Balanced Champion Releases

As I’ve mentioned above, something we want to improve over the next few months is our champion release balance. In particular, we don’t want new champions to warp our game’s meta or for anyone to feel like they have to pick up every new champ to remain competitive.

In the past year, we had released champions tuned so that their first weeks of play were more forgiving for players still learning out the ropes, and we would follow up as players mastered the champion (which we haven’t done fast enough). This strategy eased some pain for players starting out on the champion, but we think that overall it was a negative outcome, because by the time the average player has learned a new champion well enough for us to take the training wheels off, very engaged players have already used the overtuned state of the champion to take over the meta.

We’re focusing on two strategies to improve launch balance:

Launching with a long term balanced target When done perfectly this is ideal, and we can leave the champion for months, even years sometimes. (Kayn and Warwick are good examples of this) In winrates, you will see the champion start low and grow to a balanced state as players master them. I won’t be surprised if we’re seeing 44% and not buffing, give it time.

Faster / stronger followup In cases where we do end up with a new champ or VGU that is too strong we will try to follow up faster and with a more comprehensive set of nerfs. We really do not like how with Senna, Sett, and Aphelios, we have had to come back for nerf after nerf. If we could go back in time here, we would have bundled them together earlier.



It’s worth noting that we still expect to have to buff and nerf champs after we release them. There is only so much accuracy we can have when playing 1000s of games in development. We get 10x that amount of data within the first day of the champ in players’ hands.

Thanks again everyone for playing. Stay safe out there.

- Scruffy