Conversations around balance can be rough. Over the past 9(!) years, we have found that players don’t necessarily always understand what we’re trying to accomplish (or can accomplish) in a patch cycle. But we want to change that.

Introducing the Champion Balance Framework, a source for all players to hold the “balance” team accountable for how we approach buffing/nerfing champions on a patch-to-patch basis. We’ve been making changes internally on the way we view champion balance for Summoner’s Rift. Now that we’ve had some time to see that change in action, we wanted to formalize this approach so if players dislike a change we make, they can at least understand why we decided to make that change.

What follows is our way of establishing consistent understandings of how we evaluate champions’ power level, especially for the purposes of determining if they ought to be buff or nerf candidates on any given patch. The hope here is that this approach will result in balance targets that feel much more consistent, and thus more understandable.

Champion Balance in the Past

The main improvement we’d like to make by creating a more visible balance strategy is that players feel like the approach to League’s balance decisions is consistent. We expect that a more consistent approach can be more easily trusted–inconsistency with our approach to balance can be the most frustrating thing for players, even more than any individual balance issues of the past or future.

To achieve this, we are putting in place a system that seeks to limit subjectivity in the assessment of (not the reasons for) a champion’s power level. By doing so, we should have fewer champs fly under the radar in either overpowered or underpowered states, and we also avoid risky bias-based balancing.

Updating Our Approach

In the past, we’ve operated under the rough guideline of “we balance for Plat+ play.” Despite that, we’ve demonstrated that we also make balance decisions under other conditions or for other reasons. As such, we’re now formally recognizing the four audiences for which we balance Summoner’s Rift, as well as the parameters that we view as underpowered, overpowered, and reasonably balanced. Here are the audiences:

Average Play

This group contains most players, everything below the top 10% of solo queue (approximately up through Gold). While some may argue that the game should be balanced around only the very best players of the game, we think a balanced experience is an important part of what makes League compelling regardless of skill level. That said, we also think this group’s experience is less sensitive to exact balance conditions, and so our definitions of what is too strong for them is less restricted.

Win rate tells us most of what we need to know about champions’ power level here, and combined with their ban rate, gives us a good view of what is too strong for this group of players. The more a champion is banned beyond the global average ban rate (ABR, currently ~7%), the more we use their ban rate as an expression of the champion’s power level in the tier, and the tighter a band we put on their win rate.

Top End: [54.5%WR if <ABR] to [52.5%WR at 5x ABR]

Bottom End: 49%WR

Skilled Play

This group contains the top 10% of solo queue players, except the very top players (the next group). This group is similar to the Average Play group, but with higher sensitivity to power level. As such, the parameters we use to determine what is too strong for this group are a bit more restricted.

Top End: [54%WR if <ABR] to [52%WR at 5x ABR]

Bottom End: 49%WR

Elite Play

This group contains the top 0.1% of solo queue players, the best-of-the-best in solo queue. This group is the most sensitive to balance changes out of all the solo queue groups, and also has unique balance needs. Unlike the other solo queue groups, we rarely have sufficient win rate data to determine if something is too strong here (sample size is small due to the extremely limited size of the player audience). Even if we did, these players have mastered the game to such an extent that their champion select behaviors can be trusted as accurate representations of power level. To that end, we draw conclusions about power level based on pick rates in addition to ban rates, and we notably do not consider pick rate a strong indicator of power at any other solo queue tier. We introduce the concept of Presence in this tier, where Presence is the combined Pick and Ban rate of the champion.

Top End: 45% Ban Rate

Bottom End: 5% Presence

Professional Play

This group is the top five recognized leagues of competitive play (currently LPL, LCK, LEC, LCS, and LMS). Somewhat similar to Elite, we determine power level based on this group’s champion select behaviors more so than the results of the games in which they are picked. It’s arguable that just because a champion isn’t picked on a certain patch, that they’re not actually underpowered for this group, but rather that the meta just doesn’t currently allow them to be picked. Despite this reasonable stance, we will consider these champions underpowered in the context of the current meta, and we will balance around the champions’ power level within that meta.

Top End: 90% Presence on the current patch OR 80% presence in consecutive patches.

Bottom End: 5% Presence

Moving forward, we will consider a champion balanced for Summoner’s Rift if they can be considered balanced for any of these audiences. They will be considered overpowered if they cross the top end for ANY of the audiences, and they will holistically be considered underpowered if they are below the bottom end for ALL of the audiences.

Translating that understanding into action, our champion balance priorities are to immediately address champions that are overpowered, then address champions that are underpowered across the board, and when those are accounted for, working on making champions balanced across several audiences (for example, in cases where they might only be balanced for one or two audiences).

Turning Data Into Changes

Once we’ve identified champions that are out of balance, we get into the meaty stuff pertaining to how to actually adjust things. For this, there’s no definitive framework. We’ll continue to use our understanding of audiences’ needs and experiences to make good change. Our hope is that the above system for identifying imbalances allows us to more easily move beyond what is out of whack and get into the why that’s the case, as well as how we ought to address it. Put simply, the framework more easily gets us to the point of agreement on the fact that a champion like Hecarim (for a recent example) is overpowered, and then we get to work on how to fix it.