Cyberplums

Love these kinds of design stories, thank you!

If I may ask, is the live balance team usually greatly concerned with keeping a champion’s original theme intact during gameplay, or are practical solutions for balance way more of a priority for them?

As someone who used to work on that team, and still works closely with them—theme is definitely a consideration. The team always tries to keep theme intact (or even enhance it where possible), though the work is often all about trade-offs in the end because no balance change is going to be perfect and they all cost something to someone.

I will say that if any change is going to more severely undercut theme, the mandate will often be to find another way to get the job done, because theme is clearly an important part of our champions.

Polderjoch

Thanks for sharing, it's always super interesting to hear about the development and future of champs in the background.

I feel like the only champs I can think of that really lost a big part of their thematic are Aatrox with his revive, and Illaoi lost part of her thematic with the removal of being able to fight back against her spirit pull, even though gameplay wise it's not really a big deal.

Yeah, the Aatrox removal was not taken lightly. In cases like that, it's a bit easier to see looking back but a lot of their troubled post-release development comes from a dedication to preserving the cool things that make each champ unique. Sometimes, though, the right call in the end is to make the cut (I would argue that Aatrox ended up being one of these cases). If a champion is hewing really close to their thematic pillars but is inaccessible to most of the players who would enjoy that theme because of balance, we're still unfortunately failing to deliver that theme properly to players.

Thanks! I think it's inevitable that some champions will feel out of whack for some players when we have a game that's as complex as League. Glad to hear you're feeling good about it.

ZERXOK

I think they do a bad job, but so does pretty much every other game designer. Game designer and people in general suck at balancing games.

If everyone who does a thing professionally seems to be bad at it, I think that implies that either the job is very hard, the standards set forth are unachievable, or both.

That said, we'll always try to get better and meet players' expectations.

We approached this one from a couple different directions at once, initially. When pitching it, I was thinking about things like "What needs are unfulfilled for new players learning the game?" "What is league's equivalent of Team Deathmatch (from FPS games)?" "Is there a way to make pick-ARAM a worthwhile mode?" These coalesced into the specific pitch that resulted in Brawl.

Big fan of Baccano! and Samurai Champloo. I'm also contractually obligated to state that u/Riot_Cadmus is wrong and FMA '03 is better.

Yes!

We briefly tested 4v4 but it was clearly a downgrade. Reducing the number of players made the game more methodical and strategic, which was an anti-goal for this specific mode.

Yes, we made sure that champion mastery is enabled in this mode!

Sona is one of the champions we're considering preemptive balance on. We're also quite sure we won't get everything correct on release, but we're also confident that the mode is already fun and we can improve it with further changes. Please look forward to it :)

The side camps are very powerful in terms of gold/xp value, so playing defensively is typically a losing play in our tests so far. We've had a lot of lower skill tests, and also had the Game Analysis Team do some focused testing, and in both the games were typically aggressive and bloody, even if individual players are more risk-averse. More optimized play typically resulted in shorter games with more decisive skirmishing around the edges of the map. I do think there are some comps that lend themselves to stalling, and if we see that emerge as a very common playstyle I expect we'll want to take action.

I don't have an answer for the champion-specific buffs/nerfs visibility, sorry.

We designed the mode to be closer to Summoner's Rift gameplay than ARAM (being able to recall and heal makes a huge difference), so we expect fewer extreme balance outliers. We do plan to balance similarly to ARAM, and we're considering which champions are clearly powerful enough to pre-emptively balance.

And you can pick your champion!

Gold and XP are greatly accelerated, and some late-game champions (e.g. stackers) will have manual tweaks so they fit the pace of the mode. We've found late-game champions effective, but if they end up being weak we'll buff them.

No, we felt the format and new map were the main draw and wanted to focus on that. We talked about those early on, but didn't feel like this was the right place, especially given one of the goals of helping new players have a safer, more fun place to learn.

Gold and XP are greatly accelerated, and some late-game champions (e.g. stackers) will have manual tweaks so they fit the pace of the mode. We've found late-game champions effective, but if they end up being weak we'll buff them.

To add to Sirhaian's answer with some more nitty-gritty design...

It's critical that new players can understand why learning the game is worthwhile and experience a sample of that first-hand. ARAM actually does a pretty good job on both of these, but the inability to pick a champion undermines new players' ability to find their fave and have a familiar foundation going into each game. We believe that an ARAM-adjacent mode like this with free champion pick, stronger acceleration (you WILL get to play a strong version of your champ) and a lower-stakes vibe can be more successful for new players.

To answer the second question, I think that a mode where you start at full build could work, but would need a lot more design work to make it interesting throughout. Scaling up from weak to strong is a core part of League's gameplay fantasy and results in different combat outcomes over the course of the game (fighting someone at levels 4, 8, and 16 will have dramatically different texture and outcomes). The pitch for Brawl was closer to "the teamfight and skirmish action of Summoner's Rift, without the macro," so we opted to keep all of that power growth in for this mode.

It's not off the table, but we would need a really good pitch for a mode that absolutely has to be big. Making bigger maps at similar quality is going to be more expensive and take time, and we'd typically prefer to focus on using our resources to deliver more new modes instead.

A fair amount, way back in the day. Was definitely my favorite part of that game.