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[penguinofhonor]

Also Draven is up on the PBE. He's ridiculously cool. When you select him he says "Welcome to the League of Draven."

Coolness in this game is now measured on a scale of 1 to Draven.

But I really just want them to cut the shit and take a balance break.  Try putting out some game type and map variations instead of just champions, too.  Surely they have enough money for a while at this point.

They've said like fifty times that they've got different people on champion design than they do on balance, map design, etc. You could put Xypherous on a map design team but he wouldn't know what to do because he's a champion designer and he'd just get in the way.

Map design is tremendously difficult because they don't want to pump out more Twisted Treelines, so I wouldn't expect more than one of those per year. And the rumored League of Legends: Supremacy shows that we might be getting a new map sometime this year for sure.

[Micro102]

How about putting more people into the "stop the updates from ruining the player's games" department 

Just updated the game, I get lag every minute. It seems like every time they update, the performance goes down. I can't even play anymore.

And it's the bad lag, the type where your guy doesn't B on his own.

[penguinofhonor]

Unofficial PBE Patch Notes

What's annoying me right now is everyone who's going "Why are they buffing the fury mode for Renekton's E? Nobody uses fury on E." That's why they're buffing it.

Also Swain fans are going to be very, very happy. Ahri fans... not so much. But there's a new skin for her!

[RedKing]

Yikes...Decrepify range up from 500 to 625? With increased slow?

Swain just got a lot more dangerous in early laning.

[GaxkangtheUnbound]

It seems to me like Draven is going to be an incredibly fun champion to play. I may just spend money to buy him, depending on whether he's living up to his hype (Pardon the lore pun) or not.

[Yodamaster]

Swain was strong and viable before, but now...Oh man.

[SalmonGod]

They've said like fifty times that they've got different people on champion design than they do on balance, map design, etc. You could put Xypherous on a map design team but he wouldn't know what to do because he's a champion designer and he'd just get in the way.

Well first, champion design and balance should be one and the same, or at least such closely related teams that they're virtually indistinguishable.  "Different teams" is not just a bad cop out.  It's admitting that they don't really care about balance, if they have a team dedicated to putting out champions without balancing them...

And regardless, the balance team will never ever be able to get things under control if the steady influx of new characters never slows down.

But keeping their own game in a state of being constantly broken is their business model.  It's common knowledge among the player base.

Map design is tremendously difficult because they don't want to pump out more Twisted Treelines, so I wouldn't expect more than one of those per year. And the rumored League of Legends: Supremacy shows that we might be getting a new map sometime this year for sure.

This I'm more forgiving of.  I'm one of those who only plays summoner's rift.  Although, that's mainly because I'm a defensive style player who prefers a slow, strategic march. 

Still, there's no reason for them not to experiment more with the genre formula, which has thus far been explored very little.  The only thing they openly experiment with is champion design, but there are soooooo many other variables and potential innovations that could be toyed with.  It's not like the risks are at all the same as with champion releases.  If people don't like a map or game mode, they simply won't play it.  Little harm done.  Compare to the risk of putting out a broken champion, which is intrusive to everyone's game experience.

[Bordellimies]

Rework the tutorial map into ARAM/ARAB style map
Save loads of time and money when you edit the map instead of modeling a new one
Get praise from everyone who likes those gamemods, get new players to try those gamemods out
Everyone is happy

[Knirisk]

Rework the tutorial map into ARAM/ARAB style map
Save loads of time and money when you edit the map instead of modeling a new one
Get praise from everyone who likes those gamemods, get new players to try those gamemods out
Everyone is happy

This. This would be spectacular. WHY HAVEN'T THEY DONE THIS YET? They wouldn't even need that many changes, aside from maybe one-way forcefields to prevent the players from retreating.

[eerr]

FFFFFFF-

I know I've seen Darius, Draven and Garen before.

On the same show.

But I can't find any information about it.

[frostshotgg]

They've actually said that there are some bugs preventing them from making Proving Grounds into a ARAM map. Of course, we haven't gotten updates on that and it's been more than a year....

Anyways, Draven looks like he's going to be a looooot more fun, and hopefully less OP than this brother.

And goddamn, those Swain buffs. First they release Grail, now this. They really, really love that bird. As will I, because holy shit so op.

[penguinofhonor]

Well first, champion design and balance should be one and the same, or at least such closely related teams that they're virtually indistinguishable.  "Different teams" is not just a bad cop out.  It's admitting that they don't really care about balance, if they have a team dedicated to putting out champions without balancing them...

