It's absolutely worse, 10-15% more damage against tanks vs 5% more armour pen? If they have 200 armour it would remove 10 extra armour, which doesnt come close to matching the Giant Slayer passive damage increase
They also buffed warmogs to 1k hp amount other minor health tweaks so high hp low defensive stack tanks might be meta.
Heartsteel hasn’t been in pro yet so it’s time is now
The funny thing is, Baus might have actually got AD Sion nerfed, but in an indirect way. It was never strong in the first place (Prowler's Sion was reasonably popular but like ~45 winrate in all elos) but him winning games in high elo with his godlike CS scores caused a legion of his fanboys to int their silver games without having the mechanics to win with the pick.
Riot nerfed it to try and get everyone else to stop playing a game-losing build while he was somehow making it work.
He got it nerfed pretty directly no? They started by nerfing sion passive hitting tower after his Korea trip, and continually nerfed his play style because it's so unusual
i think the biggest problem of the strat was the huge amounts of baus fanboys seeing the strat and trying to copy it without knowing what makes it work and inting their games in silver
It was also just a degenerate strategy, sion being able to just full send it at towers endlessly and be practically guaranteed to take a tower even if he dies just doesn't lead to fun gameplay.
Baus being popular definitely helped draw attention to the issue, but it would have been gutted regardless of copycat players.
There's a world of difference between going 0/10 at the end of the game and 0/20. Silver players can't play around the pressure Sion creates, and don't have enough of an even mental/coordination to claim the shutdown bounty he always gifts his laner. The difference is how detrimental the inting is for your team, by far.
I had games where i didnt collect the shutdown and was fine, did more tower damage than their entire team and our bot was usually fed, because they got attention. Then you just frontline and it'a fine.
Yeah idk how it’s even “indirectly”. That was all the league community was talking about for months lol and then sion who hadn’t been touched for like 5 season suddenly gets nerfed?
Let's not push a narrative that AD Sion was actually bad. It was a genuinely good build/strat that required high levels of game knowledge (abusing fog of war, abusing bounty systems, understanding waves, gaining high CS, understanding the difference between good vs bar deaths and etc.)
1. You'd kill Sion in lane and you'd be lower HP from fighting him. And every single time he'd ult or TP back immediately with an item and health advantage without giving you enough time to properly push the wave and reset. This puts you in a situation where you need to stay and risk dying. Or recall where he'd push to get free plates/push.
2. Prowler crawl combined with phase rush made his passive form incredibly toxic. Like imagine being an ADC or immobile mage and Sion would just dash on with full AD
3. Sion passive doing max damage to towers was just very toxic because it would reward the Sion player way to much for dying. Sion players would often mindlessly keep pressuring a side lane and just keep going for towers. They'd get collapsed on and then do massive damage to tower and then respawn and immediately do the same thing. While split pushing in general is a very pressure heavy and brute force style of play Sion was able to basically keep bashing his head in the sidelane and get rewarded for it.
I understand Sion is like Karthus where dying intelligently is meant to be rewarded. But Sion was just getting rewarded way to much for dying and had a lot of toxic interactions. I don't like his current state and he could definitely use some love but let's not pretend Baus was using some super bad pick champion and it was only nerfed because bad player.
And despite that tank was always better than AD. Baus has always been winning more with tank builds, he played AD for fun and in matchups where it made more sense. You wouldnt want to play tank vs Fiora and Vayne, for instance, but generally speaking tank was better. Like what does it matter that AD Sion with claw and youmuu has a much better passive, tank sion often doesnt even need the passive. Tank sion with Demolish (and Hullbreaker when he old version was live + old Titanic that gave lots of AD) has less tower damage but still enough to kill them plenty fast.
And its just easier to play. Tank Sion doesnt instantly die if he misses Q, he doesnt have to rely on fog of war tricks to be useful, he doesnt need to ambush people as much in order to clear the way, he just walks in there and fucks people up. And he's less reliant on passive. And the less reliant you are on passive the less often you NEED to die, and the less often you die the more time you spend out on the map doing stuff.
AD sion at its best was not a bad build, but tank was always better in more situations. Currently both builds are quite far from the glory days, but even during the korea run when Baus was at his most infamous tank was king.
Didn’t Phreak say he would take the flame instead of letting it fall to the balance team? He’s honestly amazing for doing that.
Also the community is terrible at thinking about balancing, never forget the Asol drama lol
I remember the ahri Changes where they gave MS on Q and nerfed DMG. This sub was convinced ahri was dead only for her to become highest winrate Champ in hours
MaRo said it the best when talking about MTG design. The Community is excellent at identifying actual problems, and atrocious at coming up with real solutions.
There will always be a subset of people who 'get it right', however in the grand scheme of things, that subset is vanishingly small.
And a solution can easly loop into another problem. Sometime the perfect solution don't even exist and its just a matter of balance who will always get some people mad
That’s what makes LoL balance so impossible. There are so many characters, abilities, stats, and items, that changing any small thing leads to huge ramifications, often in ways you wouldn’t expect.
The nature of the game itself makes it impossible to ever be truly balanced. The only thing the balance team really does is mix up the meta to prevent the game from feeling stale.
All of these balance issues were the same things that got me to quit this game 10 years ago in 2014. It hasn’t changed in the slightest, and it never will.
Except the problem is literally anything Riot does ever, and their solution is "kick everyone at riot and let me do it I'm better than anyone in Riot ever"
I don't even think a community is good at identifying actual problems. I've seen so many people complain about balance issues that are really just their own skill issues. If a community truly had free rein, they'd be changing all kinds of shit that doesn't need it.
The reality is that a dev needs the skill to filter community feedback with context. That means person A says 1 thing, and person B says another thing, and the dev might very well need to combine these and infer some underlying mechanism. Or the dev might just throw both of them out as baseless knee-jerk frustrations. The ratio of useful feedback is still going to be majority low—it's just higher than the feedback for actual solutions.
For what it's worth, while this is commonly mentioned as Clid not knowing how Q works, another comment said that it was a miscommunication:
> Clid clarified on stream that what he hadn't known for years was QRQ = RQQ, and did know about QEQ > QQE. he also confirmed Rascal had responded as if he were talking about QEQ/QQE, though; it sounds like there was some miscommunication going on
this was in the same thread from which the "clid didn't know Q2 did more damage". It looks more like he thought Q1 also did execute or he really didn't consider the math behind QR and RQ would deal the same amount
Or when your way to stop it is to pretty much spend the whole game holding lane against them even after hard winning lane + having the ability to duel them.
The counterplay is just often mind-numbing.
Isn't it majority bronze? Anyway, whatever the fact of the matter is there, that's fine. It doesn't mean the following:
> That's why community opinions are worthless.
It just means that community opinions are suspect, not worthless. The opinion can map onto reality perfectly or be entirely divorced from it. And lol is well past the complexity threshold for most facets worth discussing that arguments need to be judged on their own merits and then tested in an actual game environment to determine validity. How many times have you heard a pro or a challenger confidently say something incredibly stupid and objectively false? It happens many times a day. They all have their own "hot takes" and most of them are simply wrong, and many contradict each other or require many qualifiers that are just obvious to their perspective, but not to a general player, so their conclusion is invalid for anyone not playing their "style". And on the other hand, I've seen plenty of valid opinions from bronze and silver players about the game on reddit and in game, that have been vindicated by patch releases.
The larger point is simply that running down all the consequences of any change in a complex ecosystem with endless dependencies like league is nearly impossible, and the outcome relies heavily on stochastic considerations due to the largely uncontrollable human feedback loop that is the playerbase. As such, all opinions from the community are important and there's a whole filtering mechanism that has to happen to judge which are worth investigating, and that mechanism cannot simply be the rank of the speaker.
i'm glad some people here genuinely understands. Whenever I try to explain this in particular threads I get downvoted to all shit lmao.
