LS: Many low-ranked players don't care about patch notes, while high-ranked players are very concerned about changes. Why doesn't Riot focus changes on high-ranked players?
Riot Phreak: Not everyone plays thirty games of League of Legends every day. As for patches, if you think AD mid became mainstream because we pushed the mid lane bushes back, making it safe to constantly push and take plates, that's fine. But the thing is, even pro players didn't immediately find the optimal solution when this change happened. The mid lane in the 2024 Spring Split wasn't dominated by Corki vs. Tristana vs. Smode. Although Smode wasn't there yet, other AD champions were, and since patch 14.1, Zeri has become playable.
For pro players, it took almost four months to find the optimal solution. I don't think anyone can immediately find the patch answer. Take the 2017 Ardent Censer as an example. This item was always there, but it wasn't until the Summer Playoffs that pro players started using it, and it became the hot item for Worlds, and then we nerfed it.
The small example above shows that everyone is slow to accept patches, especially low-ranked players, who may be even slower. But from a champion balance perspective, we can easily see the results from win rates. For example, if we give a champion 3 more AD, their win rate will increase across all ranks. Some players might not read patch notes or understand why their Ashe is winning more games.
But ultimately, champions like Master Yi have been dominating Silver rank for over ten years. We know this is true because his playstyle is straightforward, and countering him requires team coordination. New players and less skilled players won't band together to control Master Yi. Nowadays, Master Yi requires more skill to be effective; you need to meditate to block some skills and use Alpha Strike to dodge others. However, it turns out that a Bronze Master Yi might not dodge Veigar's Q, and a Bronze Veigar might not correctly cast his control skills. But the end result is that the game feels fair.
We are very aware that giving a champion stronger early game power is a buff aimed at high-ranked players because the early game is more important at high ranks, and games end faster. We know that last-hit rewards are for more skilled players, and we know that snowballing from kills is needed in ranked games.
LS: You previously mentioned considering more data from Chinese ranked games. What exactly does this mean? Will we see a champion buffed directly because they perform poorly in China? For example, if a juggernaut dominates the Emerald and Bronze ranks globally but performs poorly in Ionia or Canyon Peak, will this champion be suddenly buffed because of low pick rates in China?
Riot Phroxzon: We know that in certain regions, specific champions can become outliers, so it's important to maintain a global perspective. Like other regions, China has a large portion of our player base. It's important that we don't cater to any specific region without balance changes; we need to ensure that whenever outliers appear, we address them. Regarding China, we are restructuring and rebuilding data pipelines and data structures so we can access data more conveniently.
For many years, this data could be queried on lol.qq.com. When we were previously observing outliers, we would make adjustments based on the data from that website. Now, we will use internal tools to obtain this data, which will make it much easier. Finding outliers through our own observations is always much faster than having regional partners come and tell you "this is too strong" or "this is too weak." Our partners from various regions used to report this data to us weekly, for example, saying that this thing caused discussions in the Latin American region, this champion was too strong in Korea, this champion was too weak in China, and so on. This is just another source of information we can use to make decisions. This is not a change in principle, but a change in the way information is obtained, making it more naturally integrated so that we do not need to rely on others to tell us this information.
