Being a main of a champion means that your are intrinsically biased towards said champion. Even if you’re not asking for buffs, the way you experience the game is primarily through the lens of that champion. In honesty I feel this actually makes you worse at giving balance advice as your feedback comes from a limited perspective. Every champ in the game warps how every role plays out.
Mostly I’m writing this after continually hearing about how Velkoz mains gave advice on how to balance the champ and were “ignored”. After reading the actual post I just laughed. The idea of “reduce damage and add skill expression” to an artillery mage is funny because their ranged damage IS their skill expression. You can’t have skill expression from the back line because the safety provides no counterplay. I think back to when Ezreal is poke dominant and how busted that is.
But even in terms of community balance suggestions it’s still a weird conversation because
- Reddit is not a good sample of the community nor is Twitter. The only people who see the full picture are the devs
- High elo players are good at playing the game, not necessarily balancing the game
- There are millions of players each with their own ideas of balance, and over 150 champ main subs. Devs cannot be constantly checking every Avenue for advice
- Devs have no obligation to give feedback on your idea, and you have no idea what internally was tried before they decided on what to ship to prod. If anything I’d never give feedback because I’d just be accused of not getting it if I disagreed
Those four points are in general, not specific to the velkoz post, just about feedback in general
Velkoz mains are a joke compared to teemo mains. You want to talk about ignored? He’s ignored. I’m a teemo main. He’s awful right now. The only reason i play him is because he is my most comfortable champ, but in games where i don’t feel like i need him because the matchup isn’t awful, i tend to do really well on other champs for a former teemo otp that’s just doing something different. I’m not sure what he needs, but the main problem that i have is, no matter how well i play, there are a plethora of champs who can just 1v1 me despite me being up levels and farm. My reason for thinking like this is how well i do on champs that aren’t teemo when i get ahead.
I think “being biased” is not inherently disqualifying, though. Since a bias is unavoidable, saying “you have a bias so your ideas are bad” is no different than saying “you’re a human being so your ideas are bad.”
However, i will note that they don’t straight up ignore mains. They put out that idea about teemo being reworked where his e or w becomes a flatly worse version of twitch q and his e moves to his passive and stuff like that. It was bad because it had a self slow and became camo instead of invis so it could not even be used as an escape tool like twitch q, much less a chase tool. His mains, me among them, rightly called out how that just made his stealthing absolutely shit and removed a lot of skill expression from a kit that has almost none besides kiting mechanics. Riot, to their credit, listened, and that has not gone unappreciated by me.