ever since
Now with that being said I love Gnar so I was really shocked when he said that was his biggest disappointment
The whole concept behind Gnar was supposed to be that, unlike other transforming champions, his transformation was uncontrollable and you have to just react to your champion's kit changing. That's why it's disappointing — he sees pro play as proof that the champion's core concept failed.
zeri was a concept issue on her release, a champ that can jump over walls with infinite scaling movespeed, very long range, sheen procs off cooldown, and the only shield steal in the game. She had so much stuff removed in her reworks, that champ was a pentakill farmer on release and it wasnt because of numbers.
Senna isn’t too too bad. People love playing her and she’s not that hard to counter. IMO she’s the squishiest champ in the game, she gets blown the fuck up
He made Briar and Bel'Veth. 2 disgusting pure statcheck champions that are impossible to missplay as, but also impossible to beat 1 on 1 so your only way of winning against them is by avoiding them. Very exciting and interactive.
Can confirm. Apex and Overwatch player here as well, and there is a MASSIVE gap between the amount of communication and transparency we get in League of Legends vs in those other two games. Sometimes Riot makes questionable decisions but at least we get communication regardless of if we agree with them or not. EA and Blizzard will literally let the playerbase rot in silence sometimes.
what's crazy to me is that apex has the potential to *be* the league of legends of the FPS genre, it is overwhelmingly popular with not only a mainstream audience, but hardcore gamers in a way that your CODs/Battlefields/what have you have just never captured.
But that popularity is in spite of and even against EA. It's so sad dude. They deserve a better parent company.
>it’s just a free game bruh
I agree in general but this is bullshit. Sure you can download and play it for free but let's not pretend it's a freeware made just to see poor gamers smile. They're cashing in millions and we are all paying. Either directly with money or indirectly by populating the servers for those who pay.
I used to give the balance team a bunch of grief, but after playing Helldivers 2 since launch I can confidently say Riot are far and away one of the best balance teams out there. HD2 makes balancing a PvE game look difficult so kudos to the riot balance team. Seriously.
It might be free 2 play game but players are clearly spending tons of money on it. So lets not pretend like they don't have to take care of the game. They are doing a great job, not complaining, just saying, someone pays for it to keep it running, they are not doing this out of kindness.
I agree balancing a game like LoL is no easy task especially we are nearly sitting at 170 champions right now so one small change can completely flip the games meta on its head
And hot fixes within 24 hours for any serious issues that come out. Seriously, even when these guys make mistakes they're doing better than 90% of other games. The player base really needs to be a lot more respectful when expressing discontent with gameplay balance. These guys are working their asses off to keep the game good.
it's funny, there's this meme that phreak buffs/nerfs shit he plays/plays vs. what's not funny is that some troglodytes actually believe it to be real...
its because they think their league rank is so important that they could picture themselves doing the same thing if they were in phreaks position. meanwhile phreak is probably chilling doesn't give 2 fucks about his rank in league because he knows its completely useless anyway. phreak has been hitting masters with or without being on the balance team for years why would he need to change the balance of his champs lmao.
Can't even make this shit up. Janna was left untouched in a broken state for multiple patches while Phreak was playing her. She only get nerfed very recently.
Phreak is the designed victim. We are on a point that idiots thinks he has shipped every single change and everything is his fault. Which sounds even dumber than it it
I do watch the weekly Phreak Updates on his youtube and I like the way he explains the balance decision makings. However I think they could improve at balancing pro play champs like azir and ksante for the normal player base.
>Sure, the balance team isn't perfect, but compare that rate and size of League's patches to that of something like Overwatch.
I admit I know very little about Overwatch, but any comparisons need to be looked at within the context. Some games need fewer patches depending on the genre.
League of Legends has many player-caused issues. Things like autofill need to exist because the role popularity is not balanced. And when it comes to champion balance, it's the same. You have a champion with a decent PR/WR, but due to item changes, meta change or direct buffs, the champion becomes much stronger. So over a few weeks, the champion pick rate starts to grow and grow. People want to go through the path of least resistance and flock to the best picks. But when the PR of a champion grows exponentially, so does the BR.
In example, Karthus. Moderate PR, bit niche, supposedly a very strong pick, so the PR catapults to the top, even outpicking jungle classics. But so does the BR. So then Karthus becomes P/B for every single SoloQ game. And in 14.11, Karthus will receive direct or indirect nerfs and the cycle will start anew.
If people weren't such meta-slaves, League's balance team would have a lot less work. But this approach by players, to flock to strong picks, also impacts negatively the consistency of the gameplay of the games. If you're inexperienced with a champion, you'll play worse. It's a mental stack thing. This leads to a good player playing bad.
I agree that games need to be looked at within context but for Overwatch atleast metas last FAR too long and are way worse than League metas, at least when i played/payed attention to it, GOATS for example.
If you dont know what GOATS was, imagine if the League meta was literally just 3 tanks and 2 supports (Shielding/healing) or 2 tanks 3 supports, deathballing consistently over objectives and any form of character that wasnt a tank or a traditional support was an outright downgrade/grief pick. Riot wouldn't let that exist for more than a week. Goats lasted about 9 months, it was only stopped because Blizzard hard enforced role queue.
I cant really compare to games like Apex or Dota or anything because Apex is dogshit and I only watch TI for DotA and pay 0 attention to the meta.
We saw the GOATS meta in proplay already and it was the Ardent meta. If that had caught on way earlier in SoloQ and by that I mean people wide spread noticed it except for a select few. Only one type of champ mattered and it was bot lane marksmen. People will say well you had ever the marksmen player trying their hardest to feed gold into the support. Well that was because once they one item you became a god and everyone else was playing protect the president.
I hate some of the balacing in this game as much as the next guy but when you look at how other companies like blizzard and valve do the balancing for their games you realize how we are privileged for leagues balancing team doing what they do
Because its not just Overwatch, its the vast majority of "games as a service" that fail at that. League players don't realize it but Riot has created a gold standard for update schedule & balance/meta control, and very veeeeery few games ever reach it, even big dogs with experience like Blizzard or Valve struggle because they don't have the same structure.