What? I don't see why these need to be more involved than they already are. The balance team is definitely involved in champion releases, and the design team is involved in remakes and significant tweaks that affect a champion's feel.

If you're thinking of a way to make a champion unique and fun, I don't think you should need to care about balancing it until you've found a way to make it fun to play. It's probably not going to be released to the public for several months, the balance repurcussions don't exist quite yet.

And a designer doesn't need to know how to interpret data like win ratios and pick rates across various elos and modes to determine a champion's power. They don't need to test numbers changes for existing champions because that's a waste of time for them.

Balance should get involved at the end of design, and design should get involved when balance needs more than just numbers changes, and that's how things work currently. Saying otherwise is like saying that the concept artists should be the same people as the splash artists, but they're not for a reason. If you segregate your teams and only bring them together when they need to come together, you can get them to excel at more specific skills.

And regardless, the balance team will never ever be able to get things under control if the steady influx of new characters never slows down.

But keeping their own game in a state of being constantly broken is their business model.  It's common knowledge among the player base.

The balance team has been pretty much constantly getting things under control for quite a while now. The game is way more balanced than it was a year ago. A far larger portion of champions are viable than were then, and everyone who says otherwise really has to be intentionally ignoring the evidence by now.

But keeping their own game in a state of being constantly broken is their business model.  It's common knowledge among the player base.

I'm so tired of this conspiracy theory. They've put a lot of work into reworking Sivir mechanically (450 IP champion), put out an art rework out for Ashe (450 IP champion), they're currently working on an art rework for Soraka (450 IP champion), rework for Karma (3150 IP), huge rework for Eve (1350) and Twitch (3150).

Every time an OP champion comes out everyone's like OMG RIOT IS RELEASING OP CHAMPIONS TO MAKE MONEY and then every time they release a Sejuani, Yorick, or Hecarim everyone just shuts up until another OP one comes out so they can whine again.

And every time a 6300 is OP everyone whines about how Riot is trying to sell power, but when Sivir or Ashe are the best AD carry then everyone conveniently stops talking about price and power.

This is a huge example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. If you ignore all the overpowered low-priced champions, then yeah, it looks like they're selling power. But if you actually look at the data as a whole there's no correlation.

This I'm more forgiving of.  I'm one of those who only plays summoner's rift.  Although, that's mainly because I'm a defensive style player who prefers a slow, strategic march. 

Still, there's no reason for them not to experiment more with the genre formula, which has thus far been explored very little.  The only thing they openly experiment with is champion design, but there are soooooo many other variables and potential innovations that could be toyed with.  It's not like the risks are at all the same as with champion releases.  If people don't like a map or game mode, they simply won't play it.  Little harm done.  Compare to the risk of putting out a broken champion, which is intrusive to everyone's game experience.

Risks? The resources for creating a map and testing balance on it, making art for the whole thing, etc are huge and that would be largely wasted. Also going "hey, pump out a map without caring as much about it" is against everything that the community has asked for in every other part of the game.

At least as far as I've seen, everyone is pretty fine with slowing down champion production rates if it means better/more polished champions. And also everyone is ecstatic with skins like Draven's launch skin (huge model differences, modified voiceover, new particles, etc) rather than him being launched with two lower quality skins. Despite the community really wanting everything as soon as they can, when something actually comes out they're very dissatisfied with rushed results (see: 34% bonus IP weekend) and very happy with a well-done product.

And finally, there's a huge problem with having maps that are less balanced, less polished, or less competitive. Experienced players might not notice this, but new players are pretty put off by being told "Oh yeah, that's twisted treeline. It's way unbalanced and nobody cares about it." Not to mention the players that actually really like the map but are really mad that Riot ignores them because the map needs some really significant changes to be balanceable.

I don't know how you can get mad at having shoddily balanced champions and then be fine with shoddily balanced maps.

[webadict]

I don't know how you can get mad at having shoddily balanced champions and then be fine with shoddily balanced maps.

You can choose to avoid a map. You can't choose to avoid a champion.

[SalmonGod]

Yeah, you can succeed with most of the champions, but there's still a relatively small top-tier that is almost guaranteed to be the focal point of a match if there are no other top-tier champions present to contest them.  This has always been the case and it has never changed.  I will say that there is more room for debate now regarding who exactly is top tier and that the most powerful champions are not as ridiculous as they once were.  It's more possible now than it once was for smart play to overcome imbalance.  So it has gotten better, but I still wouldn't call it under control.

