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With the release of rotation having had a, lets say, mixed reception; and especially with the stream we just had that left many things still unanswered, and the upcoming interview people might want to prepare for, I thought now would be a good time to actually take a proper deep dive into rotation, the proposed reasons for doing it and how much they hold up, especially now that we had time to see them in action. Perhaps in doing so, we can figure out why this whole thing was so polarising.
Now we'll be focusing specifically on the reasons Riot gave for it, that is to say, rotation on it's own, with no references to what games do and don't have rotation, its history, or anything like that. We're doing it like this because the frame of reference every player has is incredibly different. Some, like me, have played card games for well over a decade, and know their way around pretty much every card game out there, but others might have started with only LoR, and know nothing of other card games. I want to make sure everyone is on the same page, so let's cast all those preconceptions aside, and look at rotation for what it is.
Now, when it comes to the reasonss, I think it's only fair to simply use the list the devs themselves outlined in the first rotation article.
Analysing the reasons for rotation
So the proposed reasons are as follows:
1. Rotation helps prevent powercreep.
2. Rotation opens up design space.
3. Rotation allows for underplayed champs to find a niche.
4. Balance, bugfixing and interaction maintenance is harder to do without rotation.
1. Rotation helps prevent powercreep.
Lets start with the first one. “Rotation helps prevent powercreep”. The way the reasoning for this claim goes here is simple. “Whenever you release a new set, you want the cards to see play, for the set to sell/have an impact. And without rotation, the only way they have an impact is if they're stronger than what you already have, and with each set stronger than the last one, you get powercreep.” Theres a million ways to word this, but this is essentially the base claim.
Now, there are three odd parts here that many of you might already have noticed. For one, how does rotation change any of it? After all, if every set has to be stronger than the last one to sell, then the only way rotation could help here is if every new set rotates ALL of the sets before it. But with yesterdays stream, we already have it confirmed that that's not how they're doing it, with cards only being available for rotation in their second year.
And of course, balance changes exist. If you want to shake up the meta, you can do what LoR has already been doing all this time. And there's no doubt that LoR will keep using this exact tool, even with rotation. After all, cards only rotate once a year. What happens inbetween? So if powercreep is a concern, we can simply use balance to create small power vacuums between sets, instead of powercreeping, to allow new cards to have an impact.
And then there is the other oddity, and that's, why do decks need to be stronger to see play or have an impact? League players specially should be questioning this, after all new league champs don't just make all previous ones irrelevant, and instead just find their own niche. Because even in league, while it's a competitive game, it's ultimately a game. And a game exists to be fun, first and foremost. All you need to do for new cards and decks to see play, is to make sure they're fun, and offer something no other deck does.
In summary, I think it's safe to say that this proposed reason just doesn't work. The premise is full of holes, and rotation isn't really a tool that would help here even if it wasn't. I understand where this misconception comes from, but it's ultimately just a misconception.
2. Rotation opens up design space
There's another aspect to this point that we will cover in point 4, so let's instead focus on just what Riot described when talking about this point. Specifically, cards with “equivalent replacements”, and cards competing with “all-star staples”. In essence, the claim here is that, without rotation, there are certain design spaces you can't really print new cards in, because cards that already are very similar exist, and you either powercreep those old cards, or the new cards can't compete. Cards like Vile Feast.
Now unlike the previous proposed reason, the claim itself here is fine. It's true that without rotation you can't keep printing slight variations of essentially the same card without powercreeping or have them end up irrelevant. But then the question is, what exactly is the point of doing that? The purpose of staples is to be generically good cards that build the foundation upon which you build unique decks. They're not interesting because they're not supposed to be.
This is especially puzzling given that Riot in the same point talks about wanting to keep providing players with “puzzles” to solve in deckbuilding, but rotating a staple and printing a new one doesn't really give us a new puzzle, you just replace the staple with the almost identical staple. The point of providing puzzles in deckbuilding is that you create new decks and strategies that people figure out, not that you change the colour of the foundation from beige to slightly brighter beige.
Overall, this reason is also just unconvincing. It's at least technically true unlike the previous one, but the stated benefit simply doesn't achieve what their claimed goal is, and as such it's unclear how exactly this is intended to be a positive.
3. Rotation allows for underplayed champs to find a niche.
Pretty much what it says on the tin. The claim here is that in a rotation environment, previously unplayed champs could maybe find new champ combinations, decks, or just a less hostile environment to find success where they previously couldn't. The example Riot used here specifically was Udyr, though I'm sure you could use other champions as examples. I'd love to say more, but this is really where the reasoning for this claim ends.
Well, this is one where we can only talk preliminary results, after all, it'll take a while for the meta to truly solidify. But this has just not happened. If you look at the top 25 decks in the last 2 days, there is only one champ that stands out as being a previously unplayed champ having found themselves a new niche and that's Fizz. But Fizz found that niche not because of rotation, but because of Samira. And as for Udyr? Yeah unfortunately he is just as underpowered as always.
And this makes sense. After all, if a champ was previously underpowered, you'd have to rotate every single champ that isn't underpowered just for them to have a chance of seeing play. And that didn't happen, of course, because that would be too much of an upheaval. There are ways to make underpowered champs see play, buffs, new support cards, but rotation just isn't one of them.
