+Shayne Gordon i heard this too. it was vlad.

+Shayne Gordon That's the placebo effect. If you think a effectless pill is medicine, it suddenly becomes effective, for some reason.

+TheRhinoMaster it was never in effective as all as the medicine was shaped by the illuminati (joke )

+TheRhinoMaster it was never in effective as all as the medicine was swaped by the illuminati (joke )

wlep that was placebo effect taking in action. The thing about legue of legend is that the more more you play a "champion ", not hero, the better you do. Idk if you have ever played a lot of LOL but the beautiful thing about it is that you can play anything in anyway as long it is countering what you are playing against in a eficiente way.

Our 9.99$ DLC boy is the best! 10% chance to 1 hit anyone! Very balanced

WHY IS THIS NOT PINNED?!!!

Ryan Gonzalez 6 years to late...?

Thanos

Unless is 5 cp

@@Vichola Yup. "Specialists on last."

Roadhog's hook is absolutely broken and everyone knows it, despite the fact that it's "working as intended".

Roadhog's hook is broken mechanically. Nothing to do with game balance. It's not like the hook has 0 counterplay.

They fixed it, and now the tank meta is going to disappear

Paul Allen except the tank meta is because of ana, not roadhog.

Ana is getting nerfed too from what I've heard.

+JoyousUnicornGaming No, rock paper scissor is like throwing dice on the floor.

+JoyousUnicornGaming No, obviously scissors are broken. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

+Jared Stein That's not true, RPS is actually considered 100% yomi. www.underraid.org/img/devlog/yomi.png Here's a graphic to display the relationship. Yomi is the concept of predicting your opponent's moves or strategy and countering it. If you notice that every time you play RPS with someone, they always choose rock first, you can capitalize on this and choose paper. If you happen to be in a library and think this might make them think of paper, you can choose scissors. Yomi isn't guaranteed, but neither is skill (even pros mess up). Fighting games are generally designed with yomi in mind, where block beats strike, strike beats grab, and grab beats block. Yomi can also become more and more complicated the more you think about it, and sometimes going for the most obvious answer can confuse an opponent that is overthinking it (such as the infamous Daigo Shoryu).

+JoyousUnicornGaming No, Rock Paper Scissors is a perfectly balanced game. Every hand has the same "stats" as every other one. Rock beats one thing, loses to one thing, and is a draw to one thing. Same as scissors and paper. The interesting play comes about from attempting to predict your opponent's next move, as +Zadamanim said, but the same is said of Chess.

Zadamanim That's just a figment of imagination. You can "predict" all you want, but the fact of the matter is nobody knows who's going to pick what.

Preistley “Your mallet is no match for my extendo arrow”

Speaking of which, ten bucks say Talonflame becomes more standard again with the release of Contrary Serperior.

Wouldn't be surprised if you're right.

Little do they know, mine carries HP Rock and an anti-Flying berry >:D

Genius...

Ramde Saeed Dugtrio still has one advantage over Groudon. It pairs up better with Water types in Double Battles because Groudon weakens/nulls (in Primal) their STAB.

But recently, the newest champ gnar and braum is not really op,

"I lost a game to x champ, It's broken!"

Considering a 52% win rate is enough to throw champs into god tier. I think "Irrefutably, undoubtedly, fundamentally broken" is a heavy overstatement.

Leauge of Ledgends rule is simple. Every champ is broken, and when all champs are broken, noone is. and in case you diddint get the point of this video, ill explain in in lol terms. Remeber when nasus was broken? infinite stacks and slow with 80% everyone played him nonstop and people raged for it. then few weaks later people saw champs liek darius easly destroys nasus no challange. or when leona was insanly op and instantly won every bot lane? same story, same awnser with morgana black shield this time, or even alistar if youre skilled. Just thing a step outside whats" OP" at the momment. and raging at Riot for being greddy... a game free to play with constant update and improvments when they dont have to do anything if they dont want to. that is selfsih to say the are greedy when you fuking chose to give them money. adapt to the game play dont cry it over internet in hope to start a fight or whatever.

Agreed, Dota2 would have been a better example.

Preach, please preach. This is spot on.

Ha, thank you. I find it really sad that we have this heavily enforced meta and players prevalently abusing the most broken champions. Weren't things just so much more fun when we were new to the game and played what we wanted?

So basically, everyone follows the "Dominant Strategy" clause. If it's the best method, why change it? I mean, who wouldn't? Without this clause, everyone would still be using hand tools to do insane levels of construction work instead of electronic ones.

LoneSWarrior It's very different that real life. When it comes to practical work, you want to find the most convenient method, and that has nothing to do with expressing your style or excelling in your own personal niche. In a GAME where it's predicated on having fun, it's no fun for anyone else when the majority of players choose to abuse the most broken champion purely based on the fact that they're wildly overpowered. We should all play who we want to play and truly climb the ranked ladder excelling at champions that resonate with our playstyle and ones that we find really fun. The game is fun with diversity and variety, but we'll NEVER have that as long as people continue to abuse the most broken champions based on their power-level. Just because something is wildly powerful, you don't HAVE to choose it. You ask "who wouldn't?" Umm, me. I would much prefer to play the champions that truly resonate with my style than the broken ones who don't, because I'm not shallow and looking to falsely climb the ranked ladder by abusing the imbalance of the game. I guarantee that half the high-level ranked players wouldn't be where they are today without abusing the system. It's not an achievement to deliberately pick who the most broken champion is, it's an achievement to excel at a champion you genuinely love.

Charley Victoria James Yes. But some people see games as something they need to "excell" at for the "reward" rather than just to have a fun satisfying experience. Unfortunately, this is the hive mind of corporations and people wanting to feel like their time isn't wasted on playing a game then leaving it because it wasn't found to be worth it due to the "Sunk Cost Fallacy". They don't want to have spent all this time learning all the mechanics without making use of realizing how the game works, and then leave it never to be touched again.

