Guild Wars 2

I know you guys have close ties to Riot Games, including at least one crossover developer (Ryan Scott).

You should really take a balance lesson from them. League of Legends is far from perfect, but at least Riot understands the importance of compensating gameplay bug fixes with balance alterations. You can’t nerf every single skill of a class indirectly through bug fixes, and not compensate the class by buffing other areas. Nor can you bug fix skills that make them better, and not take away legitimate power in other areas.

I’m not going to take a side in the “Elementalists suck/don’t suck” debate, but when they’re regarded as one of the worst professions in the game, and you nerf them through bug fixes, you have to compensate them with real power, or you’re going to have a metric crapton of angry players. And it doesn’t just apply to Eles, it applies to any class.

There are tried and true ways of balancing and fixing skills. Nerfing already bad classes for the sake of consistency without just compensation is one of the quickest way to get people to stop playing your game.

No please dont take balance lessons from Riot since they are the single worst developer when it comes to balancing. It is in fact so bad that u only have handful of viable champions in ranked. Its really that bad.

Seems to me that the balancing issues on LoL are mostly because they keep adding heroes, which offsets all existing ones on a regular basis (as well as leave less time to balance out existing ones). This is obviously part of their business model so it is to be expected, but it is quite an important factor in balancing.

One thing that both teams have probably learned (but even more probably already knew) is that balancing is hard Even a bugfix can be a buff or nerf with a lot of impact due to combinations, and every change will have a lot of players convinced that the devs are just out to get them.

How can LoL ever be considered balanced when its balanced is never determined, based on the fact new heroes are constantly added?

I suspect ArenaNet are using a single profession as a baseline (likely the Warrior) and then making small incremental tweaks.

I would also add that the subject of balance is very subjective.

If a class is too strong, it needs to be nerfed. Buffing it along with those nerfs is absurd on the face of it, because it, well, means it wasn’t really nerfed. I don’t understand how people can sincerely call for buffs along with nerfs when the intention of a nerf is to make the class weaker in some regard.

You get these outraged threads about balance in all MMOs. Just have a little perspective: class balance will probably change quite rapidly for a while and then settle down to a more steady pace.

The problem with LoL is that Riot has based their whole means of income on releasing new heroes like it was a industry.
Now it’s like they are almost releasing one hero a wek (slightly overreaction but still ) while that happens they are not really doign any changes to the gameplay itself and new heroes that are released with more utility then old ones are grinding the older versions in the mud.

The worst thing of Riots hero concept is that the only thing they do is releasing the same heroes over and over but to make it “feel new” they just swap around some of the abilities from older heroes.

LoL is the worst attempt balanced pvp game I’ve ever seen and therefor it sucks as a e-sport and therefor ArenaNet should stay the hell away from that kittenturd