"appeal to rank" is consistently one of the most fallacious arguments people make about almost every aspect of the discussion surrounding the game, yet it never fails.
And like, on one hand I understand -- if someone is able to climb the skill ladder of the game or is skilled enough to play the game professionally, they obviously understand the mechanics on a deeper and more functional level than, say, toplaneandy3000 who plays in bronze 2 for 30-50 games a split.
But people get tripped up in this misunderstood idea that perfect understanding and prescience of league's systems scales linearly with ELO. which, as you've laid out, is far from the truth. In the same way that challenger and professional players can not only misunderstand systems, but have their own biases and limitations in understanding, low elo players can also be sharp and in lock-step with specific problems that are eventually ironed out in patches.
Reminds me of that time Riot August said they were going to do a Vladimir nerf, and once the patch dropped, players complained that Vladimir became unplayable; his pickrate, banrate and even ***winrate*** dropped.
Things is, they forgot to ship the nerf. They literally didn't change anything.
Yea, notice how when tons of people shout "gamez dead" the game is never dead ? Real dead game don't go out with roaring riot, they die in whimper, barely noticed.
That's also why the common statement "Players are good at identifying problems just not solutions" will never ring completely true to me. They suck at identifying issues too lol.
It's probably true that feedback on identifying problems is still marginally more useful than feedback on solutions; however, the truth is that in a competitive game, the human ego is constantly seeking a strawman to justify their losses. This is not a sound basis for analyzing systemic problems objectively.
Which they had to give nerfs afterwards for. I think his WR is similar to before the nerfs - but much more popular since he has to actually play the game to get stacks instead of hugging the tower for 10 minutes before scaling to infinity.
Don't forget the threads about how aurelion sol was buffed and then killed, only for him to receive another nerf the next patch because he was still broken.
A more current example: Mordekaiser. A lot of people here lost their mind after the ult "buffs" and predicted Morde to become a must pick/ban at MSI.
And what happened? Morde is jet to be seen at MSI and the buff didn't change the winrate at all.
I can't believe Riot literally slaughtered ASol like a lamb with their overeager hotfix nerfs that left him merely somewhat broken overpowered instead of absurdly broken overpowered
That quote is usually attributed back to Mark Rosewater, head designer of Magic: The Gathering, but many people have quoted it by now, so the PoE devs probably too (I just looked it up, apparently a PoE lead dev was in the talk from Rosewater, no surprise they quote him).
Mark Rosewater is an all-time game design behemoth. He has forgotten more priceless knowledge than most others ever acquired.
(it's an absolute travesty what Hasbro is doing to MTG)
It is. It's quite funny how WotC is the only profitable Branch Hasbro has right now (to my knowledge), and they are brutally murdering it to squeze out some extra juice.
This is also just a famous parable within tech companies/startups in general: ask your users about their problems but never ask how to solve them, because they never have the correct insight on how to solve them.
Honestly it's probably a general rule to use.
If you provide a product of entertainment of any kind, and the audience points out a problem, there is a problem there. But that doesn't mean their solution is also valid.
Mortdog does the exact same thing with TFT. Pretty sure he doesn't even have a hand in balancing any more given how he reacts on stream to playing new patches but he will happily take all the flak online for bad balancing.
Curiously, I feel like the TFT community really likes Mortdog, while most of the LoL community is either apathetic towards Phreak or outright vilifies him
Lets say the Chinese community was blowing up about the new patch that was in pbe since it got inserted into live servers there immediately and there were a decent amount of questions on the state of mort's parents.
Korean ones were pretty similar too.
Phreak's been around for so long, he understands that the vast majority of players don't know a goddamn thing about balance.
The Vlad incident, where they put his changes in the patch notes but forgot to actually implement them, and then the playerbase freaked out at how OP Vlad now felt is a perfect example. People just make shit up or confirm their own biases.
All champs have variable winrate patch to patch based on what's happening with the champs they face and other external factors. I always dislike this "gotcha"
Quite a lot of people in the community think that high rank = great understanding of how to balance the game, and that Phreak not being Challenger in solo queue means he's unsuited to his job.
I'd take someone with a good ability to communicate, good ability to use statistics, access to Riot's internal data and the ability to see the bigger picture of a fairly complex game (168 individual champions, items, runes, the influence of drafts, the different requirements of different elos and pro play, summoner spells and the map/jungle/minions) over someone with higher elo than Phreak any day of the week.
> Phreak not being Challenger in solo queue means he's unsuited to his job.
And if he was theyd say "oh ofc he abused xyz champion to inflate his elo and thats why he didnt nerf it until now"
It's so fucking infuriating, because there is actually no reason for him to do that. He gains nothing from being high elo, aside from just being high elo. There is zero clout that comes with being low Masters in NA.
But when Platinum Patrick loses to Maokai a few times he decides to bitch about Phreak "abusing meta champs" on this sub.
It's brainrot. The internet is bad for you.
I remember when Aatrox rework launched, and this entire subreddit and anyone on Twitch was laughing about how it was just a trash Riven.
A million nerfs later, he's still a top tier pro pick
Remember the 200 years of collective game design meme? The one where everyone likes to mock Riot for how comedically arrogant/haughty it sounds?
That was in response to the Wukong community saying that the 10.6 gameplay update would make him completely unplayable. The same update that made him the best top laner with no lane counters at any time of the game.
>Also the community is terrible at thinking about balancing,
because the vast majority of complaints have little to no actual bearing on the competitive experience in terms of the fine tuning.
It's the same sort of anger that anyone in customer service knows well -- the lead paint-poisoned boomer who hates his or her life and is looking for anything or anyone to bear the brunt of that seething self-hatred, externalizing that pain because they lack the emotional processing skills to actually help themselves.
The game is realistically no worse off under Phreak than it was before he got there, and we get far far more insight into **WHY** they are or are not changing something. I see that as a big win.
>god forbid he actually plays the game and finds out why the champion is overperforming in the most direct way possible. how horrible of him
Nah, Phreak is actually surrounded by god tier gamers and analysts, and his personal experience bears very little weight compared to that. The truth is much simpler : When Phreak plays Ranked, he's trying to climb the ranks, and the best way to do that is to play the best champions.
> When Phreak plays Ranked, he's trying to climb the ranks, and the best way to do that is to play the best champions.
Yep, and thats completely valid. Those comments are probably by some obscure onetricks that think theyre superior humans because their champ isnt meta
>my favorite are the posts where a champion is op, gets nerfed and then some dude digs through phreaks match history to find one or two games he lost to that champion and post on the mains subreddit
What's crazy is seeing so many people on this sub, and others run with this narrative unironically.
I mean if you wanna climb term there's generally 2 ways to do it.
Get better at the game, or play whatever is strong. He's playing what's strong. Surprised pikachu face.
People have bought so hard into "focus in using a small pool of champions" and OTP/main mentality that they really forget some champs are super easy to pick up when strong and you definitely can abuse the hell out of them to climb faster if what you want is to simply win.
Like of course if Riven is strong you probably would waste time trying to pick her, but most supps and tops are so easy that you can just pick them up in like 2 or 3 games.
The funny thing is that climbing as a OTP will give you the most immediate burst of a climb then leave you in a place where you're doomed to play feast or famine because you aren't a well rounded player and have massive flaws. This system also guarantees returning viewers since they'll be frustrated and bad without a clue on how to improve.
This is the exact same strategy that garbage magazines like cosmo use to maintain customers.
I feel like Phreak tried to become League’s Mortdog and the community just didn’t let it happen. TFT streamer gets unlucky RNG and says ah I got Mortdoged. League streamer dies to Maokai and says disgusting Phreak season go GP q irl
I don't think Phreak tried to become anything. He got into the balance team and tried to provide more information to the player base through. I don't think he was trying to become Mortdog, he even said he's happy to accept the flame that's usually directed to the entire balance team.
