Maria Creveling is a former League of Legends professional with stints at Renegades, Misfits, and Flyquest.

Special to VPEsports

I may not have always seen eye to eye with the League of Legends community but one thing we’ve always been able to bond over is our mutual hatred for Riot’s balancing decisions. It’s the meme that keeps on giving in the League of Legends community. League of Cleavers, League of Assassins, League of Tanks… The list is endless and when one disaster patch is finally fixed another comes chugging along. Perhaps it’s Riot’s design philosophy that’s at fault rather than the individuals on the team. The constant tweaking and tinkering with numbers attempts to create a dynamic gaming experience, but usually fails due to conflict between casual and competitive balance. Each patch simply shifts power from one small set of champions to another set who then dominate competitive play. Riot continues to bow to the loud minority of Redditors who cite win percentages in solo queue as the be all and end all of balance. A cycle of nerfs to push out all unique strategies that develop year after year and League of Legends just feels like it’s “same shit different day”.

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The bimonthly cycle of balance changes often throws solo queue and competitive League of Legends into turmoil. It seems when I’m just beginning to adjust to a patch there’s already another one queued up and ready to go. As someone who used to practice more than ten hours a day, the constant shift in power is frustrating to deal with. When every balance change affects all 137 champions in the game and how they interact with each other, it’s no surprise that unforseen imbalances force pro players to adapt accordingly. Professional players spend more time learning strong “meta” champions every patch instead of refining their team’s unique playstyle or creating interesting strategies. As a result League of Legends as an esport is beginning to feel monotonous and difficult to watch and I would put the blame on the balance team for the homogeneous landscape. On top of that pros have to practice on new patches to get ahead of the curve while also performing on older patches. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if the changes from patch to patch weren’t so drastic.

The massive changes every cycle have had some catastrophic results on the global stage as well. World’s balancing has always been a hot issue for Riot Games. In their endeavor to create exciting games for the fans to watch, they inadvertently compromise competitive integrity. Immediately what springs to mind is the Juggernaut patch for World’s 2015. The decision from Riot’s balance team to push out these major reworks before World’s was absolutely tragic. Not only did top lane get completely revamped, Mordekaiser absolutely dominated the bottom lane with a near 100% pick/ban rate and a 100% win rate. These changes forced teams to waste bans on overtuned champions and completely altered the style they had been working on leading up to the tournament. How can anyone take a tournament seriously when the “rules” of the game change so much beforehand? The winner of World’s should be the strongest team, not the team that adapts the fastest to a massive shift in the metagame. It’s probably one of Riot’s worst decisions to put out that huge change for World’s instead of delaying it until preseason.

So maybe the patches come too often and the numbers are sometimes off, so what? Those things can be fixed easy enough and as a player I can understand that with so many variables some interactions are unpredictable. What I can’t understand is the constant need for Riot to remove any interesting strategies that pop up. One that was famously nerfed out of existence was lane swapping, mostly used to get laners out of bad matchups and accelerate the game. The lengths Riot went to remove it from the game were as concerning as they were unprecedented, with them even willing to experiment with altering the tower resistances different in top and bot lane. A more recent example is the funnel strategy where the jungler or mid laner sacrifices their resources so the other can reach their power spikes sooner. I thought this was a really unique style of play, originally deemed the “Chinese boosting strat”, and to see it elevate from solo queue to pro play was exciting and different. The champions involved weren’t overpowered individually but the strategy allowed them to beat out standard meta compositions through creatively working together to funnel resources. Of course it was deemed “too uninteractive” and subsequently nerfed into the ground by Riot despite teams already making adaptations to counter it. When new and interesting strategies pop up they’re hardly ever given time to develop and grow. Instead, Riot errs on the side of caution and in the first instance something appears overpowered they “remove it from the game” by nerfing the champions involved until it’s unviable. It makes the competitive scene feel stale and forced instead of organic and creative.

It’s clear that the balance team has a vision for this game that I find difficult to understand. After trying to eliminate alternative styles of play in lane swaps and funnels, they now want to implement diversity in team compositions. Massive nerfs to attack damage carries allowed new champions into the bottom lane simply because Riot wanted to see more champion diversity. I find this strange that Riot wants champion diversity but not playstyle diversity. Perhaps this is why games feel so bland recently. Of course, watching a week of teams testing funnel compositions in LCS or LCK causes some people to complain about how boring the pro scene is. The idea that these games are boring because funneling or lane swapping is not interactive is laughable. Maybe the first few matchups will be low kill count but both lane swaps and funnel compositions saw adaptations and improvements as well as counter strategies develop over time. Unfortunately, Riot’s instinct towards community appeasement sees them nerfing anything that generates complaints if it might add a dynamic component to the competitive scene.

Community appeasement in regards to balance is a tightrope walk in and of itself. The developers have said that they will never ban players for choosing off-meta picks as they don’t want to “enforce” a set playing style. This public stance is a contradiction of how their balance philosophy works in general as you can see from the examples above, yet it is in essence the correct one. Solo queue can be a place for experimentation and innovation but it is all for nothing if as soon as something becomes the optimal way to play, in the hand of professionals at least, it is patched out entirely. Remember how teleport on bottom laners was nerfed as soon as it appeared and saw play in the professional scene? This is them specifically balancing around professional play and how “exciting” it is to watch, whatever that means. The term is subjective. I’d say it’s more exciting watching professional teams play off of each other and develop their strategies to the fullest whatever they might be. If Riot’s plan was to keep the game exciting in a conventional sense – constant teamfights and high kills – then they’ve objectively failed anyway.

Now I’m not saying that balancing around competitive play is wrong, in fact I think it’s the only way to balance the game. There are a few fundamental differences between playing a game of solo queue and playing on a coordinated professional team and as such the balancing would need to be different for both of them. Pro teams have much better coordination so the synergistic interactions between champions needs to be assessed much more closely. Pro teams also play much more safe and are less inclined to give up kills and early gold meaning champions that snowball would receive different balancing than they would if it were balanced around solo queue. You can balance for the casual player or the competitive scene but not both. Where Riot exists is somewhere in between, choosing to cater towards the more casual players that make up a majority of their player base. The times they don’t are when they’re specifically squashing any changes in the meta that they didn’t anticipate.

Overall, the state of Riot’s balancing team needs a few buffs themselves. If they want complete control over the meta, competitive strategies, and how people play their game then so be it. In my opinion, the game will stagnate and fall off if Riot keeps disincentivising professional players with constant patches, reworks, and blanket nerfs to eliminate alternate playstyles. I know that everyone at every level of play probably has issues with Riot’s balancing team, and that balancing a game is definitely difficult, but at the competitive level Riot’s balance choices have been inconsistent and detrimental to the overall standard of play. For a company that exudes confidence in their approach to almost everything they seem to make a lot of knee jerk reactions to fix “problems” that if they were more hands off might fix themselves. The best players at all levels can be incredibly resourceful and as long as something isn’t clearly broken they will usually find creative ways to counter problems that don’t require the drastic measures Riot has become too keen to employ.