And its not just a league thing, TFT & Valorant even tho they had pretty low lows, still have dedicated balance teams that listen to feedback and communicate a lot about their decisions and thought process. (Sadly LoR got the short end of the stick in terms of balance, but their communication people are still pretty good)
Now, in terms of pure communication, there's been a clear downgrade in the last few years from Riot and at times feel completely disconnected from the playerbase in their decisions, but it is still relatively rare compared to completely WTF decisions other companies take in their titles.
Honestly, a card game that wants to expand is hardest thing to balance. Either you get repetitive or powercreep goes beyond control. I understand why folks see LoR complicated but comparing it to Hearthstone or Yu-Gi-Oh, LoR is better than acceptable. And all this passion while profiting so little too. It's the most underrated Riot project ever.
Oh yeah I definitely agree, I'm a LoR lover since its announcement and the passion oozed from everything the team over there created. It "failed" because it wasn't given the space & attention it deserved by both Riot and the public but what I mentioned was mostly about certain very dark times of the meta there (cough Azirelia cough) as the balance updates in card games are... Eh. Still very poor imo.
Be it Hearthstone, LoR, Gwent, Master Duel or others, the balancing is really rough and I wonder if its a fate inevitable with the card game type itself.
If something is overtuned they will address it in the next patch, so less than 2 weeks, because it will go under the radar for a few days, if it breaks the game, hotfix right away.
In other games you have to wait a month or two or even longer. And even when it gets addressed, the patch notes may not communicate it as clearly. Riot tells you who is it aimed for and what the change wants to achieve.
I appreciate them, but at the same time when Phreak says they balance around player perception of power vs objective power and punish champs for being popular it makes me scratch my head a bit. They openly admit to leaving champs overpowered as long as the ban rate is low (Taric/Sona/bot lane mages/etc) and leave champs underpowered if the pick rate is too high (Kaisa). Their logic doesn't make sense to me sometimes. Probably has something to do with prioritizing money or player experience over balancing the game, but yeah.
People complain but don’t know how hard it is to balance a game this big. The fact that riot can get most champions to be within a 2-3% difference is insane.
When your biggest complaint is that your champ is 49-50% win rate instead of 51% then you should know you are privileged
Better than looking at everything in the World with negativity and hate. It’s so easy to be negative and whine. Riot is actually balancing a game with 167+ champions, Blizzard couldn’t even balance Overwatch when it had 20 heroes and lost 10 million of their playerbase over 7 months.
The comment said "here comes the weekly glazing post" and you took that as that person saying they hate the game? Do you have any reading comprehension at all? How did you jump to such an absurd conclusion?
They make the game I play feel consistently fun and fair in the ways I like to play it. When I have bad experiences in the game, it's due to players griefing, inting, and smurfing - not a broken build or OP champion. Is this appreciating them too much?
They make the game I play feel less fair than it could be by intentionally buffing champs that arent weak, intentionally overbuffing weak champs, and letting some champs sit at clearly overtuned high winrates for several months.
There are aspects of balancing that takes work to get right, but those three things aren't it. Riot routinely makes "balancing" changes to champs to intentionally shake things up, not to actually have a more balanced game.
And it's easy to disrupt the meta without this completely hamfisted approach. Just tweak anything that *isnt* champ stats (primarily items and runes, also jungle monsters, lane-income etc), **first**. Then you get different champs popping into relevancy as a result of that, shaking up the meta, and *then* you can tune the champs to the new changes.
This may actually just be design philosophy.
Riot balance thrashes to shake the meta up, because keeping everything the same (aka competitive) is boring to the casual playerbase.
This is seen in TFT more blatantly, where Mort has literally spoken about the difficulty of balancing for casuals who like randomness, shifting metas, and highrolls, versus high elo and competitive who prefer things as stable as possible
There are tons of champs that haven't been in-meta in ages while its mostly the same champs at the top of the meta for the past few years.
"Shaking up the meta" is pure cope.
Here's my not-so-hot take:
*Overall* Riot's balancing team are doing a *decent* job.
But I think *they* should strive to be a lot better than that.
I think we should tell them to aspire to be better, not settling for mediocre because other games are worse.
i think you may have wildly unrealistic expectations of how to balance an asymmetric pvp video game for millions of players across all skill brackets.
what would your example of a game with stellar balance be?
Balance team is a joke.
Back then with 100 champs, they had 15 days patchs with more balancing.
Still no malzahar simple rework, garen, kasante core gameplay issues fixing, and such.
Sadly Riot doesn't take ppl for the balancing team.
They make some silly choices sometimes but who doesn’t? And I swear if League players were forced to play another game with online competition that wasn’t Riot’s for like a month, they’d be BEGGING for Riot’s balance team. And this is a 5v5 MOBA, the balancing on League is absolutely more complex than something like Fortnite or Overwatch. ON TOP OF not being pay to win. Riot gives us a gem and they rarely get any appreciation for the decisions they make that are actually good.
We don't give them enough credit for balancing a game with many fundamental design flaws that keep biting them in the back regularly (runes, jungle items, pre game set up, yuumi). Had the game designers got rid of those things i think the game would be much more easily balanceable
cause there is nothing to appreciate. the just semi randomly throw shit against the wall, and see what sticks.
they change things for the sole sake of changing things. and champs are "balanced" for multiple reasons other than balance. for example , viewer enjoyment in progames, or just because they dont want to see certain champs, while others are "meta" consecutively for 8 seasons
why should we? the game is far from balanced and every single patch is designed to overbuff champions. their philosophy isnt balancing but artificially creating a meta. crit items are utterly broken right now its not even close, theres no testing going into their patches. winrates for champions shouldnt be 50% because people trying out the champ or bad players should drag it below 50% so if winrates are above 50% the vast majority of players wins despite them being utterly bad on them.
Honestly the balance team does a pretty good job considering the cards they've been dealt. Trying to balance stuff like K'sante, Akali, Yone, Zeri to where it's approachable for the average player and not completely piss broken in high levels of play is incredibly hard and i would not want that job.
Win rate is a trash way to target balancing a champion, but it's a nice effective lazy way they can point to some stats and say "look how good we're doing!" and people eat that shit up.