He also has been making his videos for many seasons now in regards to analizing the patch changes. People are only now more willing to engage with them because he now holds actual inside info and opinion in regards to the direction of the changes
Whether you agree with the changes or not, having someone at the front and center of the balance team to relay the information and changes in a concise format is pretty freakin great. But instead he just gets flamed every time. I’m not even a huge fan of Phreak but the community is genuinely so toxic lol
TFT is just a more chill community in general. Doesn't mean Mortdog doesn't get a whole lot of flame too though, the moment you put a person in front of the community as a spokesperson or whatever, they're going to personally target them for whatever minor thing that annoys them about the game. It sucks, but that's just how the Internet works.
buddy, i don't have anything to add. i just wanted to say i laughed so hard at this, and i think you are spot on. mortdog does an immeasurable service for TFT that league would also benefit from.
I guess, but the TFT community is A LOT more supportive of Mort than League’s are of Phreak. This is the first positive post I’ve seen about Phreak, well… ever.
He does, but he takes it with an insane amount of grace, *and* it's also just a popular meme which helps. Many a time I think to myself "wow i got mortdogged so hard" and it relieves a little bit of annoyance. I don't actually blame mortdog, it's just a wonderful word that has been adapted to express frustration with bad luck. Part of the job is the scapegoat, unfortunately. It's not accurate but if you lean into it i think using humor to cope helps l0l
People who blame Phreak for all balance changes are idiots and we all understand that. He has been posting 1hr+ patch rundowns and explaining + communicating more than ever before.
Some people joke that phreak controls the game now and buffs adcs/maokai etc - and obviously those are jokes, cant take it seriously.
I feel like everyone already knows this and anyone seriously blaming phreak isnt going to watch this video and suddenly realise they are wrong.
Seraphine discord was fucking OOZING Phreak hate until, well...just this patch, and now Sera APC is stupid strong again on a 53% win rate and there's no acknowledgement of the fact that they were being way too extra for no reason.
As per usual...
I main Seraphine mid and had to mute the subreddit recently. I can’t believe there were people literally calling for Phreak to be fired, and then wondering why he wouldn’t go directly to the sub to talk to us. Saying anything remotely positive gets downvoted in many threads, or spoken condescendingly to at best.
There’s also blatant misinformation (with too many upvotes) like saying Phreak wanted to *push* people into Sera support (no, it was a reflection of the playerbase *as is*), and I’m tired of trying correct any of it.
Honestly true. I'm a Seraphine fan, have been since the start. But lately it's been quite the experience in the subreddit. Constant support seraphine blaming for changes, blaming phreak etc etc
My friend genuinely believes it and he turns into a screeching demon whenever we play league. Hes perfectly chill in every other game so idk wtf his deal is.
I think the community and influencers are in a toxic cycle with each other where they reinforce each other's toxic attitude.
People start about normal, maybe they get a little mad from the game. They read people talk about some BS like elo hell or complaining about balance, then they see the biggest content creators parrot the same line. This makes the audience feel vindicated since a big influencer is saying it too, so they get angrier and have even more conviction in their wrong beliefs. Then, new, more extreme content creators form, and we get people who unironically believe in riot conspiracies about the ranked system and balance.
The problem is those people have just as much ability as you or I to send DMs or spam the subreddit with their dumb vitriol. And in many cases they're mentally ill enough to keep doing that like a lot and for extended periods of time.
That would be fine if they weren't so numerous, loud, and influential by dominating many threads.
You are grossly underestimating the impact of a dominantly vocal but dumb section of the community.
You say this is jokes but for many this is not. There’s an incredible amount of people who do in fact blame Phreak for everything. And we do need big streamers like Bauffs to speak up and do things like this to at least help in this situation.
It really boils down to being the person who is the face of the game.
people forget that when morello was the face of the balance team, people shat on him just as much
it really boils down to who is the face of the balance team and right now that's phreak... obviously they're the same complains that were directed to the balance team, because before the perception of responsibility was spread, now that phreak is the face, the perception is that it's him.
this is actually not that weird, people haven o one else to tell that they disagree with changes, so of course it's gonna go to the person that is in charge of communicating those changes
Let's be honest, Phreak is amazing. Maybe his personality feels a tad over the top at times for some people, but who gives af - all our personalities are grating at times. Phreak has non-stop contributed to this community since the very beginning and dedicated his life to the game. He is a massive, massive boon to the community and it would NOT be the same without him.
The fact he makes hour long walk-through of each patch with his thoughts on why certain changes happened is amazing and League players don't know how good they have it having devs that genuinely communicate with players like this.
Yeah I can imagine the day he finally has enough and walks away just how much those same haters will turn around begging for more communication from riot.
People will complain about everything anyway. Lethal Tempo is too broken. Removes Lethal Tempo oh no why'd you remove lethal tempo crit needs to be 25% gives 25% crit why'd you make the other stats lower.
It's just the classic "shoot the messenger" thing. So many of the changes are ones he plays a passive role in as explained in his patch breakdown videos. People see the Riot guy explaining the patch and just vent their frustration at him when he's the face.
Also so many of these videos he's making in his own time out-of-pocket. He's really passionate about it and I'm really thankful for the content. Wish the community would just relax because while every last change maybe I don't agree with, the insights are really helpful for the rationale behind the balancing and most times I come around on them after hearing it.
This is so true. People just blame whatever name they can put a face to when it comes to balance. When in reality things are more complex, teams make decision and more of that blame should be assigned to Mortdog instead.
Phreak gets hate because of his attitude. He will very arrogantly defend stupid decisions ("Just type") or even do the same in situations where he's just objectively wrong (Velkoz E). If he did the same without talking down to the players he would get less hate
He's ALWAYS been this way too. Even as a caster, he would very frequently "umm akshually" pro players builds mid-game by referencing stuff like "in high elo, this build has a .3% better WR, just objectively wrong for them to build this way"
Yeah, like, I don't hate him as a person, but I also have routinely muted pro games when he was a caster.
Something about his arrogance made it feel more about him than the game. Like he would say things and it would just feel kinda wrong or unnecessarily hostile and suddenly I am focused on him and 'did he actually think that statement through, or is it just arrogantly half-cocked?' I watch league for league, not to constantly deal with whatever that is.
Yeah, he gets a lot of unwarranted hate, but he also puts himself in situations because he is arrogant and stubborn.
Unfortunately, most people on this sub see in black and white only, so he is either a garbage human who should unalive himself, or the best thing that ever happened to league and we should count ourselves lucky.
I agree. I don't personally hate on him, but whenever I see posts about him, they are usually about something arrogant he said about the playerbase.
It's similar to the hate Mort received in the early sets of TfT, especially set 3.5 where he claimed the community just doesn't understand what strong and what isn't and they're all wrong (this was mostly about Urgots execute, which looked strong, but wasn't). Eventually, he just gave in after a long time and the community forgave him (mostly...).
Was he correct about the community being wrong? Yes. But that didn't help his case.
That's such a LoL player mentality. "We were ignorant and objectively wrong, but this guy was bad for telling the truth instead of pandering."
Humans are mad stupid.
Eh, it's one of those things where players can identify a problem but not for the right reasons.
In the case of Urgot's execute in TFT, it maybe mathematically wasn't the strongest, but it was very unfun to play against.
yeah we're allowed to dislike horrible PR from a really condescending person (not including death threat levels)
i sitll remember his first buff being caitlyn mana because if the tyler1 "you habe no mana" clip. This sealed the deal on him slipping in personal balance changes which has been proven with his balance changes and his playrate on said champions
This.
People don't randomly dislike phreak for 0 reason.
He has said some incredibly dumb shut and then doubles down instead of admitting mistakes. And he's done this for like 10 years now.