There's not really much more to add here, it is in theory possible that in the future, this somehow changes, but as of right now? This proposed reason simply isn't holding up,
4. Balance, bugfixing and interaction maintenance is harder to do without rotation.
This one is framed less as a benefit to rotation and more as a detriment of not having rotation, but roundabout as it is, it still is ultimately a proposed reason for rotation. The reasoning is once again simple: “As more and more cards are added, the amount of potential interactions between cards increase exponentially, making it more and more difficult for the team to keep up with these interactions, hurting their ability to playtest, prevent bugs and maintain consistency. If you rotate, the amount of interaction is restricted to an upper bound, making it once again possible to keep up”.
Now for this one, I honestly don't think I even need to say much, because when Riot's article on rotation first came out, pretty much everyone spotted a big issue here. Eternal still exists. For rotation to work, Eternal needs to be a properly supported and maintained gamemode, which means you still need to worry about all of that when making new sets. Doing rotation doesn't actually help here, it makes it harder on the dev team because on top of having to still do all these things for the eternal format, they now also have to do the same for standard. The only way rotation would be able to do anything here is if you intend to completely abandon Eternal, make it an unplayable mess you won't touch, but then you're not rotating cards, youre just deleting them.
In fact, this issue was brought up so much that it was one of the points of feedback Riot ended up addressing in the second article. And since then Riot has insisted that they won't abandon Eternal, and want it to be a fully fledged format, so if we are to take their word, this proposed reason is one they themselves ended up walking back. And if even Riot doesn't claim it as a reason to rotate anymore, it just isn't one. Not much more I can say here really.
Conclusion.
All in all, sadly these proposed reasons don't really hold up. I'm sure there are more potential reasons for rotation, perhaps Riot's devs have some they're keeping close to the chest, but without knowing them, we can't really talk about them. So instead, let's talk about the reception, and perhaps an alternative we can go for here.
Rotation's reception
As I think everyone is painfully aware, reception to rotation has been rather mixed. And by itself that's nothing special, every change has its supporters and detractors, but this is without a doubt the most polarised and split the community has been on anything since probably the games very announcement. And while this was expected, it does seem that no one is quite sure why it is so polarising, and in particular why the two sides have such wildly different views on rotation. But having now looked at how Riot's reasons for rotation hold up, I think I might have a potential explanation.
And it comes down to the benefits and detriments. The big problem we have with rotation right now is that while the detriments are obvious (you can't play your favourite champ anymore, balance is currently messy, regions are incredibly uneven in what they can do and what decks they can enable, and entire playstyles are gone alltogether), the benefits are much more nebulous. The ones Riot gave as reasons to rotate simply didn't hold up. Maybe they have more they haven't shared, but since we can't see those, we can't actually see what the benefit of rotation is, even in the long term.
So all we have to rely on is Riots words, and, indeed, references to other games with rotation. Which means that depending on your frame of reference, your view on rotation changes drastically. Those who associate rotation with specific games they see as particularly good have more inherent faith in rotation, those who lack that frame of reference instead can only judge it by it's merits, where it just doesn't do well currently.
Now, sadly this polarisation is something I don't really think can be fixed as is. Certainly, having a permanent, fully maintained and fully equivalent Eternal Ranked gamemode would go a long way (and is frankly an absolutely mandatory requirement to even be able to compare your rotation with that of magic), but Riot doesn't think they can do that. So instead, I want to propose an alternative. One that still gives us more formats, because having more formats is good. After all, variety is the spice of life. An alternative that, while it doesnt do anything about point 1 (not that it needs to), point 2 (because that one is a solution in search of a problem) or point 4 (since Riot walked this one back anyway), but does actually manage to address point 3.
Flipping the script: A suggested alternative
And that is a different kind of alternative gamemode. The problem we ran into with point 3, if you remember, is that for underpowered champs to be able to thrive, you would basically have to remove every actually good champ from the format. And that's just too massive of an upheaval. Or well, it is for the main gamemode. But what if we instead flipped the perspective around?
Instead of having Standard and Eternal, we would have Standard and Limited (though I would prefer a more evocative name than that). Standard becomes what we currently know as Eternal. A gamemode including all of the cards, forever. It would be the default gamemode, getting the most attention as it needs the most. Simply the way to play LoR, as you know and love.
But in addition to this gamemode, we get another gamemode, called “Limited”. This gamemode is a curated gamemode, requiring less attention as a result. Instead of being a gamemode where a lot of cards are rotated out, this would be a gamemode where we select cards to rotate in. It would be a place for cards and champs to have a second chance in a lower powered environment. A way to implement point 3, and perhaps allow Udyr to become the master of spirits he always was supposed to be.
While I'm sure there are still flaws to be found, it's an approach I think would be able to satisfy both sides. Or at least satisfy more people than the current approach does. Limited wouldn't need to be up only 1/3 of the time, because you have much more fine control over what is and isn't in it. It would be immediately distinct from rotation already, instead of having to wait quite a few years to finally find its identity like Riot has stated Eternal would need. It would even fix the current problem of skins becoming less appealing.
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