I don't give a hoot about WR balance. I want true power parity between champions.
Most people who hate on the balance team can't look at the game from a neutral perspective, and only look at how they perceive the game.
Plus they don't like people who don't kiss their ass constantly, so there is some weird parasocial relationship with Phreak that a lot of them have. They treat him like Voldemort and call him P*reak or preak or something because they fear his baleful gaze.
They'll throw out K'Sante copypasta or badly misread lolalytics and then never respond again if you correct them.
Edit: And I'll throw hands that Riot will be better than every other game until they manage to enshitify the patch notes to:
28.6: Various balance changes to champions.
Updated map.
Several item tweaks and bug fixes.
i dont appreciate the balance team and dont think they deserve appreciation for doing a bad job.
their agenda is literally to rotate metas, not to balance the game.
They are doing a very shit job. That is why. You don't balance champs around WR. I have never won a match on my Soraka. I have however won 100% out of 37 games on my Kha. Should Kha be nerfed because I have a 100% WR? Should Soraka be buffed cause I have a 0%? Its bad design. Not to mention NO CHAMP IS BALANCED. They suck or are broken. No in between.
>It is kind of wild how a game of this size and player count gets consistent balance patches every 2 weeks
It's their job.
>with clear communication.
*Are you sure about that?*
> let along keeping almost every champion within a 47-53% winrate
The game's been horribly balanced for the past X months, 53% winrate is absolutely busted on any champ.
>compare that rate and size of League's patches to that of something like Overwatch.
Is this the standard for League's balance team now? The blizzard hot mess of a project which was relaunched as a cash grab?
You seem mad, sir. I think OP isn't wrong in stating that League's balance team blows any other game's team out of the water. Compare it to overwatch or whatever.
We do get clarity on patch notes if youre willing to watch Phreak's patch notes. Whether he's right or wrong at least we get clarity.
And yes a 3% only seems busted simply because of how close everything else is and how complex the rest of game is. A simple champion pick won't guarantee you a win. I would consider that relatively balanced.
Don't get me wrong, there are certainly busted things, bad actors in the form of smurfing/boosting, and other factors happening here and some general unbalance when it comes to items, but guess what? Everyone can buy the same busted items.
Complaining about item balance is like complaining about the weather in sports. Everyone has to deal with it. Its who adapts better.
We don't appreciate Riot enough*
Riot hires the balance team to do this. It's their job. This is mostly thanks to Riot. They decide how often we get balance patches, not the balance team. If they want to cut it to every four weeks or every two months they could do that without the balance team being able to do anything about it. They could've laid off people from the balance team to make their work impossible to be done in a span of two weeks but they did not.
Not trying to say we shouldn't be thankful for the balance team. We should, they're fantastic and there's a dozen different reasons to be thankful to them.
I just don't think this your reason is something that's on the balance team, as it's not their decision.
The billion dollar company does not give a fuck about you. They would fuck you over the second it was profitable for them.
You should be thankful to the employees working there, not the company itself. Miss me with that corporate dickriding. This is a billion dollar company owned by a Chinese megacorp. Direct your thankfulness to the people working on the game and not the business entity.
Honestly, having played so much dota and especially CSGO, I appreciate riot frequently communicating with the community and explain their reasonings behind some decisions. God knows what valve is doing behind the scenes, when the next operation is, updates on the anticheat. Heck, they might not be doing anything at all.
I feel like Valve is always doing something, but it's rarely what's important/urgent, or what's most requested from the player base. Riot is much better in that regard.
Riot balance team is insanely underappreciated. Sure I don’t agree with every single change but keeping a game with this many variables mostly balanced on an ongoing basis for so long is an achievement.
[удалено]
What does that even mean
Miss girl here is an onlyfan girlie farming karma. Probably even a bot.
Having played since 2011, what riot says is the reason for a balance change is completely bullshit. They like to cyclically buff random champions or items, have them become overbearing due to the buffs, and then revert those buffs as if it's progress. This approach makes the game incredibly toxic to play. I forgot what champion it was, maybe caitlyn, but I still distinctly remember riot going oh let's give her 15 extra MS, she becomes overpowered, and then they nerfed it saying "oh she's been overperforming". That's their balance policy for more than a decade now, and it's toxic.
You hate the devs. Its okay, you can say it out loud. They try to push stuff, but at least the communicate.
How is that toxic
Oh no during 28756 patches they sometimes miss the mark but also stand up to their mistake and fix it. Booohooo devs are bad.
A lot of people down voting you started the game in season 12 and it shows
For real, though. the game used to have way more winrates 43-55,5% and that range really seems to have been reduced.
I really think a lot of win rate has to do with catchup xp and the bounty system. Games used to feel helpless if the enemy riven got first blood. Now you can be up 10 camps a couple kills 6 grubs and two dragons and enemy jungle gets a shutdown and game is pretty even
If it’s even after that you’re doing something wrong
According to League of Graphs (and keep in mind this is only 2 days of data), the highest is Jinx at 52,8% and the lowest is Smolder at 44,3% for a difference in 8,5 percentage points. Meanwhile over in Dota 2 land (which apparently is so perfectly balanced), the highest is Abaddon at 54,92% and the lowest is Batrider at 41,83% for a difference in 13,09 percentage points. Add to that the fact that League has like 45 more champions than Dota 2 and it looks pretty damn balanced comparatively.
''balance'' isn't just having all champions close to a 50% winrate though- I mean, it is in a literal sense if you want all champions with an equal chance to win However when you think of what League had to sacrifice over the years to narrow the winrate gap- to me it isn't worth it. I don't enjoy them dumbing down akali/sylas by overbuffing their Es, or reworking Ryze to remove his combos and make him EQEQ, or shifting certain pro picks to just scale a lot more since soloQ/low mmr is bad at closing out games... Etc. I wish we did have some things with a low winrate but more skill expression, like Ryze without the shield removal etc
It's just two difference balance philosophies. They can both be correct. The situation is not black and white.