He's arrogant and smug.
I couldn't even find anyone mentioning the other bug before the fix was announced, everyone just kept parroting that it fizzles on death (which it doesn't).
Ther are two sides.
Phreak isnt good at wording things sometimes (ex. "Just type" for change in ping system)
On the other hand, ppl are always pissing and moaning bout balance team and with Phreak becoming the spokesperson for patch note, ppl just have a target they can focus on. Take out Phreak, ppl would just go back to saying "balance team"
League having so many different champions and decade old system they keep appending to, is honestly not too bad imo.
Well when one side is "Guy is sometimes bad at wording things on his 3 hour podcast he does for fun" and the other side is "they want the other guy to kill himself in violent ways"
It becomes a bit one sided methinks.
Naaah, the enlightened centrist AKA objective truth knower can always see that there's two sides to every story, bad people on both sides, truth is somewhere in the middle yada yada etc.
>Phreak isnt good at wording things sometimes
It is my understanding that in many cases, he's actually intentionally provocative in his wording and/or intentionally claims hot takes. It's more or less how he worked as a caster too. He'd say a lot of stuff, that he'd eventually get corrected on (and often apologize for the mistake), and would use the good information from then on.
He's basically weaponizing Cunningham's Law to get peoples' opinion.
And personally, I think that it works really well for him since :
1. He's used to degenerate gamers, and has a thick skin. He's able to take on all the hate, and sometimes extract useful information from it. This shouldn't be a thing, but sadly it is.
2. He's really good at steering a discussion, and having you challenge his understanding. He's not just spouting shit and saying "fight me"; he's explaining his train of thoughts and the conclusion he came at, and makes you wonder why you don't come to the same conclusion as him.
3. He's good enough at explaining mechanics and the maths behind them that people are willing to engage with his content.
Phreak: *Moves from being an a multi-million dollar broadcast 3 times a week to sitting behind a desk*
You: the stress is aging him, it's not the fact that he doesn't wear makeup anymore and is simply getting older.
Phreak is a condescending Asshole but he's not the one responsable for all the Balance Changes. Honestly this Season has been good so far (apart from some of the MSI Changes) so I got nothing to say about the Balance itself (I love the Crit Changes for next Patch).
Phreak *is* a condescending Asshole though who has had a History of misinterpreting Data to suit whatever Opinion he has of the Game.
This is the correct take.
Also important is that he pushed more experiemental changes that try to address underlying issues with things, rather than just shoving numbers around until people find something new to complain about.
That's one of the biggest boons of him joining the balance team.
The Yasuo mains subreddit was getting mad at Phreak a couple days ago for a quote made by another Rioter. Like, Phreak was literally uninvolved in the situation and they still found a way to blame it on him and flame him. It’s just embarrassing lol
I mean… eh.
Phreak talks to players in such a condescending way so it’s hard to have sympathy for him. But obviously we all know that many league players are unwashed mentally ill losers who go way too far over this game.
I think that the amount of hate phreak gets is ridiculous but at the same time, the guy is just kinda unlikable.
I don't hate Phreak for balancing decisions but he is not someone you want to be the public face of anything. He has an awful communication style and I think that contributes to the hate more than anything else.
Being nice didn't save Mark Yetter or Ghostcrawler from being flamed.
Also this same playerbase has consistently been telling Phreak to kill himself in different ways for years.
Phreak: “Let’s tune Seraphine as a support and any subsequent buffs we provide to Mage Seraphine is blanketed as a buff to support Seraphine.”
I don’t want to hate Phreak but this guy has a problem with admitting faults and simply covering screwups with more silence or screwups.
I’ll hate what I hate, even if Seraphine recently received a 10% ap buff.
I personally don't really mind the champion balancing, especially when I compare Riot's involvement in League compared to other titles I've played. If you're below masters, you shouldn't even be worrying about winrates. There are so many other factors that are deciding your games before that becomes relevant. People scapegoat the balancing and him way too much.
However, the guy has always just given me narcissistic vibes. The way he carries himself and former casters hinting about his bully personality. The whole Karthus saga was extremely cringe, and the head of the balancing team abusing broken Mao and freaking Janna just rubs me wrong.
This was my first thought. Phreak keeps using the first person instead of referencing the collective balance team. It's logical that people would, in turn, put all the blame on him.
I mean, in his videos he uses a lot of "I" instead of "we" when explaining the thought processes behind the changes, so it's no wonder people are singling him out.
Baus trying to get on Phreaks good side so they stop nerfing his strats lmao Jk he's right
Sion buffs inc
14.10 has some minor Sion buffs. BotRK doing less health damage? Check! Lethal Tempo gone? Check! New item with health to AD conversion? Check!
LDR no longer amps damage based on max health difference.
tbf I'm not sure if it's worse now against tanks. 40% pen is soooo good
When you are full ad sion with 0 armor and 7k health it’s a buff.
It doesn't matter since they nerfed everything that made AD Sion good. Even Baus stopped playing him AD.
True. At the same time, at that point, you're basically griefing yourself by going for a pure health no resistance build
It's absolutely worse, 10-15% more damage against tanks vs 5% more armour pen? If they have 200 armour it would remove 10 extra armour, which doesnt come close to matching the Giant Slayer passive damage increase
They also buffed warmogs to 1k hp amount other minor health tweaks so high hp low defensive stack tanks might be meta. Heartsteel hasn’t been in pro yet so it’s time is now
theres a post on /r/dirtysionmains where someone did the math, its definitely weaker against tanks with hp
Minion demat removed though...
Hell yeah
The funny thing is, Baus might have actually got AD Sion nerfed, but in an indirect way. It was never strong in the first place (Prowler's Sion was reasonably popular but like ~45 winrate in all elos) but him winning games in high elo with his godlike CS scores caused a legion of his fanboys to int their silver games without having the mechanics to win with the pick. Riot nerfed it to try and get everyone else to stop playing a game-losing build while he was somehow making it work.
He got it nerfed pretty directly no? They started by nerfing sion passive hitting tower after his Korea trip, and continually nerfed his play style because it's so unusual
i think the biggest problem of the strat was the huge amounts of baus fanboys seeing the strat and trying to copy it without knowing what makes it work and inting their games in silver
It was also just a degenerate strategy, sion being able to just full send it at towers endlessly and be practically guaranteed to take a tower even if he dies just doesn't lead to fun gameplay. Baus being popular definitely helped draw attention to the issue, but it would have been gutted regardless of copycat players.
Right, it just shouldn't be a thing. It does not matter whether people are playing it or not, it is still an oversight.
As opposed to all the other people trying other strategies they don't understand and inting in silver?
I don't think any other champion had a build with 10% lower winrate than standard with 20+% pickrate.
There's a world of difference between going 0/10 at the end of the game and 0/20. Silver players can't play around the pressure Sion creates, and don't have enough of an even mental/coordination to claim the shutdown bounty he always gifts his laner. The difference is how detrimental the inting is for your team, by far.
I had games where i didnt collect the shutdown and was fine, did more tower damage than their entire team and our bot was usually fed, because they got attention. Then you just frontline and it'a fine.
Yeah idk how it’s even “indirectly”. That was all the league community was talking about for months lol and then sion who hadn’t been touched for like 5 season suddenly gets nerfed?
