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
This is the biggest thing for me.
People who balance - and that applies to a bunch of other topics in League and in general - spend their days doing that. When someone has a sudden realization or a thought of “they should just do that, I have no idea why they haven’t”, there’s a near-zero chance that they haven’t already thought about it and given it a try. And if it’s not been implemented, it’s because it caused a bigger problem somewhere else.
Suggesting ideas isn’t bad, it never is (this is in the context of public forums and not of going up to the person directly). But doing it in a way that’s either insulting or even just coming from a place of pretentiousness is very much unhelpful (besides obviously being an asshole’s thing to do).
I’ve given ideas that I thought and think were well-thought out. I know they were listened to. And they were never applied. And I’ve always been totally fine with that, and that’s… the norm? If they never actually got followed, it’s because they saw something that I didn’t that was causing issues. And I don’t need to know what it was - yeah, I’d like to, because it’s interesting. But it would be interesting for me and nothing but a time cost for them. So demanding that would be completely selfish.
To give one simple and clear example of how the people at Riot just know things we don’t - in 2019, lots of people were complaining about how the arena picked for the World finals was small and how Riot could have picked a bigger one in Paris, followed by the assumption that they probably didn’t just because they were stingy. Turns out, someone from the team in charge of that told me the reason why they had to opt out of the bigger arenas was because the material they had to hang from the ceilings was heavier than the limits these stadiums had.
So… yeah. Assuming that one knows and understands everything is wrong, unhelpful, and also very pretentious.
Pointing out issues (constructively, and it should have been needless to say, in a non-sociopathic way) is great and super helpful.
Suggesting ideas can always be useful (again, same remarks, shouldn’t need to be specified).
Suggesting ideas from the assumption that one just knows better and especially knows better than the people in charge very much isn’t.