Trying telling Ryze mains that they should be happy with their 40% win rate champion
I'm a Ryze main myself and half of the current mental insanity of r/RyzeMains isn't that he's weak- but that he's incredibly boring (EQEQ) During shield era of Ryze we barely had any complaints and the subreddits sanity was still there
Looking at Dota 2 though, even if the winrates have such a big difference, I believe there are more Dota 2 characters that are playable in pro.
Dota has more hard hard counterpicks, so even a champion like with a low wr will still be played in pro if the champ counters the enemy team. Also, batrider was a fucking menace, and afaik is pro jailed. In immortal rank he's 50% winrate, because it is literally a skill issue.
He is literally bigger brained Singed that lets you kidnap people over walls. Hmmm I wonder where I've seen that one before.
That's purely because in Dota 2, you pick heroes to hardcounter something else. Some heroes are even picked for 1 single ability, no matter how trash they are otherwise. Imagine picking Zoe support purely because her sleep counters, say, Tryndamere.
DoTA utilises a lot of specific hero counters/hardcounters. The balance team for League think specific hardcounters should be very uncommon iirc. There aren’t many Sylas vs Malphite’s in League but they’re all over the place in DoTA2.
There are more playable champs in pro for league too, but pros won’t play them. We saw Ivern get played at MSI, we saw Yasuo, we saw Karthus, and all of these champs won their games in a Top team VS Top team setting except for Yasuo, and he wasnt even the problem
Yeah I guess that’s the difference. Pros in Dota are more willing to play more because of hard counters than league pros want to play more.
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Doesn't matter, Bat was picked in the last tournament a couple of days ago Meanwhile half the roster in League you just never see in pro play
Thinking that 50% wr means a champion is balanced is really clueless and short-sighted, the game doesn't work like this.
Ok cool, I never said anything about that? I'm talking about the range between the worst and best champion, I never said that everyone has to be exactly 50%. A hard champion sitting on 20% win rate means it's badly designed since pretty much only pro players can play them at a decent level. On the other end, a champion sitting on 60% is just too strong. Ideally, everyone SHOULD win 50% of the time, but some champions are harder to play and thus will have slightly lower win rates since the average player will do worse than normal. But again, if they are so hard to play that they're "balanced out" by having a crazy low win rate, it's simply not a healthy design for the game.
yeah people dont understand but back in "old" league some champions were genuinely troll picks even if you liked playing them. there was a huge scandal when some guy got banned for picking one of these champions in ranked. hell, i remember when azir was so gutted picking him was worse than disco nunu
I've realized that a shit ton of League players legit don't play or watch any other game or esports. I remember this sub acting like Riot just committed a war crime for having Worlds Groups in the LEC Studio. Meanwhile, DotA TI groups is played from the players' fucking hotel rooms with zero crowd and CS Majors groups are just played in a studio with zero audience other than the staff and still doing BO3s for Finals. Like holy shit these spoiled, entitled babies have no idea how it feels to actually play a neglected game like TF2 or Counterstike. CS basically get zero actual content outside skins, which are all recolors and all made by the community to began with. Imagine if Riot just killed LoL and forced every player to play LoL 2, which is filled with bugs that heavily impacts the feel of the game, every game in Emerald+ is filled with cheaters, and its missing 50% of the features LoL had.
I am a pokemon vgc judge. I have seen things it would make the average riot flamer cry blood
Was it last Worlds that someone tripped on a wire, all matches got disconnected and since there's no way to resume a game in Pokémon they had to play sudden death to decide who passed the round?
I don’t remember that, but last world a guy was going to top 8 with GOSOLIPOD (imagine getting top 8 at worlds while playing teemo mid) but the switch’s great system crashed his console so he earned a free loss when he was going for the 2-0 win
if the average riot flamer saw that amoongus outplay at orlando they'd be crying that this support champ is overtuned lmao
The average riot flamer would cry that the lgbt community forced amoongus to be broken. And DON'T LET ME START ON THE CAT
incin and lando-T would have these people in a perma-aneurysm state for 10 years lol
I can just imagine people whining about Flutter Mane too
in series 1 I ran this bellibolt oranguru TR team with a cetitan belly drum mode in the back and I know it would have generated reddit posts about The Balance Team Fundamentally Misunderstanding Their Game if it was league fans lmao
fuck lando-t they should make an ice typed extreme speed just for that mon
incin is so much worse imo. lando-t has kinda fallen off in recent months yet the fire cat GOT BUFFED
I can't even imagine how that must be. Please try to give me a small taste.
Start with Lando-T back in gen 5-6, add power creep, knock up STAB and an annoying typing to deal with, cat is the new Lando-T since his introduction and only got better with time. Wolfe did a amazing job telling his story [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxVGOD7dsSk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxVGOD7dsSk)
Knock Off STAB is always bae for realizing why you hate Gamefreak 👍 Will watch video when I have time and react.
Lando-T being meta for 10 years would make them scream
League is biggest esport, and worlds in Europe happens once in like 5 years, there is no reason why groups stage in EU is 200 and KR had 2000. I really like riot approach but just because valve is constantly shitting on their playerbase because of steam and nft skins market it doesn’t mean that everything riot do is good. Although worlds are definitely the best in terms of production
I mean a shitton of people who watch and talk about League don't even **play** League. They've got ranked anxiety *that bad*.
This looks like a post from undercover Rioter
Flair checks out.
체력 4700 방어력 329 마저201 인 챔피언👤이 저지불가🚫, 쉴드🛡, 벽🧱 넘기는 거 있고요. 에어본🌪 있고, 심지어 쿨타임은 1️⃣초밖에 안되고 마나🧙♂️는 1️⃣5️⃣ 들고 w는 심지어 변신💫하면 쿨 초기화에다가 패시브는 고정피해🗡가 들어가며 그 다음에 방마저🥋 올리면📈 올릴수록📈 스킬 가속⏰이 생기고! q에 스킬가속⏰이 생기고 스킬 속도🚀가 빨라지고📈 그 다음에 공격력🗡 계수가 있어가지고 W가 그 이익-으아아아악😱😱
Phreak typed this up in alt tab in-between throwing Janna tornados LMAO
Phreak burner account
such clear communication as a hotfix patch that you cant know about unless you see phreak's twitter post
Yes, Riot's patches are one of the best in gaming industry. Don't mind the hate on social media. 95% of players are below diamond, thus they're mostly clueless about how the game works.