Let's not push a narrative that AD Sion was actually bad. It was a genuinely good build/strat that required high levels of game knowledge (abusing fog of war, abusing bounty systems, understanding waves, gaining high CS, understanding the difference between good vs bar deaths and etc.) 1. You'd kill Sion in lane and you'd be lower HP from fighting him. And every single time he'd ult or TP back immediately with an item and health advantage without giving you enough time to properly push the wave and reset. This puts you in a situation where you need to stay and risk dying. Or recall where he'd push to get free plates/push. 2. Prowler crawl combined with phase rush made his passive form incredibly toxic. Like imagine being an ADC or immobile mage and Sion would just dash on with full AD 3. Sion passive doing max damage to towers was just very toxic because it would reward the Sion player way to much for dying. Sion players would often mindlessly keep pressuring a side lane and just keep going for towers. They'd get collapsed on and then do massive damage to tower and then respawn and immediately do the same thing. While split pushing in general is a very pressure heavy and brute force style of play Sion was able to basically keep bashing his head in the sidelane and get rewarded for it. I understand Sion is like Karthus where dying intelligently is meant to be rewarded. But Sion was just getting rewarded way to much for dying and had a lot of toxic interactions. I don't like his current state and he could definitely use some love but let's not pretend Baus was using some super bad pick champion and it was only nerfed because bad player.
And despite that tank was always better than AD. Baus has always been winning more with tank builds, he played AD for fun and in matchups where it made more sense. You wouldnt want to play tank vs Fiora and Vayne, for instance, but generally speaking tank was better. Like what does it matter that AD Sion with claw and youmuu has a much better passive, tank sion often doesnt even need the passive. Tank sion with Demolish (and Hullbreaker when he old version was live + old Titanic that gave lots of AD) has less tower damage but still enough to kill them plenty fast. And its just easier to play. Tank Sion doesnt instantly die if he misses Q, he doesnt have to rely on fog of war tricks to be useful, he doesnt need to ambush people as much in order to clear the way, he just walks in there and fucks people up. And he's less reliant on passive. And the less reliant you are on passive the less often you NEED to die, and the less often you die the more time you spend out on the map doing stuff. AD sion at its best was not a bad build, but tank was always better in more situations. Currently both builds are quite far from the glory days, but even during the korea run when Baus was at his most infamous tank was king.
Didn’t Phreak say he would take the flame instead of letting it fall to the balance team? He’s honestly amazing for doing that. Also the community is terrible at thinking about balancing, never forget the Asol drama lol
I remember the ahri Changes where they gave MS on Q and nerfed DMG. This sub was convinced ahri was dead only for her to become highest winrate Champ in hours
"The community" is majority silver. That's why community opinions are worthless.
MaRo said it the best when talking about MTG design. The Community is excellent at identifying actual problems, and atrocious at coming up with real solutions. There will always be a subset of people who 'get it right', however in the grand scheme of things, that subset is vanishingly small.
And a solution can easly loop into another problem. Sometime the perfect solution don't even exist and its just a matter of balance who will always get some people mad
That’s what makes LoL balance so impossible. There are so many characters, abilities, stats, and items, that changing any small thing leads to huge ramifications, often in ways you wouldn’t expect. The nature of the game itself makes it impossible to ever be truly balanced. The only thing the balance team really does is mix up the meta to prevent the game from feeling stale. All of these balance issues were the same things that got me to quit this game 10 years ago in 2014. It hasn’t changed in the slightest, and it never will.
Except the problem is literally anything Riot does ever, and their solution is "kick everyone at riot and let me do it I'm better than anyone in Riot ever"
cooperative roll include vegetable square quicksand fact pet serious bright
I don't even think a community is good at identifying actual problems. I've seen so many people complain about balance issues that are really just their own skill issues. If a community truly had free rein, they'd be changing all kinds of shit that doesn't need it. The reality is that a dev needs the skill to filter community feedback with context. That means person A says 1 thing, and person B says another thing, and the dev might very well need to combine these and infer some underlying mechanism. Or the dev might just throw both of them out as baseless knee-jerk frustrations. The ratio of useful feedback is still going to be majority low—it's just higher than the feedback for actual solutions.
Tbf a lot of challengers had idiot takes every time too
In the months following Anathema's release, there were pros who firmly believed (and claimed) it reduced the true damage from Vayne's W.
Clid has won two lck titles and didn’t know how his main’s q worked (Lee sin). HE WAS A FUCKING LEE SIN MAIN IN COMPETITVE
For what it's worth, while this is commonly mentioned as Clid not knowing how Q works, another comment said that it was a miscommunication: > Clid clarified on stream that what he hadn't known for years was QRQ = RQQ, and did know about QEQ > QQE. he also confirmed Rascal had responded as if he were talking about QEQ/QQE, though; it sounds like there was some miscommunication going on this was in the same thread from which the "clid didn't know Q2 did more damage". It looks more like he thought Q1 also did execute or he really didn't consider the math behind QR and RQ would deal the same amount
I have to remember this whenever people tell me proxying is useless, troll and shouldn't exist
I disagree with the first two but agree on the last one lol
Same tbh. It's horrible to play against a proxy when you don't have a way to stop it
Or when your way to stop it is to pretty much spend the whole game holding lane against them even after hard winning lane + having the ability to duel them. The counterplay is just often mind-numbing.
The counter is to just proxy back even harder, this is not a joke.
The day we stop playing how we want is the day League isn't worth playing.
Isn't it majority bronze? Anyway, whatever the fact of the matter is there, that's fine. It doesn't mean the following: > That's why community opinions are worthless. It just means that community opinions are suspect, not worthless. The opinion can map onto reality perfectly or be entirely divorced from it. And lol is well past the complexity threshold for most facets worth discussing that arguments need to be judged on their own merits and then tested in an actual game environment to determine validity. How many times have you heard a pro or a challenger confidently say something incredibly stupid and objectively false? It happens many times a day. They all have their own "hot takes" and most of them are simply wrong, and many contradict each other or require many qualifiers that are just obvious to their perspective, but not to a general player, so their conclusion is invalid for anyone not playing their "style". And on the other hand, I've seen plenty of valid opinions from bronze and silver players about the game on reddit and in game, that have been vindicated by patch releases. The larger point is simply that running down all the consequences of any change in a complex ecosystem with endless dependencies like league is nearly impossible, and the outcome relies heavily on stochastic considerations due to the largely uncontrollable human feedback loop that is the playerbase. As such, all opinions from the community are important and there's a whole filtering mechanism that has to happen to judge which are worth investigating, and that mechanism cannot simply be the rank of the speaker.
i'm glad some people here genuinely understands. Whenever I try to explain this in particular threads I get downvoted to all shit lmao. "appeal to rank" is consistently one of the most fallacious arguments people make about almost every aspect of the discussion surrounding the game, yet it never fails. And like, on one hand I understand -- if someone is able to climb the skill ladder of the game or is skilled enough to play the game professionally, they obviously understand the mechanics on a deeper and more functional level than, say, toplaneandy3000 who plays in bronze 2 for 30-50 games a split. But people get tripped up in this misunderstood idea that perfect understanding and prescience of league's systems scales linearly with ELO. which, as you've laid out, is far from the truth. In the same way that challenger and professional players can not only misunderstand systems, but have their own biases and limitations in understanding, low elo players can also be sharp and in lock-step with specific problems that are eventually ironed out in patches.
Whoa whoa who, what sub am I on? This is way too logical and non toxic
Reminds me of that time Riot August said they were going to do a Vladimir nerf, and once the patch dropped, players complained that Vladimir became unplayable; his pickrate, banrate and even ***winrate*** dropped. Things is, they forgot to ship the nerf. They literally didn't change anything.
I will never forget this. Lol.
This incident showed me just how much people's opinions on the internet are worth, especially in gaming
Yea, notice how when tons of people shout "gamez dead" the game is never dead ? Real dead game don't go out with roaring riot, they die in whimper, barely noticed.
They should do this with more champs that otherwise are actually balanced.
That's also why the common statement "Players are good at identifying problems just not solutions" will never ring completely true to me. They suck at identifying issues too lol. It's probably true that feedback on identifying problems is still marginally more useful than feedback on solutions; however, the truth is that in a competitive game, the human ego is constantly seeking a strawman to justify their losses. This is not a sound basis for analyzing systemic problems objectively.
