“Meddler just dropped a bomb and debunked the Silver balance team myth, I wanted ask you for your thoughts on it, how do you think it started, does the line blur between reality and a joke, and how important is it to actually be high elo.”

It’s perhaps inevitable for players to complain about the balance of the games they play. Or at the very least, I’ve never been an active player of a game in which the community wasn’t convinced balance was terrible. (Note that isn’t an excuse for developers to stop caring about balance!)

I think it stems from two main issues.

First, as players, we love to blame external things when we screw up. It was too sunny and I couldn’t see the net. I had bad lag. I’m super tired and can barely keep my eyes open. That character is OP and I haven’t played mine in awhile.

I do it myself as a player, and even about League. :)

This isn’t true of every player or every game of course. Sometimes we are self-aware enough to realize we just made a bad decision or got outplayed. But it’s also really easy to externalize blame, and there are healthy aspects of it - maybe it encourages you to keep striving to get better rather than giving up because you’re not as good as you want to be. Maybe it encourages you to try EZ Lee Sin and realize that no, that dude just really knew what he was doing.

LoL overall is objectively a pretty balanced game. For example, most of our champions hover around a 50% winrate most of the time. When there are deviations, the winrates get to something like 53% or 46%. That means you’d likely have to play dozens or hundreds of games to really notice a difference. Usually your own experience with a champion will swamp most balance changes that we make (meaning you are probably going to have more individual success playing a “bad” champion that switching to the flavor of the month “good” champion). Rarely are we ever talking about 25% or 75% winrates and when those do occur (often from bugs or unexpected interactions with items or whatever) we can usually hotfix those cases quickly.

But this is where the second issue comes to play. Very few companies, including Riot, share their internal data externally. We let players own that narrative. If someone says a champion is overpowered, there typically isn’t much word from Riot or even data to counter that argument.

There are third party sites that try as much as they can to aggregate data, but you still have no way of knowing if those data corroborate our data, or if we are even looking at the same data. (For example, are you including all players or only high ELO, and are you looking worldwide or just NA?)

And we are talking more and more about whether that is a mistake. Maybe we should publish our data, so you can see which champions we think are a problem and which ones we think are fine. Maybe you should be able to see, without asking, which problems we are worried about, which ones we’re worried about but haven’t solved yet, and which ones we think the community can solve on its own.

In terms of whether you have to be high ELO to balance League or any game, you don’t. Most of the job is looking at data and having enough insight into the game to know what changes you should make to cause future data to match your goals. Some developers can leverage their high ELO experience to make this job easier, but others just have a really good ability to predict what magnitude of change on what stats or abilities etc. to say lower win rates by 2%.

Where high ELO developers are really valuable is in helping to validate those changes. Say I wanted to buff Evelynn. I could make an educated guess and change some of her stats, and maybe try a game or two, but I might have to make further adjustments once the changes go live. With an internal playtest team of high ELO players, we can get a small sample size (dozens of games if we are lucky) to get a sense for whether the changes will do what we want before they go live. It just speeds up the whole iteration process and spares players from some of the early iteration cycles. But those dozens of games still pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of games that get played on live, which is why having a playtest team (or some high ELO designers or QA) is helpful (and I am very grateful for the one we have), but by no means foolproof.



10/30/2017