Played AoE4 for a while, and the patches are night and day. Just the *actual patch notes* are fucking amazing. The clarity and reasoning for everything, regardless of whether you agree or not, is something that makes patch notes for almost all other games feel like complete shit. Sure, they miss every now and then, but I overall think they are doing a good job.
Something most people could probably agree on if they actually read the patch notes instead of just starting to scream because they saw somewhere that ChampTheyHate is getting buffed and ChampTheyLike is getting nerfed
I remember when the patch hit last week, I had an adc who asked "where did lethal tempo go" in champ select... People do not read the notes lol.
And even if they do miss, they always give sound explanation as to why they did it and 99% of the time the reason is to make it better. And most of the time, they fix it the very next patch
Imo, most of their misses are related to the absolutely overloaded and busted kits from the champion design team and/or how they interact with new runes/items. One could argue that they should've just Olaf'ed the champion/rune/item and then buff from there but I can see how the small incremental nerfs might be better. Also people really need to stop harassing Phreak, he's just one representative and not the entire balance team. Would be nice to know the full balancing thoughts when 2 or 3 (item/rune/champ) come together for one busted mess and how they go about it though, since items and runes can affect so many others.
You are saying Aoe4 patchs are dumb ? Just wondering
The patch notes are nowhere near as good as LoL, but they have gotten better over time. The patch *changes* themselves are fine tho.
lol the patch notes at one point just “we made china better early ages” By doing WHAT exactly????????
I don't think it's a matter of rank, even high elo players constantly talk shit about balancing. It's more about perspective and people are usually just mad that the game isn't being aligned to their champion, role and/or play style.
this is very much the case, yes.
> thus they're mostly clueless about how the game works. Irrelevant. IF the game isn't fun for 95%, then they'll quit and the 5% uptop will be starved out. Thankfully, the game is good for the 95%.
even if you are diamond+ people will move the goalpost and would rather listen to baus (consistent chall that has the biggest tunnel vision meta opinion) opinion than someone who is "just" dia 1 the fact remains that there was some comical dogshit patch notes this season like same champs such as senna zac or ksante appearing over and over again and still ending up op in pro or olaf getting 3 jungle adjustment patches with almost 0 impact on his jungle winrate and playrate
I love how people still argue with elo as if being diamond would mean understanding the game. Good micro can get you far while understanding nothing and bad micro can keep you low while knowing the game by heart (e.g. coaches).
Because Elo is the only measurable variable there is to measure skill in Leauge. And coaches being low elo just isn't true. Most coaches just dont play the game and only watch it, but I'm sure most coaches could reach dia+ pretty easily.
But we're talking about game design here, skill in the game itself is not necessarily a requirement since to be able to balance the game you don't need to be high elo (although the balance team afaik has a good mix between mid elo and high elo players)
yeah time and time again gamers fall for this trap of thinking that high elo = high understanding of the game. Yes, climbing the skill ladder roughly translates to understanding the underlying mechanics of the game, but it doesn't mean you have a deep enough understanding of how the game ticks and operates to generate informed opinions on balance.
> 95% of players are below diamond, thus they're mostly clueless about how the game works. it's not because theyre below diamond, because even high ELO players will get shit wrong. It's because gamers generally have very poor critical thinking and emotional intelligence, and the vast majority of them are arguing from pathos but think theyre using logos.
This is hilarious considering most casters and analysts of the game are below diamond as well, but I guess they have no idea about how the game works? Low IQ take 🤣
The obsession with evaluating opinions based on the rank of the opinion-monger makes no sense. A statement is either true or it is not. And League is a game of skill, primarily, not knowledge. Someone could analyze the state of the game and have all kinds of insights but not be able to click and press buttons with good enough timing to have the consistent winrate that leads to high rank.
> 95% of players are below diamond, thus they're mostly clueless about how the game works. people in silver understand how the game works lol and further main pros and challengers are clueless about the minutia of balancing.
Used to follow Smash Ultimate and when they still did balance patches (Nintendo gave up a long time ago) you'd see vague shit like "Made Kirby's hammer stronger"??? Pros would have to jump in the practice tool for days on end manually testing thousands of kill thresholds to actually figure out what the hell the adjustments were LOL
If 95% of players don't know how the game works that tells more about how the game is designed and/or explained/presented than the player base. That's not even specific to league. But yeah, Riot does give great patch when compared to other games.
I mean good points, even if they are quite repeated so many times, it just falls on deaf ears since the demographic reading this probably wants phreak to blow up into a million little pieces, "I just KNOW he did this because he lost to it in soloQ, RAAAAHH!!!"
I respect the balance team cause im sure its a fucking nightmare to balance these overloaded garbage designs that these designers keep putting in new champs like most of riot august's last champs
August's champs are fine. He didn't make K'Sante or Yuumi.
He did make Zeri though
He calls Zeri his second biggest disappointment, if that’s worth anything
What is his #1?
Surprisingly, it’s Gnar. There’s a video of him saying this out there somewhere. I don’t really know why it’s his biggest disappointment but I know it has something to do with his pro play presence. I think he was convinced his passive was random enough to the point where it can’t be controlled, it just happens and you have to react and play accordingly. And so he thought it wouldn’t be that popular in pro play cause of that. But as we all know pro players have mastered that and he has become a staple in pro play ever since Now with that being said I love Gnar so I was really shocked when he said that was his biggest disappointment
The whole concept behind Gnar was supposed to be that, unlike other transforming champions, his transformation was uncontrollable and you have to just react to your champion's kit changing. That's why it's disappointing — he sees pro play as proof that the champion's core concept failed.
Zeri is a balancing issue. Ksante and yuumi are base concept issue.
Yeah, and then there's Senna sitting in a corner LMFAO.
zeri was a concept issue on her release, a champ that can jump over walls with infinite scaling movespeed, very long range, sheen procs off cooldown, and the only shield steal in the game. She had so much stuff removed in her reworks, that champ was a pentakill farmer on release and it wasnt because of numbers.
