League of Legends XL: Season on Hold 'til Morello gets Gold

[ex cathedra]

Actually, all experience (and straight up common sense) has shown me that small imbalances matter much more in a highly competitive environment, and hence that PvP games require far more care in balancing than Co-op games. Hence your premise that co-op is harder and more important to balance strikes me as, not just wrong, but the opposite of the reality of the situation.

I don't recall saying that PvE balance was more important than PvP balance, I simply refuted the ridiculous suggestion that PvE balance doesn't matter. Co-Op would be harder to balance because League of Legends was designed as a PvP game, for ****'s sake. These are PvP champions. With abilities meant for PvP. This would be a solid, if not good or even great, concept for an entirely different game, so why does anyone want to shoehorn it into something as functionally limited and poorly suited as League of Legends?

Ah, but did you get Gold?

MathMage ended the season with a top rating just a few wins beneath plat, IIRC. So ya, he was pretty gold.

I haven't noticed a significant change w.r.t. calls vs. higher pick. People have been bitching at each other about that since time immemorial.

People seriously need to get over themselves. People like to use calls/pick order to be selfish, but it's ridiculous. Neither is more valid than the other and both can make you seem like a huge jerk (you're probably a huge jerk but w/e). That's okay. Of course players have a preference, and most people don't care about inconveniencing other players over such a minor thing. That's fine and natural and all, but the only thing that I find silly is how much some players want their calls or pick order to somehow justify their behavior.

Because everyone knows that the game is all about maximizing efficiency. Why bother having fun when there is a clear numerical advantage to be had?

I find it unfun when games offer me the illusion of choice. Let's say that Riot released an AD carry with 700 base range, amazing steroids, a couple of built-in flashes, a short-lived "invincibility button," and two or three large AoE nukes. Seems reasonable. All of the other carries would still exist, but assuming that you wanted to succeed would you really ever have any reason to choose a different carry? What if Irelia and Jax were literally the two best bruisers in the game by a very wide margin. Ignoring the effect they would have on the meta or the competitive scene or whatever, wouldn't you feel that their blatant superiority makes picking and playing your bruiser less enjoyable in general? Maybe you don't. That's also okay. But League is a strategy game. I enjoy its strategic element. People enjoy different things (and different games) for different reasons, but aren't my (potentially niche?) feelings equally valid?

I don't know if anyone else around here picked up Borderlands 2, but it serves as a good example. Broadly speaking, there's a single piece of end-game equipment that was so significantly superior to all of its competition that it not only rendered every other piece of equipment of that type (shields, in this case) completely useless (which is kind of a big deal considering that the vast majority of the series' replay-ability comes from its loot system) but it also single-handedly dictated which weapons and builds were and were not worth using. Sure, I had the choice to use something else, but that didn't stop the object's existence from actively lowering my enjoyment of the game.