I also have complaints that are debatable as to whether they're balance issues or personal taste.  Such as meta game (ranged ad carry/support bottom, jungler, ap nuke mid, tanky dps top) has become ridiculously strict.  The game still favors AD to an insane degree over every other stat.  Any auto-attacking AD champion can shred through the tankiest tank in a split second once fully built, and certain champions do this so well (Trynd, for example) that they almost guarantee victory if their teammates can do nothing more than draw out the length of the match.  While this has always been the case, the last few months have seen Riot continually nerfing defense, especially armor, and even removing fortify.  These sure as hell feel like balance issues to me, but I also realize at the same time that they're working as intended...

And I'm further biased by having left the game for a couple months and returning just after Darius is released...  It also still seems to me like most new champions are nerfed in the next patch or two after their release.  And it's funny that you mention some of those people, such as Ash, Sivir, or Eve.  I still almost never see successful Eve.  I feel like they made Sivir worse.  And I think Ash is outclassed by every ranged dps they've put out since... a long time.

Risks? The resources for creating a map and testing balance on it, making art for the whole thing, etc are huge and that would be largely wasted. Also going "hey, pump out a map without caring as much about it" is against everything that the community has asked for in every other part of the game.

At least as far as I've seen, everyone is pretty fine with slowing down champion production rates if it means better/more polished champions. And also everyone is ecstatic with skins like Draven's launch skin (huge model differences, modified voiceover, new particles, etc) rather than him being launched with two lower quality skins. Despite the community really wanting everything as soon as they can, when something actually comes out they're very dissatisfied with rushed results (see: 34% bonus IP weekend) and very happy with a well-done product.

And finally, there's a huge problem with having maps that are less balanced, less polished, or less competitive. Experienced players might not notice this, but new players are pretty put off by being told "Oh yeah, that's twisted treeline. It's way unbalanced and nobody cares about it." Not to mention the players that actually really like the map but are really mad that Riot ignores them because the map needs some really significant changes to be balanceable.

I don't know how you can get mad at having shoddily balanced champions and then be fine with shoddily balanced maps.

And... as I type up a response to this, I just have to concede that I am very much i n the minority as far as what kind of experience I want out of a game.  I'm just not a mass appeal kind of person.

My favorite game ever is still the first Quake.  It's not that Quake itself was a great game or anything.  It's that it was the first game to have a really large modding community, and very few games have had a similar mod community since.  There was something new to try every single day.  The vast majority of modders didn't bother trying to make anything very polished.  There was just an explosion of ideas, and people tried to make something for every idea they had, not worrying whether it was great or not. 

A great example of this is the very first CTF mod.  It was just a tiny server side script.  Some people said "hey capture the flag would be great".  So they turned the gold and silver keys into flags and placed them onto opposite sides of vanilla maps.  No balance.  No production of anything outside of that tiny script.  And it was huuuuuuge.  It was a new experience, and that's all people cared about.  Nobody does stuff like that with games anymore.  Not even with mods.

I played sooooo many half-finished products on the quake engine, and I loved it all.  Even the stuff that was poorly executed or just didn't like, I still loved at the same time for offering me a new experience.  Over the last couple years, I've been playing lots of betas and loosely finished indy titles.

I understand caution when a feature is intrusive to an entire game experience, as it is with champions.  When it's not, my instinct is to treat it like an idea playground.  I understand that most of the community would not deal with that very well.  Doesn't stop my urge to gripe about it.

As for twisted treeline (and dominion to a lesser extent), I think they're neglected as sideshows because they're so short.  They feel throw away.  Like they're not a real match.  You don't even get to halfway build your character.  I see winning teams intentionally drag out matches on summoner's rift all the time, just because they want to get further in their builds.  I think a map designed for longer, more epic matches would be very successful.

[frostshotgg]

See, here's the deal. There are a handful of champs who were intentionally nerfed into the ground (Eve, Twitch, X^Z, Akali), and others that just don't fit into the current meta, (Poppy, Karma). Darius is the only champ I can think of right now that absolutely dominates, and that' because he's X^Z+Irelia+A hint of Riven for good measure. Name a champ and I'll tell you why it's weaker than others. Because the vast majority of champs are perfectly viable.