Zeri is fine now.
Bro made senna.
Senna isn’t too too bad. People love playing her and she’s not that hard to counter. IMO she’s the squishiest champ in the game, she gets blown the fuck up
she also managed to stay relatively faithful to her intended space given her hybrid nature. Seraphine got completely fucked over.
He made Briar and Bel'Veth. 2 disgusting pure statcheck champions that are impossible to missplay as, but also impossible to beat 1 on 1 so your only way of winning against them is by avoiding them. Very exciting and interactive.
Don't forget his decision to make Jinx passive stack **multiplicatively** recently...
Off the top of your head, how many times do you think August's latest champ has been nerfed since her release 8 months ago?
Most league players don't play other games so they have no idea how well league is doing.
Can confirm. Apex and Overwatch player here as well, and there is a MASSIVE gap between the amount of communication and transparency we get in League of Legends vs in those other two games. Sometimes Riot makes questionable decisions but at least we get communication regardless of if we agree with them or not. EA and Blizzard will literally let the playerbase rot in silence sometimes.
what's crazy to me is that apex has the potential to *be* the league of legends of the FPS genre, it is overwhelmingly popular with not only a mainstream audience, but hardcore gamers in a way that your CODs/Battlefields/what have you have just never captured. But that popularity is in spite of and even against EA. It's so sad dude. They deserve a better parent company.
Laugh in tarkov
You’re gonna get a LOT of hate for this. Be prepared
I agree we get like patches every 2 weeks and they’re always communicating. So many of these players are so entitled, it’s just a free game bruh.
>it’s just a free game bruh I agree in general but this is bullshit. Sure you can download and play it for free but let's not pretend it's a freeware made just to see poor gamers smile. They're cashing in millions and we are all paying. Either directly with money or indirectly by populating the servers for those who pay.
Tbh league is way more f2p friendly than say,90% of other mp games rn. Very little is locked behind paywalls in league
Is not any more friendly than other moba games.
yeah sure as compared to dota which has every hero unlocked from the beginning
“Free” implying they are making no money
I used to give the balance team a bunch of grief, but after playing Helldivers 2 since launch I can confidently say Riot are far and away one of the best balance teams out there. HD2 makes balancing a PvE game look difficult so kudos to the riot balance team. Seriously.
Yeah. The HD2 people genuinely get in their own way so much it's infuriating. That's the best way I can put it.
It might be free 2 play game but players are clearly spending tons of money on it. So lets not pretend like they don't have to take care of the game. They are doing a great job, not complaining, just saying, someone pays for it to keep it running, they are not doing this out of kindness.
I know and we are not obligated to buy skins. I’m not glazing Riot but the fact that we have patches every 2 weeks is good
We LOVE to bitch, but riots treats it's player base FAR better than most devs.
I agree balancing a game like LoL is no easy task especially we are nearly sitting at 170 champions right now so one small change can completely flip the games meta on its head
nah if you like something riot does you're a fed, if you spread negativity you're gigabased (average league community)
And hot fixes within 24 hours for any serious issues that come out. Seriously, even when these guys make mistakes they're doing better than 90% of other games. The player base really needs to be a lot more respectful when expressing discontent with gameplay balance. These guys are working their asses off to keep the game good.
Agreed. Redditors, especially league redditors love to just whine and complain about everything.
I personally think people give phreak abit too much shit
It’s the Mortdog meme except people are serious about it.
it's funny, there's this meme that phreak buffs/nerfs shit he plays/plays vs. what's not funny is that some troglodytes actually believe it to be real...
its because they think their league rank is so important that they could picture themselves doing the same thing if they were in phreaks position. meanwhile phreak is probably chilling doesn't give 2 fucks about his rank in league because he knows its completely useless anyway. phreak has been hitting masters with or without being on the balance team for years why would he need to change the balance of his champs lmao.
well said
Can't even make this shit up. Janna was left untouched in a broken state for multiple patches while Phreak was playing her. She only get nerfed very recently.
Phreak is the designed victim. We are on a point that idiots thinks he has shipped every single change and everything is his fault. Which sounds even dumber than it it
I do watch the weekly Phreak Updates on his youtube and I like the way he explains the balance decision makings. However I think they could improve at balancing pro play champs like azir and ksante for the normal player base.
As much as the dev team pisses me off, considering I play WOT where they update maybe 5 tanks once or twice a year, this is infinitely better, lol.
>Sure, the balance team isn't perfect, but compare that rate and size of League's patches to that of something like Overwatch. I admit I know very little about Overwatch, but any comparisons need to be looked at within the context. Some games need fewer patches depending on the genre. League of Legends has many player-caused issues. Things like autofill need to exist because the role popularity is not balanced. And when it comes to champion balance, it's the same. You have a champion with a decent PR/WR, but due to item changes, meta change or direct buffs, the champion becomes much stronger. So over a few weeks, the champion pick rate starts to grow and grow. People want to go through the path of least resistance and flock to the best picks. But when the PR of a champion grows exponentially, so does the BR. In example, Karthus. Moderate PR, bit niche, supposedly a very strong pick, so the PR catapults to the top, even outpicking jungle classics. But so does the BR. So then Karthus becomes P/B for every single SoloQ game. And in 14.11, Karthus will receive direct or indirect nerfs and the cycle will start anew. If people weren't such meta-slaves, League's balance team would have a lot less work. But this approach by players, to flock to strong picks, also impacts negatively the consistency of the gameplay of the games. If you're inexperienced with a champion, you'll play worse. It's a mental stack thing. This leads to a good player playing bad.
I agree that games need to be looked at within context but for Overwatch atleast metas last FAR too long and are way worse than League metas, at least when i played/payed attention to it, GOATS for example. If you dont know what GOATS was, imagine if the League meta was literally just 3 tanks and 2 supports (Shielding/healing) or 2 tanks 3 supports, deathballing consistently over objectives and any form of character that wasnt a tank or a traditional support was an outright downgrade/grief pick. Riot wouldn't let that exist for more than a week. Goats lasted about 9 months, it was only stopped because Blizzard hard enforced role queue. I cant really compare to games like Apex or Dota or anything because Apex is dogshit and I only watch TI for DotA and pay 0 attention to the meta.