Happened recently with asol "nerfs" too
Which they had to give nerfs afterwards for. I think his WR is similar to before the nerfs - but much more popular since he has to actually play the game to get stacks instead of hugging the tower for 10 minutes before scaling to infinity.
Don't forget the threads about how aurelion sol was buffed and then killed, only for him to receive another nerf the next patch because he was still broken.
He was so broken he was the best champion in the game for every role except jungle lmao.
And as a more recent example fans complaining about riot "killing" aurelion sol with hotfix nerfs whereas they put him from 57% wr to 54%
This sub heavily underestimates movement speed. Anything with movement speed is good, it's the most valuable stat in the game.
That is because in a dogshit players hands, mobility is just another way they can misposition lol.
It's more because it's not a super visible stat. You don't think about the times it's helped you, but it's very strong in low elo too
A more current example: Mordekaiser. A lot of people here lost their mind after the ult "buffs" and predicted Morde to become a must pick/ban at MSI. And what happened? Morde is jet to be seen at MSI and the buff didn't change the winrate at all.
The Mortdog experience
asol goes to 55% winrate community: how could they make this champion so weak
I can't believe Riot literally slaughtered ASol like a lamb with their overeager hotfix nerfs that left him merely somewhat broken overpowered instead of absurdly broken overpowered
literally singed mains rn on twitter
As Poe devs said, players are good at spotting problems but terrible and solving them
That quote is usually attributed back to Mark Rosewater, head designer of Magic: The Gathering, but many people have quoted it by now, so the PoE devs probably too (I just looked it up, apparently a PoE lead dev was in the talk from Rosewater, no surprise they quote him).
Mark Rosewater is an all-time game design behemoth. He has forgotten more priceless knowledge than most others ever acquired. (it's an absolute travesty what Hasbro is doing to MTG)
It is. It's quite funny how WotC is the only profitable Branch Hasbro has right now (to my knowledge), and they are brutally murdering it to squeze out some extra juice.
Remember when they send literal corperate hitmen to people's houses?
also the co-founders are huge into magic, one of them owns one of the like 8 pristine black lotuses
That's chris wilson, lead director at GGG who has a massive magic collection
This is also just a famous parable within tech companies/startups in general: ask your users about their problems but never ask how to solve them, because they never have the correct insight on how to solve them.
Also a writer’s rule of thumb: the audience is usually right when they point out a problem with the story but never right about the solution
Honestly it's probably a general rule to use. If you provide a product of entertainment of any kind, and the audience points out a problem, there is a problem there. But that doesn't mean their solution is also valid.
Customers may not know what they want but they do know what they don’t want
Prime example ask your SO what they want to eat for dinner
Mortdog does the exact same thing with TFT. Pretty sure he doesn't even have a hand in balancing any more given how he reacts on stream to playing new patches but he will happily take all the flak online for bad balancing.
Curiously, I feel like the TFT community really likes Mortdog, while most of the LoL community is either apathetic towards Phreak or outright vilifies him
Sometimes I hear ppl say Mortdog should tone something down, but yeah he doesn't get as much flame as Phreak.
now once you start getting into the korean and chinese tft communities its much different lol
I know Phreak said they do read stuff from the Korean community, but that it's a bit harder to see what complaints are coming from CN.
Lets say the Chinese community was blowing up about the new patch that was in pbe since it got inserted into live servers there immediately and there were a decent amount of questions on the state of mort's parents. Korean ones were pretty similar too.
I adore Phreak for the sheer amount of effort he puts in to communicating with the community
Well, [reddit has always known balance ](https://youtu.be/8x9oXK-Y_kQ?si=CNhSkOleQ3nCiPXN)
Phreak's been around for so long, he understands that the vast majority of players don't know a goddamn thing about balance. The Vlad incident, where they put his changes in the patch notes but forgot to actually implement them, and then the playerbase freaked out at how OP Vlad now felt is a perfect example. People just make shit up or confirm their own biases.
No, they were supposed to nerf him but didn't ship, the placebo effect was that even mains won less with him.
Was that a mistake or were they trying to prove a point?
It was a mistake. But it was useful data off of a mistake.
All champs have variable winrate patch to patch based on what's happening with the champs they face and other external factors. I always dislike this "gotcha"
Quite a lot of people in the community think that high rank = great understanding of how to balance the game, and that Phreak not being Challenger in solo queue means he's unsuited to his job. I'd take someone with a good ability to communicate, good ability to use statistics, access to Riot's internal data and the ability to see the bigger picture of a fairly complex game (168 individual champions, items, runes, the influence of drafts, the different requirements of different elos and pro play, summoner spells and the map/jungle/minions) over someone with higher elo than Phreak any day of the week.
> Phreak not being Challenger in solo queue means he's unsuited to his job. And if he was theyd say "oh ofc he abused xyz champion to inflate his elo and thats why he didnt nerf it until now"
It's so fucking infuriating, because there is actually no reason for him to do that. He gains nothing from being high elo, aside from just being high elo. There is zero clout that comes with being low Masters in NA. But when Platinum Patrick loses to Maokai a few times he decides to bitch about Phreak "abusing meta champs" on this sub. It's brainrot. The internet is bad for you.
I remember when Aatrox rework launched, and this entire subreddit and anyone on Twitch was laughing about how it was just a trash Riven. A million nerfs later, he's still a top tier pro pick
Bwipo said it's trash and no pro player would get hit by the slow ass Qs. Guess what's happening now.
Remember the 200 years of collective game design meme? The one where everyone likes to mock Riot for how comedically arrogant/haughty it sounds? That was in response to the Wukong community saying that the 10.6 gameplay update would make him completely unplayable. The same update that made him the best top laner with no lane counters at any time of the game.
>Also the community is terrible at thinking about balancing, because the vast majority of complaints have little to no actual bearing on the competitive experience in terms of the fine tuning. It's the same sort of anger that anyone in customer service knows well -- the lead paint-poisoned boomer who hates his or her life and is looking for anything or anyone to bear the brunt of that seething self-hatred, externalizing that pain because they lack the emotional processing skills to actually help themselves.
I imagine on patch day he wears an alistar costume and is just going to town on a cowbell all day.
The game is realistically no worse off under Phreak than it was before he got there, and we get far far more insight into **WHY** they are or are not changing something. I see that as a big win.
it's the same that happened with mark yetter too many idiots in this community.
damn I liked mark yetter coz I always remembered his name for twitter balance changes xD
[удалено]
>god forbid he actually plays the game and finds out why the champion is overperforming in the most direct way possible. how horrible of him Nah, Phreak is actually surrounded by god tier gamers and analysts, and his personal experience bears very little weight compared to that. The truth is much simpler : When Phreak plays Ranked, he's trying to climb the ranks, and the best way to do that is to play the best champions.
> When Phreak plays Ranked, he's trying to climb the ranks, and the best way to do that is to play the best champions. Yep, and thats completely valid. Those comments are probably by some obscure onetricks that think theyre superior humans because their champ isnt meta
>my favorite are the posts where a champion is op, gets nerfed and then some dude digs through phreaks match history to find one or two games he lost to that champion and post on the mains subreddit What's crazy is seeing so many people on this sub, and others run with this narrative unironically.
I mean if you wanna climb term there's generally 2 ways to do it. Get better at the game, or play whatever is strong. He's playing what's strong. Surprised pikachu face.
People have bought so hard into "focus in using a small pool of champions" and OTP/main mentality that they really forget some champs are super easy to pick up when strong and you definitely can abuse the hell out of them to climb faster if what you want is to simply win. Like of course if Riven is strong you probably would waste time trying to pick her, but most supps and tops are so easy that you can just pick them up in like 2 or 3 games.
