LoL – The League State of Gameplay This Year

For those who are unfamiliar with the topic, the League of Legends team at Riot Games reveals their thoughts on how various aspects of gameplay have developed over the years in an article called the State of Gameplay.

The goal for these kinds of articles is to allow the Gameplay teams at Riot Games to interact with the general public to ensure a competitive, fun, and high-quality gaming experience. In it, they mostly discuss how they approach champion, item, and system balancing as well as other aspects of the game.

Champion balance 

So far this year, Riot has balanced champions around their balance framework that they announced the previous year. It has performed admirably so far, resulting in every champion being viable in at least one of the skill levels. For each patch, there are only a few champions who cross their designated Overpowered thresholds and those are adjusted in the following patch notes. Although this approach has been successful, moving forwards, they look to implement some improvements without disrupting the current progress.

Balancing underplayed champions

One of the aspects their balance framework has neglected so far is the possibility of how champion win rates are affected by the experienced player base. Their goal of balance is to ensure everyone has a fair chance at winning if they play well, and experienced mains should be rewarded for dedicating a ton of time to their champ. But not to the point where a victory becomes unrealistic for the enemy team from champ select. One of these examples is Aurelion Sol, a champion that has a very low play rate and an average win rate, yet was nerfed a few patches ago. The reasoning for this was that players who are new to the champ, fail to understand his playstyle and concepts. This leads to many lost games and they rarely try to pick him up after that. Meanwhile, dedicated mains understand these concepts and use the general lack of knowledge from the rest of the community regarding their champion to perform admirably. With Aurelion Sol reaching above 60% win rate on certain patches in the hands of players with more than 100 games on him, Riot felt like something needed to be done. This also applies to the rest of the champions with low play rates that are being closely monitored like Maokai, Skarner, and Ivern.

Champion balance for high elo and pro play

Another segment Riot plans to adjust is the Elite Play thresholds and how they affect balance. This covers the top 0,5% of all players, which is roughly Diamond 2 and above across the world. The challenges they face here are the small and skewed amount of data they have because the player base is so small.  High-skill champions that thrive in the fast-paced high elo meta may show high win rates and be subjected to nerfs, which makes them underwhelming in the rest of the ladder.

On another note, Riot has also addressed the pro play meta in their champion balance framework article, and with Worlds underway their approach has been revealed. For MSI they hit their goal of no 100%pick/ban champions with Udyr(95%), Renekton (93%), and Lee Sin( 91%). The event saw 82 different champions picked and with the recent patches 11.18 and 11.19, focused mostly on ensuring the World’s meta diversity, we can expect similarly positive results from this tournament as well.

Item balance

 One of the most debated topics this year in the League community was the item system changes. The way Riot measured the success of this move was through monitoring the purchase rates and power levels of items for each independent class of champions. The constant adjustments of the over and underperforming items as well as the addition of Anathema’s Chains and Hullbreaker to the game also aided their cause.

 Although some champions build the same Legendary item every game, they don’t consider this an issue because it might just be a perfect fit. Where they focus on is making more mythic items viable for the same champions depending on the situation. Some champions still don’t have that, but the new preseason looks to help with that.

Champion releases 

So far this year, four new champions have been released alongside the Dr. Mundo rework.

Viego

The first release was Viego, the AD jungle assassin that could possess the bodies of his fallen enemies and use their spells. On release, he wasn’t overpowered in terms of win rates, but with more time players started figuring out his strong suits. One of them was his lane sustain as a resourceless champion, which had to be nerfed. Apart from that, there were countless bugs tied to his passive mechanic which also had to be resolved and nerfed.

Gwen

Gwen’s release in April was a breath of fresh air and a big change for the top lane as the first designated AP bruiser. Sure Mordekaiser and Sylas have slid into that role before, but that wasn’t their main intention or role. Gwen’s W-ability turned out to be a frustrating interaction for many players, but the reason she was so powerful in Solo Queue and Pro Play, was her early game dueling potential.  After that was nerfed her numbers quickly settled down into acceptable boundaries and she’s even received buffs after that, even though her W remains a problematic ability. 

Mundo VGU

When the Dr. Mundo VGU came out in June, it turned out to be a lot more successful than expected. Apart from maintaining his low complexity kit and super tanky playstyle, they added more depth and visual clarity to him. Since then some of his numbers have been nerfed in terms of durability in the top lane while his jungle clear has been buffed. 

Akshan

Akshan, the new mid-lane marksman with an assassin playstyle, was introduced in July. On release, he turned out to be a lot weaker than everyone expected, mostly due to his low range for a marksman and the inconsistency of his W. His W makes him camouflaged, but he can be revealed from far away, and it resurrects allies if you kill the enemy that killed them.  Combine that with a few nerfs to his E ability and he’s been in a weaker state than the other champions, but Riot is still monitoring his power levels due to his W playmaking.

Vex

And lastly, for this year, we have Vex. The mid-lane anti mobility Yordle mage. She was first imagined as an artillery mage but they moved in this direction because that would mean designing her spells in a way that didn’t fit the theme of the event in which she would be released. 

 

(Header image via RIOT Games)