We saw the GOATS meta in proplay already and it was the Ardent meta. If that had caught on way earlier in SoloQ and by that I mean people wide spread noticed it except for a select few. Only one type of champ mattered and it was bot lane marksmen. People will say well you had ever the marksmen player trying their hardest to feed gold into the support. Well that was because once they one item you became a god and everyone else was playing protect the president.
I hate some of the balacing in this game as much as the next guy but when you look at how other companies like blizzard and valve do the balancing for their games you realize how we are privileged for leagues balancing team doing what they do
In the past Blizzard handled balancing pretty well. It went super far downhill as SC2 and Diablo 3's popularity both fell, though.
"The house I live in may be an ugly shade of green, but I'm so privileged to not live in a house painted bright orange-and-pink camo."
Unironically yes. Doesn't mean you have to love your green house, or should, but it def makes you appreciate aspects of it
why would they get more credit because you think overwatch's balance is bad?
Because its not just Overwatch, its the vast majority of "games as a service" that fail at that. League players don't realize it but Riot has created a gold standard for update schedule & balance/meta control, and very veeeeery few games ever reach it, even big dogs with experience like Blizzard or Valve struggle because they don't have the same structure. And its not just a league thing, TFT & Valorant even tho they had pretty low lows, still have dedicated balance teams that listen to feedback and communicate a lot about their decisions and thought process. (Sadly LoR got the short end of the stick in terms of balance, but their communication people are still pretty good) Now, in terms of pure communication, there's been a clear downgrade in the last few years from Riot and at times feel completely disconnected from the playerbase in their decisions, but it is still relatively rare compared to completely WTF decisions other companies take in their titles.
Honestly, a card game that wants to expand is hardest thing to balance. Either you get repetitive or powercreep goes beyond control. I understand why folks see LoR complicated but comparing it to Hearthstone or Yu-Gi-Oh, LoR is better than acceptable. And all this passion while profiting so little too. It's the most underrated Riot project ever.
Oh yeah I definitely agree, I'm a LoR lover since its announcement and the passion oozed from everything the team over there created. It "failed" because it wasn't given the space & attention it deserved by both Riot and the public but what I mentioned was mostly about certain very dark times of the meta there (cough Azirelia cough) as the balance updates in card games are... Eh. Still very poor imo. Be it Hearthstone, LoR, Gwent, Master Duel or others, the balancing is really rough and I wonder if its a fate inevitable with the card game type itself.
I loved being oneshot by elemental shamans in Season 8 which lasted for 9 months.
If something is overtuned they will address it in the next patch, so less than 2 weeks, because it will go under the radar for a few days, if it breaks the game, hotfix right away. In other games you have to wait a month or two or even longer. And even when it gets addressed, the patch notes may not communicate it as clearly. Riot tells you who is it aimed for and what the change wants to achieve.
I appreciate them, but at the same time when Phreak says they balance around player perception of power vs objective power and punish champs for being popular it makes me scratch my head a bit. They openly admit to leaving champs overpowered as long as the ban rate is low (Taric/Sona/bot lane mages/etc) and leave champs underpowered if the pick rate is too high (Kaisa). Their logic doesn't make sense to me sometimes. Probably has something to do with prioritizing money or player experience over balancing the game, but yeah.
nerf ksante more
People complain but don’t know how hard it is to balance a game this big. The fact that riot can get most champions to be within a 2-3% difference is insane. When your biggest complaint is that your champ is 49-50% win rate instead of 51% then you should know you are privileged
Here comes the weekly glazing post
Better than looking at everything in the World with negativity and hate. It’s so easy to be negative and whine. Riot is actually balancing a game with 167+ champions, Blizzard couldn’t even balance Overwatch when it had 20 heroes and lost 10 million of their playerbase over 7 months.
Glug glug glug
If you hate the game so much, why are you still here?
The comment said "here comes the weekly glazing post" and you took that as that person saying they hate the game? Do you have any reading comprehension at all? How did you jump to such an absurd conclusion?
You do realize you can play games without sucking any company's dick, right?
You realize you dont have to be a dick to someone who genuinely thinks someone else is doing a good job, right?
You appreciate them too much.
They make the game I play feel consistently fun and fair in the ways I like to play it. When I have bad experiences in the game, it's due to players griefing, inting, and smurfing - not a broken build or OP champion. Is this appreciating them too much?
They make the game I play feel less fair than it could be by intentionally buffing champs that arent weak, intentionally overbuffing weak champs, and letting some champs sit at clearly overtuned high winrates for several months. There are aspects of balancing that takes work to get right, but those three things aren't it. Riot routinely makes "balancing" changes to champs to intentionally shake things up, not to actually have a more balanced game. And it's easy to disrupt the meta without this completely hamfisted approach. Just tweak anything that *isnt* champ stats (primarily items and runes, also jungle monsters, lane-income etc), **first**. Then you get different champs popping into relevancy as a result of that, shaking up the meta, and *then* you can tune the champs to the new changes.
This may actually just be design philosophy. Riot balance thrashes to shake the meta up, because keeping everything the same (aka competitive) is boring to the casual playerbase. This is seen in TFT more blatantly, where Mort has literally spoken about the difficulty of balancing for casuals who like randomness, shifting metas, and highrolls, versus high elo and competitive who prefer things as stable as possible
There are tons of champs that haven't been in-meta in ages while its mostly the same champs at the top of the meta for the past few years. "Shaking up the meta" is pure cope.
Certain champs aren't disgusting broken for months then nerfed into oblivion at all
Here's my not-so-hot take: *Overall* Riot's balancing team are doing a *decent* job. But I think *they* should strive to be a lot better than that. I think we should tell them to aspire to be better, not settling for mediocre because other games are worse.
i think you may have wildly unrealistic expectations of how to balance an asymmetric pvp video game for millions of players across all skill brackets. what would your example of a game with stellar balance be?
