League of Legends

[Belle Hibiki]

I bring up Eve because she is the most prevalent example (that I can think of) of the business end of the model screwing with what I think should be the goals of design. Business and design can work in harmony, sometimes. I don't think that's the case here, though.

With the rate that they rebalance champs (pretty slow), I don't see how they can expect to keep the list in line when they're releasing a new champ every other week.

This opinion works under some assumptions though:

1) that the list does not have a finite end. I'm assuming Riot has not put themselves under a hard limit on how many champs they want out, since stopping champ production would likely result in a cut in their bottom line. I could only realistically see them doing this after they release something else to get from RP, or if the community grows so large that +xp +ip boosts or skins alone will be able to fund the project. (Gaming tournaments and fame help, too.)

2) that new champs have just as many balance issues as earlier champs. This is admittedly a more suspect assumption, as most recent champs seem alright. But then again - Urgot is almost universally panned and on the bottom of many tier lists.

3) their rate of rebalance remains steady.

If one, two and three are true - that is, they don't have an ending of champs, and the new champs have as many 'bad eggs' as the old ones do, and they can't fix those champs faster than they put out new bad champs, then I see the list eventually getting really bloated. (Shit, I think it's bloated already.)

What I'd like to see is a temporary end to new champ production somewhere in the near future for retuning, bringing non-tournament viable champs up to standard, and then a re-release of the LoL box with the then-current list of champions included. Then they could start up champ production again, with a huge foundation of solid champions.