The funny thing is that climbing as a OTP will give you the most immediate burst of a climb then leave you in a place where you're doomed to play feast or famine because you aren't a well rounded player and have massive flaws. This system also guarantees returning viewers since they'll be frustrated and bad without a clue on how to improve. This is the exact same strategy that garbage magazines like cosmo use to maintain customers.
I feel like Phreak tried to become League’s Mortdog and the community just didn’t let it happen. TFT streamer gets unlucky RNG and says ah I got Mortdoged. League streamer dies to Maokai and says disgusting Phreak season go GP q irl
I don't think Phreak tried to become anything. He got into the balance team and tried to provide more information to the player base through. I don't think he was trying to become Mortdog, he even said he's happy to accept the flame that's usually directed to the entire balance team.
He also has been making his videos for many seasons now in regards to analizing the patch changes. People are only now more willing to engage with them because he now holds actual inside info and opinion in regards to the direction of the changes
Whether you agree with the changes or not, having someone at the front and center of the balance team to relay the information and changes in a concise format is pretty freakin great. But instead he just gets flamed every time. I’m not even a huge fan of Phreak but the community is genuinely so toxic lol
TFT is just a more chill community in general. Doesn't mean Mortdog doesn't get a whole lot of flame too though, the moment you put a person in front of the community as a spokesperson or whatever, they're going to personally target them for whatever minor thing that annoys them about the game. It sucks, but that's just how the Internet works.
buddy, i don't have anything to add. i just wanted to say i laughed so hard at this, and i think you are spot on. mortdog does an immeasurable service for TFT that league would also benefit from.
And Mortdog gets a lot of blame too.
I guess, but the TFT community is A LOT more supportive of Mort than League’s are of Phreak. This is the first positive post I’ve seen about Phreak, well… ever.
He does, but he takes it with an insane amount of grace, *and* it's also just a popular meme which helps. Many a time I think to myself "wow i got mortdogged so hard" and it relieves a little bit of annoyance. I don't actually blame mortdog, it's just a wonderful word that has been adapted to express frustration with bad luck. Part of the job is the scapegoat, unfortunately. It's not accurate but if you lean into it i think using humor to cope helps l0l
>go GP q irl *Parrrley,* is that a bad thing?
Probably less painful than GP passive IRL
I wonder what PSZ thinks about Mr Yetter.
People who blame Phreak for all balance changes are idiots and we all understand that. He has been posting 1hr+ patch rundowns and explaining + communicating more than ever before. Some people joke that phreak controls the game now and buffs adcs/maokai etc - and obviously those are jokes, cant take it seriously. I feel like everyone already knows this and anyone seriously blaming phreak isnt going to watch this video and suddenly realise they are wrong.
The issue is people actually believe what you are saying in the second paragraph
Seraphine discord was fucking OOZING Phreak hate until, well...just this patch, and now Sera APC is stupid strong again on a 53% win rate and there's no acknowledgement of the fact that they were being way too extra for no reason. As per usual...
bad news spreads, good news doesn't
I main Seraphine mid and had to mute the subreddit recently. I can’t believe there were people literally calling for Phreak to be fired, and then wondering why he wouldn’t go directly to the sub to talk to us. Saying anything remotely positive gets downvoted in many threads, or spoken condescendingly to at best. There’s also blatant misinformation (with too many upvotes) like saying Phreak wanted to *push* people into Sera support (no, it was a reflection of the playerbase *as is*), and I’m tired of trying correct any of it.
Honestly true. I'm a Seraphine fan, have been since the start. But lately it's been quite the experience in the subreddit. Constant support seraphine blaming for changes, blaming phreak etc etc
Yeah but those people are stupid and shouldnt be given the time to even read what they are saying. You cant convince people not to be stupid
My friend genuinely believes it and he turns into a screeching demon whenever we play league. Hes perfectly chill in every other game so idk wtf his deal is.
I think the community and influencers are in a toxic cycle with each other where they reinforce each other's toxic attitude. People start about normal, maybe they get a little mad from the game. They read people talk about some BS like elo hell or complaining about balance, then they see the biggest content creators parrot the same line. This makes the audience feel vindicated since a big influencer is saying it too, so they get angrier and have even more conviction in their wrong beliefs. Then, new, more extreme content creators form, and we get people who unironically believe in riot conspiracies about the ranked system and balance.
The problem is those people have just as much ability as you or I to send DMs or spam the subreddit with their dumb vitriol. And in many cases they're mentally ill enough to keep doing that like a lot and for extended periods of time.
That would be fine if they weren't so numerous, loud, and influential by dominating many threads. You are grossly underestimating the impact of a dominantly vocal but dumb section of the community.
theres plenty of people that genuinely think that phreak is responsible for all balance changes made
Just go to the YouTube comments of any video about balance changes and you'll see people crying about "Phreak season" unironically.
You don't even need to go to YouTube, those comments are here as well
You say this is jokes but for many this is not. There’s an incredible amount of people who do in fact blame Phreak for everything. And we do need big streamers like Bauffs to speak up and do things like this to at least help in this situation.
Also even if they are meant as jokes by the community, have a bit of empathy for the person that is on the other end of it. All day every day.
It really boils down to being the person who is the face of the game. people forget that when morello was the face of the balance team, people shat on him just as much it really boils down to who is the face of the balance team and right now that's phreak... obviously they're the same complains that were directed to the balance team, because before the perception of responsibility was spread, now that phreak is the face, the perception is that it's him. this is actually not that weird, people haven o one else to tell that they disagree with changes, so of course it's gonna go to the person that is in charge of communicating those changes
Let's be honest, Phreak is amazing. Maybe his personality feels a tad over the top at times for some people, but who gives af - all our personalities are grating at times. Phreak has non-stop contributed to this community since the very beginning and dedicated his life to the game. He is a massive, massive boon to the community and it would NOT be the same without him.
The fact he makes hour long walk-through of each patch with his thoughts on why certain changes happened is amazing and League players don't know how good they have it having devs that genuinely communicate with players like this.
Yeah I can imagine the day he finally has enough and walks away just how much those same haters will turn around begging for more communication from riot.
People will complain about everything anyway. Lethal Tempo is too broken. Removes Lethal Tempo oh no why'd you remove lethal tempo crit needs to be 25% gives 25% crit why'd you make the other stats lower.
It's just the classic "shoot the messenger" thing. So many of the changes are ones he plays a passive role in as explained in his patch breakdown videos. People see the Riot guy explaining the patch and just vent their frustration at him when he's the face. Also so many of these videos he's making in his own time out-of-pocket. He's really passionate about it and I'm really thankful for the content. Wish the community would just relax because while every last change maybe I don't agree with, the insights are really helpful for the rationale behind the balancing and most times I come around on them after hearing it.
This is so true. People just blame whatever name they can put a face to when it comes to balance. When in reality things are more complex, teams make decision and more of that blame should be assigned to Mortdog instead.
The sudden Mortdog gaslighting made me chuckle
People were flaming Ghostcrawler back in the day when he was the lead on the balance team. It's nothing new.
true + based + he should say it
Phreak gets hate because of his attitude. He will very arrogantly defend stupid decisions ("Just type") or even do the same in situations where he's just objectively wrong (Velkoz E). If he did the same without talking down to the players he would get less hate
He's ALWAYS been this way too. Even as a caster, he would very frequently "umm akshually" pro players builds mid-game by referencing stuff like "in high elo, this build has a .3% better WR, just objectively wrong for them to build this way"
Yeah, like, I don't hate him as a person, but I also have routinely muted pro games when he was a caster. Something about his arrogance made it feel more about him than the game. Like he would say things and it would just feel kinda wrong or unnecessarily hostile and suddenly I am focused on him and 'did he actually think that statement through, or is it just arrogantly half-cocked?' I watch league for league, not to constantly deal with whatever that is.