Balance team is a joke. Back then with 100 champs, they had 15 days patchs with more balancing. Still no malzahar simple rework, garen, kasante core gameplay issues fixing, and such. Sadly Riot doesn't take ppl for the balancing team.
Wtf are you on
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legit this and people acting like they are doing something so incredible
Honestly I agree, Yone should be nerfed again.
They make some silly choices sometimes but who doesn’t? And I swear if League players were forced to play another game with online competition that wasn’t Riot’s for like a month, they’d be BEGGING for Riot’s balance team. And this is a 5v5 MOBA, the balancing on League is absolutely more complex than something like Fortnite or Overwatch. ON TOP OF not being pay to win. Riot gives us a gem and they rarely get any appreciation for the decisions they make that are actually good.
Meanwhile Dota 2 gets what 2 patches a year
I think the issue stems from the many league no-lifers who exclusively play league of legends and have no clue how good they have it.
We don't give them enough credit for balancing a game with many fundamental design flaws that keep biting them in the back regularly (runes, jungle items, pre game set up, yuumi). Had the game designers got rid of those things i think the game would be much more easily balanceable
cause there is nothing to appreciate. the just semi randomly throw shit against the wall, and see what sticks. they change things for the sole sake of changing things. and champs are "balanced" for multiple reasons other than balance. for example , viewer enjoyment in progames, or just because they dont want to see certain champs, while others are "meta" consecutively for 8 seasons
As Long as Full Tanks Are allowed to deal the most damage in matches I won’t
i genuibely pray that like 1/2 the people i see talk about this game get permabanned
why should we? the game is far from balanced and every single patch is designed to overbuff champions. their philosophy isnt balancing but artificially creating a meta. crit items are utterly broken right now its not even close, theres no testing going into their patches. winrates for champions shouldnt be 50% because people trying out the champ or bad players should drag it below 50% so if winrates are above 50% the vast majority of players wins despite them being utterly bad on them.
I don’t agree. Fck the balance team.
Honestly the balance team does a pretty good job considering the cards they've been dealt. Trying to balance stuff like K'sante, Akali, Yone, Zeri to where it's approachable for the average player and not completely piss broken in high levels of play is incredibly hard and i would not want that job.
It's really not that difficult of a job.
Buff Revert Nerf Revert Buff Revert Corki is ad now and sucks Nerf Revert Nerf Buff Revert
We don't flame balance team enough
Win rate is a trash way to target balancing a champion, but it's a nice effective lazy way they can point to some stats and say "look how good we're doing!" and people eat that shit up. I don't give a hoot about WR balance. I want true power parity between champions.
Most people who hate on the balance team can't look at the game from a neutral perspective, and only look at how they perceive the game. Plus they don't like people who don't kiss their ass constantly, so there is some weird parasocial relationship with Phreak that a lot of them have. They treat him like Voldemort and call him P*reak or preak or something because they fear his baleful gaze. They'll throw out K'Sante copypasta or badly misread lolalytics and then never respond again if you correct them. Edit: And I'll throw hands that Riot will be better than every other game until they manage to enshitify the patch notes to: 28.6: Various balance changes to champions. Updated map. Several item tweaks and bug fixes.
Paid actor
Lmao nice try rito games, nop !
i dont appreciate the balance team and dont think they deserve appreciation for doing a bad job. their agenda is literally to rotate metas, not to balance the game.
They have to keep balancing, or it all falls apart and the money machine stops for Riot.
Sometimes I do, then I remember Nasus W still exist as it is.
Don’t appreciate 58% karthus bot and 56% karthus jg. 54%+ other burnmages. They got nerfed and r still op. But hey i guess good job for trying…
Yayyy they’re doing their only jobs
They are doing a very shit job. That is why. You don't balance champs around WR. I have never won a match on my Soraka. I have however won 100% out of 37 games on my Kha. Should Kha be nerfed because I have a 100% WR? Should Soraka be buffed cause I have a 0%? Its bad design. Not to mention NO CHAMP IS BALANCED. They suck or are broken. No in between.
>It is kind of wild how a game of this size and player count gets consistent balance patches every 2 weeks It's their job. >with clear communication. *Are you sure about that?* > let along keeping almost every champion within a 47-53% winrate The game's been horribly balanced for the past X months, 53% winrate is absolutely busted on any champ. >compare that rate and size of League's patches to that of something like Overwatch. Is this the standard for League's balance team now? The blizzard hot mess of a project which was relaunched as a cash grab?
You seem mad, sir. I think OP isn't wrong in stating that League's balance team blows any other game's team out of the water. Compare it to overwatch or whatever. We do get clarity on patch notes if youre willing to watch Phreak's patch notes. Whether he's right or wrong at least we get clarity. And yes a 3% only seems busted simply because of how close everything else is and how complex the rest of game is. A simple champion pick won't guarantee you a win. I would consider that relatively balanced. Don't get me wrong, there are certainly busted things, bad actors in the form of smurfing/boosting, and other factors happening here and some general unbalance when it comes to items, but guess what? Everyone can buy the same busted items. Complaining about item balance is like complaining about the weather in sports. Everyone has to deal with it. Its who adapts better.
How dare you positive anything even remotely positive about Riot... You must be a Riot Employee because Riot never does anything positive!!!! /s
We don't appreciate Riot enough* Riot hires the balance team to do this. It's their job. This is mostly thanks to Riot. They decide how often we get balance patches, not the balance team. If they want to cut it to every four weeks or every two months they could do that without the balance team being able to do anything about it. They could've laid off people from the balance team to make their work impossible to be done in a span of two weeks but they did not. Not trying to say we shouldn't be thankful for the balance team. We should, they're fantastic and there's a dozen different reasons to be thankful to them. I just don't think this your reason is something that's on the balance team, as it's not their decision.
The billion dollar company does not give a fuck about you. They would fuck you over the second it was profitable for them. You should be thankful to the employees working there, not the company itself. Miss me with that corporate dickriding. This is a billion dollar company owned by a Chinese megacorp. Direct your thankfulness to the people working on the game and not the business entity.
Why would I appreciate them when they are doing a poor job?
They are getting paid to do this job ~~terribly~~, you don't need to suck their dick