Balance Philosophy: High elo vs. low elo

A forum post directed at Riot wondered why Riot balanced at low-elo rather than for competitive play. Presumably, this post was in response to the eve nerf, which was primarily aimed at the lower level play experience. Xypherous was kind enough to give us a ton of material about the thought process that goes into balance decisions. His first post explains that glaring balance issues in low-elo play prevent the development of actual game strategy, as players adopt the unbalanced strategy to such effect that it overwhelms those trying other strategies.  It also points out the subtleties between gameplay changes (i.e. mechanics changes) and balance changes (i.e. numbers changes):

Point 1: People think naively balancing for only the highest tier of play leads to better results

For example, let’s imagine that in SC2, zerg-rush resulted in wins 90% of the time, except at the highest levels of competitive play? Is this fine? Naively balancing for the competitive scene would say yes, except it is also detrimental to competitive play in that case. Why?

Let’s take an analogy here: A ladder consists of many steps or rungs along the way. By making a strategy which is unbelievably easy to pull off and extremely hard to counter unless you’re at the highest level of skill, you can think of it as a huge “gap” in the ladder.

These gaps are where meta-strategies in the competitive community tend to die, because they cannot exist in the environment for long enough to evolve and become stronger strategies, due to the dominance of a “cheese” strategy. The portion of competitive players who are innovators are far dwarfed by the people who are iterators that refine strategies up to a high-level.

Thus, even when balancing for a game for a competitive setting, you still need to ensure that at each step along the way, the cost to counter a strategy is only moderately or slightly higher than the cost to implement a strategy, because this is the only type of environment where healthy metas grow and evolve to become refined strategies. Otherwise, they get simply curb-stomped out by far easier to implement and far far far harder to counter strategies, blocking out refinement from iteration.

Point 2: People mistaking gameplay changes for balance changesand vice versa.

There’s two major types of changes and much of the confusion lies when one type of change is being mistaken for the other. One is Power Balance, the other is gameplay, which goes back to my central tenet:

Power Balance is far easier to adjust than gameplay balance.

Power balance is something that can be always done with numbers. However, if something is broken from a gameplay-perspective, that difficulty is a much harder problem to tease out. For example, Irelia’s problems were two fold: One, she had terrible power-balance issues due to her lack of scaling. That’s an easy problem. Two, she was dealing triple damage in equal amounts. That’s a gameplay problem, and much harder to resolve.

Making her do Physical/True is a step to resolve that, but it actually made her deal more (counterable, but overall higher values) damage, overall, not less. This makes sense if you realize that we’re trying to adjust her gameplay. However, it’s when people mistake the intent of the change to be “power” level fixing, rather than fixing gameplay/game flow changes that people think we cater “balance” to low ELO and then people think the intent of the change was to buff Irelia, etc.

His second post talks a little bit more about his ladder analogy, and also about some of the traits that make a player “skilled”:

A ladder does split highly skilled players from low-moderately skilled players. But imagine if a ladder had 6 foot gaps along the way. This would not only be a poor ladder to figure out who is actually good at the game, but would also kill many players and strategies from being able to climb and show off new and innovative ways of playing the game.

As to ensuring that higher level play is not affected by the changes, we do try to make our gameplay changes as small as possible and tweak afterwards after the ramifications are more obvious. It’s certainly a difficult problem and I completely agree that we could do better on this front.

However, from my perspective, truly competitive players have one great defining quality that makes them competitive: Adaptation. The highest skilled players are defined not only by skill but their ability to adapt to changes, which mitigates this problem somewhat.

A desire to adapt isn’t really found outside of competitive levels, however, so it’s a tricky thing.

The third post is about gameplay changes at higher elo:

There are a few things that were mostly catered to high level players. Ezreal for instance, for a long time was thought “balanced” for everyone but high ELO, but in high ELO, Ezreal was “pick or ban him, otherwise you lose.”

Evelynn is another one of the headaches for high ELO players. None of them thinks she is particularly powerful, but all of them are annoyed whenever fighting her.

Though I agree, that higher-tier players tend to be affected more by gameplay changes, but overall, higher-tier players tend to be more accepting of negative gameplay experiences rather than negative balance experiences, because of their adaptability.

And finally, to bring it all back together, how Eve fits into this philosophy:

I should clarify, since I’ve been using the term balance fix a little too loosely. From gameplay, all that you need to ultimately answer is: Does this X lead to good gameplay scenarios or bad ones? You can’t really be “unbalanced from a gameplay perspective”, because there’s nothing to balance, really there. It’s just a manner of whether ultimately, it’s good or bad for the game.

Evelynn is a good example of this. Evelynn with her stun, when she works, makes the game frustrating for the opponent who can’t actually perform many actions. The counter to Evelynn, when it works, makes the game frustrating for Evelynn and makes the game have less gameplay overall becomes it ******s item-builds and slows the game down due to pink ward and oracle costs.

What does Evelynn with that stun/stealth combo add to the game? One strategic option. What is the gameplay tradeoff? Every game she’s in is far more frustrating than normal. It’s not worth it, overall, from gameplay. If Eve, overall, is easier to counter, or less reliant on her stun-effect, then the negative attributes on both sides are lessened.

I admit fully that gameplay changes have serious impacts on balance, as many of you rightly point out.

(There’s also a side argument that can be made, regarding how easy Stealth characters are to use versus their effectiveness, but that one is mostly unusable at this point due to power level issues. Still something to think about, regarding the Stealth mechanic as a whole.)