League of Legends

[Kaden]

Evelynn is a fringe case to begin with. The reason it's taken them so long to remake the champion is that they don't want to break her from the role she's supposed to fill. It's a lot easier to whip something up from scratch than it is to change something so that it more effectively fills the same role without breaking the balance of the game.

A large part of your argument is based on them spending the time to make older champions "tournament viable." It's easier to pull up a couple of tier lists and see Twisted Fate in a solid Tier 3 (or worse, depending on the list) and just say "nope, he's not good enough," but that doesn't actually mean anything.

The WCG should be a great example that Riot has been spending time and effort keeping older champions "viable." The European team proved that, properly played, Twisted Fate, Kassadin, and Soraka, who were all very low on all the tier lists, can be just as effective. The problem wasn't the actual champion, but the skewed perspective that arose from the current meta. Look at Ezreal: he was the absolute forerunner of every single tier list during the poke/heal meta and now he's a low T1, high T2 on most lists. Yes, he's been toned down in terms of raw numbers, but not in a realistically debilitating way (not like, say, Shaco).

Obviously, our base opinions differ in regards to Riot's approach, and I'm not expecting either of us to just suddenly say "oh yeah, you're completely right, I never thought of it like that before," but I think a lot of it has to do with the following quote:

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.

When you say "rebalance" it seems you're referring to what Riot calls "reworks" of older champions. Every time a patch hits and Taric's heal gets nerfed or Malzahar gets a buff, aren't those champions being "rebalanced?" It seems slow because Riot has said they try to be as cautious about changes as possible (especially after Xin Zhao, amirite?) so they make small tweaks over several patches, presumably -- hopefully! -- based on datamining that we don't have access to.

Malzahar, who I mentioned earlier, is actually a really good example of their approach to rebalance. He's been slowly tweaked over the past... what? Five or six patches now? Lowered mana costs, adjusted CDs, range buffs for his ult. The current Malz has significantly different numbers than the original one. He's been rebalanced to be in-line with other casters.

I don't really think there are any champions that need to be completely reworked, with the exceptions of Jax and Eve. If patch notes weren't constantly filled with adjustments to Nunu or Mundo or Tryndamere or Anivia or Corki, I would agree with you: Riot is far more interested in making money by pumping out new gimmicks than they are with keeping the game balanced. I definitely don't see that as the case, though.