[2022] before you go and rant about a champion being weak, please go and look at the stats first.

We do look at Chinese winrate data, but that doesn't mean we only look at that data, and ignore the rest of the world.

We look at everything we can when making changes. Chinese champion data isn't always 1:1 with the rest of the world, but it is generally similar.

When I see it quoted the data is often very far off from our own data (no champions are anywhere close to -40% in their intended roles). I haven't looked at what is shown on playrate, so I can't speak to that.

So normally I wouldn't take the bait and only respond to people who seem interested in hearing responses, rather than arguing, but I'll bite.

First, the balance team does not take skins into account, they don't even know what skin release plans are, and are not judged based on the success of skins or revenue.

God Fist Lee Sin was the last example I used, so I'll stick to it here. We have wanted to Buff Lee Sin for a while, (he isn't doing great), but players feel he is strong. The skin came out, we didn't buff him, because of player perception even though (from looking at just winrate data) he needs it.

Second, it really depends on what brackets you are talking about Winrate isn't universal across the board and it really comes down to how you look at the data, and this is particularly true for Kai'Sa. Because of how our loadout system works the VAST majority of players just build the next item in line. This means they will rush Stormrazor, when you should really be doing a double BF Sword build (or who knows if that has changed), before finishing Stormrazor. The players who know to do this build, tend to be just fine, but her winrate is suppressed by the legions of people rushing Stormrazor.

This is something we would like to address, but buffing the champion doesn't do anything to address that, it just makes it worse. If she were to sit at a reasonable winrate for most players she would need to be very strong for players optimizing her evolve system, or we could shift power out of the evolve system and into other areas, but that isn't something we like to do and I don't think you would enjoy either.