Krazikarl2

A lot of the champs that were frequently banned (Brand, Veigar, Lux) have now been adjusted, making them more fair to play against.

A good case of Riot completely missing the point.

Veigar isn't unfair because his damage needs trimming. Guess what? Full tank Veigar is actually pretty good in ARAM. Veigar isn't fair because he has a shortish cooldown AoE stun that covers almost all of the lane. You have to completely and totally change how you play to deal with it, and a lot of champions don't have enough in their kit to really do it.

Riot wrote this big long post about how they understood how not having reasonable weaknesses mattered and how they'd think about it in the future. They then completely ignored everything in that post and pretend that its all about having the right Win% numbers (see discussions from Riot on Riven and Vayne). It's the classic fallacy where things that are (easily) measured matter and things that aren't as easily measured don't.

Yes, you can trim Veigar's numbers so that he is close to 50% winrate. Congrats. But that doesn't matter - he would make the game vastly less enjoyable for 5 people even if he was at 40% winrate because his kit is broken on ARAM.

This is fair feedback. Let me see if I can elaborate some, though I know it won't be enough.

Long before I worked at Riot, we tried to balance TT by changing the way specific champions worked in that mode to be different than how they behaved in SR. It made the game a lot more confusing when you swapped between modes, and was deemed a failure and something we shouldn't do again. So for years we left the side modes alone so that when you played a champ in ARAM/TT, it behaved the exact same as SR. (Yes I know there's a few exceptions, but for the most part this is the case.)

So fast forward to NB/ARURF. We wanted to make the mode more fair so that it wasn't "decided at champ select", but we had the constraint of YOU CAN'T CHANGE HOW CHAMPS WORK. It's fine to disagree with this constraint, but this is what we feel makes the best experience as you play all of League of Legends. So we tried just numerical adjustments (+X% damage taken for example), and saw a pretty decent success. Win rates became more balanced! Now it didn't eliminate the "bullshit" moments (You ever lane vs Morg + Lux in URF?), but did succeed in making it more fair overall.

So yeah, Veigar is a great example of what we can & can't solve. With Veigar on ARAM, the first nerf I applied was actually +% damage taken, because you're right that the amount of damage he does isn't relevant, but I wanted to reward players who finally caught him, that he was more likely to actually die! It wasn't enough, so I also reduced his damage.

And you're also right...I could probably cut his damage IN HALF and he'd STILL BE GOOD. You'd actually probably build him pure CDR/Tank and he'd be an amazing support for the team. That's just kind of how Veigar is designed...

That being said, it's possible there are some other levels we could consider tuning. Stun duration (Veigar)? Silence duration (Fiddle)? Shield power (Sona)? Mine Duration (Ziggs)? Though I admit I'm a little cautious about those levers since they will change how a champ feels. But if it becomes necessary, we can discuss it.

Hopefully this was helpful.

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[removed]

Pumping that mental iron

ALMGNOON

do these idiots play their own game ?

...Yes?

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[deleted]

I'll find out. Thanks!

SwellyF

I appreciate that a Rioter responded to this knowing that it is a minefield of a situation. My issue is that you can get a feeling of satisfaction by banning something you simply don’t want to play against. I normally don’t touch aram because of the frustration of having little to no control of the outcome, during the patch I tried a few games because of the ban system. My enjoyment was significantly increased because of the artificial feeling of removing my frustrations in ban phase (Veigar stun, size and duration). It is disappointing that the vocal crowd brings up lots of possible solutions to the issues and they seem to be ignored. The statistics that are relevant don’t seem to be listed or cited. Statistics on ARAM playrate or quality of games should be the top concern. If the game draws more players isn’t that a success? Or if there were actual surveys done on the quality of games? There seem to be lots of data missing and testing the bans for such a short period of time seems to be a disservice to the integrity of the experiment.

Sure. Here's an over simplification of some of the concerns:

Let's take Lux, Veigar, and Blitzcrank. (3 champs that are pretty high on popularity but also high on frustration in ARAM). There are players who identify as "Mains" of those champions on SR and get excited to play them if they luck into them on ARAM. (These aren't ARAM accounts but legit players).

Now, let's say I DELETE them from ARAM, then ran a survey of if this was a good move. The likely outcome is that the majority of players (since the majority of players aren't mains and don't have an affinity to those champs) would be like "Yes, good move! Game less frustrating!" But was it the right call? Probably not since the impact to most players isn't as large as the impact to the players that have an affinity to those champs.

It's a tricky situation for sure though, and as mentioned it the article, we'll keep an eye on it and are open to revisiting it.

hpp3

On another note, I really hope you guys don't change the stat adjustments too often. You put up the initial changelist, hotfix in another bunch of changes, and then added even more changes in 9.8. It's too much to keep up with.

For me, ARAM has always been about good champions and bad champions. I get excited about rolling a strong champion or having a really good team. I need to be able to actually assess whether a champion is good or not. It's exhausting keeping up with 30 champions being adjusted every week. Nothing feels worse than being excited to finally get Mundo but then get melted because he got +10% damage taken that you didn't know about.

I'm not saying to keep the OP champions always OP, but you should stop doing microadjustments every patch and just do bigger changes every 6 months. That way there is time to adjust and get used to the new OP champions (and the changes keep the mode fresh).

I have a feeling that your goal is to make it so that every champion is exactly 50% winrate and there is no longer the notion of "good champion/bad champion". I think this would make the game mode a lot less exciting. I imagine a large part of why people play ARAM is the same reason why people gamble; the disparity between the best and worst outcomes creates a high when you get something good.

Agreed. We do NOT want every champ at 50. Goal was something like 60-40 that maintains the existing power structure (sona ziggs still strong). We hit 58-43. 55-45 is the farthest I’d go.

And updates will likely be every ~4 patches

opalampo

I only have one question. How did you try to balance TT long before you worked at the company that created it?

We = Riot. I’m speaking as a representative of the company.

sorendiz

look im not going to flame you for this specifically but you have to understand that when there are tons of legitimate comments in this thread, you reply (by my count in your profile) 7 times, and 2 of those are snarky replies to flame, that's just bad fucking optics dude. if you don't have time to reply to actual concerns, sure, whatever, you're a dev, makes sense. but as you yourself said in a different comment you're speaking for Riot and taking the time to reply snarky shit on random angry comments is just annoying to see

I try to reply pretty frequently, and offer as much insight as I can. On topics like this, a lot of people have their mind made up and it would be far easier to steer clear, but players deserve better so I still try to offer some explanations.

That being said, the two snarky replies...one was to a person who has been hounding me since the announcement of ban removals calling me retarded asking for me to be fired, etc. The other was this one. And those replies take 10 seconds. More thoughtful ones take longer.

I've been trying to reply as much as I can. Apologies if it's not enough.