A Riot employee explains LoL balance: “Players have no idea how difficult game design is.”
LoL players are complaining about the balance. Riot says it’s not that easy.
League of Legends is a game with 161 unique characters and several dozen different items and runes at the moment. For this reason, balancing it all is extremely difficult.
At least that’s what one of the main employees and the leader of the game balancing team says. He spoke about it in one of the podcasts.
Balancing LoL is not that easy
Playing Riot’s games, you can see that they are extremely complex. Especially the oldest developer’s title, League of Legends. The game has 161 characters, several dozen items, dragons, various buffs, monster camps, plants on the river, wards, runes, summoner spells, and probably a few other elements that are extremely important. For this reason, the balance team has to do a lot of calculations and analyze hundreds of situations.
- ALSO – There are more and more Easter eggs from Rioters’ private lives in LoL, but few know about it
This explanation was adopted by Matt Leung-Harrison, better known as Riot Phroxzon, the main person dealing with the balance of the game.
I think the community has no idea, at all, how difficult game design is. Just think about the number of permutations and combinations of every possible thing. Not only do we have to think about these things, we have to think about them ahead of time.
He also gave an example of his actions based on creating a new item:
Let’s say you’re making an item. You have to think about how that item is used on every possible champion and rune combination, in any team comp — and that’s just how it’s optimized. That’s not talking about the design quality of the thing: Is the thing satisfying when you press a button, is it intuitive, does it have counterplay? All of those esoteric values that the community doesn’t consider
Finally, he also added a comment regarding the patch:
These things are really hard to estimate. There are so many moving parts. There could be item changes going in the patch, there could be champion interactions, or the play rate could increase which will decrease the win rate. If more players play it, there are probably more new players and that changes the way the win rates play out. There’s a lot of factors involved.
As you can see, it’s not that easy and fun. Rioters have to predict a lot and take into account many factors. For this reason, sometimes there are errors like over buffed Sivir or Master Yi a few weeks ago.
