Original Post — Direct link

Disclaimer: this post is essentially venting.

Hello, I am a Wukong main.

At this point, I think there's enough data to safely conclude that Wukong is overtuned given the sunderer+BC buffs. I think it is inevitable that he will be nerfed this coming patch. This situation annoys me, because I see it as a microcosm of the wider frustration the community feels towards game balance.

Anyone who was keeping track of Wukong knew that he was already flirting with being too strong at mid-elo, and that these buffs to some of his core items would push him over the top. However, I also acknowledge that Riot has to solve a hard optimization problem in balancing the game, and that if Divine Sunderer was underperforming on average, then changes were needed. Personally, I build goredrinker + ravenous on Wukong (rather than the more standard sunderer + BC) because it's the playstyle that I like, and rebalancing Wukong based on items I don't build feels as though it will push me out of my preferred build path, which I see as a failure of game balance.

What frustrates me most, however, is not this specific situation with Wukong. It's that more generally, there's no forum to interact directly with the balance team. Their job is obviously hard, and I'm sure they have their own set of metrics for balance that we don't see, but I really think that the community would benefit from something like a patch-by-patch AMA where they explain some of the decisions they're making and how they're getting there. The current lack of transparency leaves me thinking "have they thought about this potential issue, or is it just under their radar and they're acting reactively?" I think even getting a random sampling of these types of questions from the community would go a long way towards mitigating some of this frustration.

Not justifying themselves of course - there will always be those that disagree, and we as players are biased towards anecdotal evidence, but just explaining.

External link →
almost 3 years ago - /u/RiotJag - Direct link

As far as venting goes, I thought this was quite level-headed!

I can tell you that we do pay attention to the community, and we try to communicate with the community as openly as we can. Engaging in player discussion regarding changes can take just as much as implementing them, so hopefully you can believe we're doing our best with the time we have. A full patch-by-patch AMA seems like a cool idea that we could think about doing in the future. We also put a lot of time into every patch note, and it's hard to squeeze all the design considerations we make into a few words of context, but I can confidently say we're investing a ton of careful thought into each change we make to the game.

As far as Wukong goes - I can respect your vision of game balance. I will say that our approach does attempt to balance the game assuming that players will play to win, and consequently will build what is the most powerful item to enable that goal. At the same time, we also have a goal to preserve item diversity whenever possible, and so if a champion is overperforming with just one item, we'll often try to reduce the binding to that item.