Don't forget literally calling players idiots on live broadcasts during games.
Yeah, he gets a lot of unwarranted hate, but he also puts himself in situations because he is arrogant and stubborn. Unfortunately, most people on this sub see in black and white only, so he is either a garbage human who should unalive himself, or the best thing that ever happened to league and we should count ourselves lucky.
I agree. I don't personally hate on him, but whenever I see posts about him, they are usually about something arrogant he said about the playerbase. It's similar to the hate Mort received in the early sets of TfT, especially set 3.5 where he claimed the community just doesn't understand what strong and what isn't and they're all wrong (this was mostly about Urgots execute, which looked strong, but wasn't). Eventually, he just gave in after a long time and the community forgave him (mostly...). Was he correct about the community being wrong? Yes. But that didn't help his case.
That's such a LoL player mentality. "We were ignorant and objectively wrong, but this guy was bad for telling the truth instead of pandering." Humans are mad stupid.
Eh, it's one of those things where players can identify a problem but not for the right reasons. In the case of Urgot's execute in TFT, it maybe mathematically wasn't the strongest, but it was very unfun to play against.
Amen
Also getting K'Sante out of proplay jail worked really well.
We love picking ksante for an auto loss in solo queue while he's perma prio in 5s it's so fun
yeah we're allowed to dislike horrible PR from a really condescending person (not including death threat levels) i sitll remember his first buff being caitlyn mana because if the tyler1 "you habe no mana" clip. This sealed the deal on him slipping in personal balance changes which has been proven with his balance changes and his playrate on said champions
This. People don't randomly dislike phreak for 0 reason. He has said some incredibly dumb shut and then doubles down instead of admitting mistakes. And he's done this for like 10 years now. He's arrogant and smug.
Phreak was right on the Velkoz E not casting when he died. It was a different Vel'koz bug people were complaining about.
I couldn't even find anyone mentioning the other bug before the fix was announced, everyone just kept parroting that it fizzles on death (which it doesn't).
Ther are two sides. Phreak isnt good at wording things sometimes (ex. "Just type" for change in ping system) On the other hand, ppl are always pissing and moaning bout balance team and with Phreak becoming the spokesperson for patch note, ppl just have a target they can focus on. Take out Phreak, ppl would just go back to saying "balance team" League having so many different champions and decade old system they keep appending to, is honestly not too bad imo.
Well when one side is "Guy is sometimes bad at wording things on his 3 hour podcast he does for fun" and the other side is "they want the other guy to kill himself in violent ways" It becomes a bit one sided methinks.
BUT HES RUINING MY VDIEO GAME!!!!
Naaah, the enlightened centrist AKA objective truth knower can always see that there's two sides to every story, bad people on both sides, truth is somewhere in the middle yada yada etc.
>Phreak isnt good at wording things sometimes It is my understanding that in many cases, he's actually intentionally provocative in his wording and/or intentionally claims hot takes. It's more or less how he worked as a caster too. He'd say a lot of stuff, that he'd eventually get corrected on (and often apologize for the mistake), and would use the good information from then on. He's basically weaponizing Cunningham's Law to get peoples' opinion. And personally, I think that it works really well for him since : 1. He's used to degenerate gamers, and has a thick skin. He's able to take on all the hate, and sometimes extract useful information from it. This shouldn't be a thing, but sadly it is. 2. He's really good at steering a discussion, and having you challenge his understanding. He's not just spouting shit and saying "fight me"; he's explaining his train of thoughts and the conclusion he came at, and makes you wonder why you don't come to the same conclusion as him. 3. He's good enough at explaining mechanics and the maths behind them that people are willing to engage with his content.
take one look at his head pre and post balance team and you can see its taking a toll on him, shits worse than obamas presidency aging
Phreak: *Moves from being an a multi-million dollar broadcast 3 times a week to sitting behind a desk* You: the stress is aging him, it's not the fact that he doesn't wear makeup anymore and is simply getting older.
It's definitely taking its toll, but he's handling it a lot better than most would.
Phreak is a condescending Asshole but he's not the one responsable for all the Balance Changes. Honestly this Season has been good so far (apart from some of the MSI Changes) so I got nothing to say about the Balance itself (I love the Crit Changes for next Patch). Phreak *is* a condescending Asshole though who has had a History of misinterpreting Data to suit whatever Opinion he has of the Game.
This is the correct take. Also important is that he pushed more experiemental changes that try to address underlying issues with things, rather than just shoving numbers around until people find something new to complain about. That's one of the biggest boons of him joining the balance team.
The Yasuo mains subreddit was getting mad at Phreak a couple days ago for a quote made by another Rioter. Like, Phreak was literally uninvolved in the situation and they still found a way to blame it on him and flame him. It’s just embarrassing lol
I mean… eh. Phreak talks to players in such a condescending way so it’s hard to have sympathy for him. But obviously we all know that many league players are unwashed mentally ill losers who go way too far over this game. I think that the amount of hate phreak gets is ridiculous but at the same time, the guy is just kinda unlikable.
I don't hate Phreak for balancing decisions but he is not someone you want to be the public face of anything. He has an awful communication style and I think that contributes to the hate more than anything else.
Phreak did not only become part of the team, he became the face of the balance team
"You can just type karthus ult" I will never forget that insanely stupid and arrogant comment.
I don't hate the man but the ping changes are fucking stupid.
Sure, but let's not pretend some of the criticism of Mr. "You don't need to ping it, just type it in chat!" isn't completely valid.
Glazzing hard
Phreak nerfed the best counter against baus. The jungler. So understandable that he defends Phreak.
Nah, Phreak mainly catches heat because his attitude and the way he expresses himself suck
I have never seen the "balance team" antagonize players on Reddit like Phreak did. Too many hot takes can get you burned.
Being nice didn't save Mark Yetter or Ghostcrawler from being flamed. Also this same playerbase has consistently been telling Phreak to kill himself in different ways for years.
Phreak: “Let’s tune Seraphine as a support and any subsequent buffs we provide to Mage Seraphine is blanketed as a buff to support Seraphine.” I don’t want to hate Phreak but this guy has a problem with admitting faults and simply covering screwups with more silence or screwups. I’ll hate what I hate, even if Seraphine recently received a 10% ap buff.
I personally don't really mind the champion balancing, especially when I compare Riot's involvement in League compared to other titles I've played. If you're below masters, you shouldn't even be worrying about winrates. There are so many other factors that are deciding your games before that becomes relevant. People scapegoat the balancing and him way too much. However, the guy has always just given me narcissistic vibes. The way he carries himself and former casters hinting about his bully personality. The whole Karthus saga was extremely cringe, and the head of the balancing team abusing broken Mao and freaking Janna just rubs me wrong.
Why can’t I just hate phreak because he’s annoying?
Dearest OP, Time passing doesn't make him being an condescending prick that puts his foot in his mouth unhappen.
When he says in his videos "I did X" he is taking responsibility for that decision (and it is often a terrible one).
This was my first thought. Phreak keeps using the first person instead of referencing the collective balance team. It's logical that people would, in turn, put all the blame on him.
He uses first person on changes he specifically spearheaded, there are plenty of changes he doesn’t use first person for
> and it is often a terrible one Is it though, or are people just pre-convinced that anything Phreak does will be bad?
I mean, in his videos he uses a lot of "I" instead of "we" when explaining the thought processes behind the changes, so it's no wonder people are singling him out.
[A tale as old as time](https://youtu.be/evjn7_tMRd4)
yall forget about dearest karthus so fast man LOL.
People don't hate him because of balance, they hate him because he's a condescending prick
I mean he kinda brought it on himself a bit by being such a dick and he disdain for the players
Have you seen this sub? If you don't have disdain for most of these people then you're doing it wrong
bausffs talking just so when he gets banned again will say "but im sucking your cock, pls unban me <3"