+David PT Came here because of stonewall. Had no idea that it would be extra credit. Was not disappointed. Cheers Leauge!

+David PT Came here for the same reason and as always extra credit explains it well, but were wrong on league being perfectly unbalanced as they state at 4:41 they tend to have champs that a times don't have weaknesses thus making them the "one true way to win" and (2:12) where it comes down to you play that or lose unless you are far better then the person you are playing against, like a rank higher then them (or more depending on the game in question).

this video was like 3 year before your comment, a lot has change in league.

I'm from the Future... They changed it....

Asymmetric balance is a really good term to use. In Starcraft 2, each race has their own imbalances. Marines are really versatile, stalker blink is insanely useful, and Mutas are fast at everything (to give a few examples). It's all just a matter of being able to beat that sort of strategy

Woooh! Another Wargame player! :D (Yes, I know that this statement has nothing to add to this discussion :))

I ain't even mad. :P

Champion C is a hammer. EDIT: I just reread your comment...I feel silly now...

Trust demo is kinda OP especially when defending objectives in games with more players

*smogon play (the regular game only updates on hardware updates so there is some of this that just doesn't apply as readily as it does with smogon)

Well, I mean. Unless you've played many hundreds of matches you probably have only played a couple games with any particular matchup in lane-ing. Or maybe a dozen times for the most popular champions. Personally League never "clicked" for me. I'm sure there's interesting stuff in there but I was honestly more interested in the characters than the game 🤷‍♀️

I've got the beast in my sights

+Dr. Barber Ysera, Malygos, Chromaggus anyone? That great dragon priest though...

Angel33Demon666 The comment was ,made before dragon priest and how do Ysera and Malygos apply to this?

***** Ysera, Malygos, Chromaggus are great cards which don't get BGH'ed. Dragon Priest can use Ysera and Chromaggus.

Angel33Demon666 I made this comment back when Dr.Balanced was the uncontested king of the meta and the goal of the game was get your boom out first

Mundo and Shyvana were kinda crap 3-4 months ago(as toplaners, shyv was a meh jungler), and they're God tier now. While you could argue it's because of how broken the S4 defense masteries are(and this is a lot more true for Mundo than Shyvana), tings like Singed which were very popular in S3 are falling out of favour now. Mundo, Shyvana, and Singed haven't received any nerfs or buffs from s3 to now(excluding 4.1 where shyv was nerfed). Abusive ranged toplaners(Jayce, Kennen, Elise), which were gods in s3 got nerfed, as well as 2v1 strats, so now we see the rise of melee dueling-type toplaners. So yes, extremely obvious OP stuff(like Riven, S2 black cleaver, release Zed, etc.) and items that are too cost efficient(Like relic shield, spirit Visage, heart of gold) get nerfed, but a lot of the meta just evolves without being touched directly.

Frikgeek Singed received heavy nerfs after Azubu was successful with him in the tournament scene. After those nerfs, singed's popularity dropped consistently as his win rate fell to roughly a 50%. Mundo undoubtedly became popular purely because of the defensive mastery tree buffs. Shyvana is iffy, but, at the very least, didn't receive attention until the buff to her projectile. Aside from your small comment on Singed, who was also directly nerfed, your entire post consists of the Riot balance team causing every shift in the meta.

A good example of these extremely OP champions disappearing over time could be anivia, karthus or kogmaw. These champions lost popularity not because they were directly nerfed but because they became less relevant in the meta. When the assassins ruled LoL, there just wasn't a room for a slow, exposed hyper carry. They weren't nerfed but they couldn't survive in the environment. Riot fixes things that have little to no counterplay. A reason why they swear that should Poppy become popular or strong, they'll immediately nerf her, as she is the epitome of no counter play. If poppy ults someone other than you, you are immediately useless against her. Even if she charges in 1v5, you are impotent, with only the option of fleeing in terror. Whereas someone like Kog'maw (though he was never really that popular) had a direct counter like nocturne, someone who a slow and extremely long range couldn't stop from getting on top of you. So had Kog'maw become prevalent, Nocturne would in turn have become popular. Had poppy become prevalent, riot would nerf. And that's why LoL is a good balance of both. They keep things that people can work around and improve the game with but remove the factors that prevents the situations of "follow the meta or do badly". P.S. That's part of the reason behind the joke of better nerf Irelia. Irelia has not real identity in League. She's a jack of all trades and basically just a block of numbers and coding. She doesn't have specific counters or doesn't counter things specifically because that's all she is, a bunch of numbers. If her numbers are bigger than yours, you lose and if yours is bigger than hers, you win. That's why riot doesn't like this hero to be strong. There's no counterplay, no strategy, no evolution when people play irelia all the time.

Morde.. Karthus.. Nerfed to hell... Back when I used to play anyway... Atleast Karthus is still kinda OP.. Morde just plain sucks now.

Eh, I would say morde was never that strong or op. People just plain didn't know how to play around him. (it's not sitting next to the creeps so he can hit 5 target e and get max shield). Also, the patches to karthus hit around june~october 2012 (time of the season 2 world series). He was being first or second picked despite the nerfs and was still doing fantastic. Only after ad assassins became popular in mid with release of zed in november of 2012 did karthus use fall off hard.

TheChilledQuagsire I agree

It's pretty amazing how irrelevant Smash4 became the instant Ultimate dropped.

@@zak9399 Yeah. People whined about Bayo and Cloud so much that they just left.

Low MMR-Player spotted

SmedbySG hes actually correct and im plat 2. :^)

Samasoku Anything below higher Diamond is generally considered irrelevant/low elo.

Count Cocofang ive heard stupid sht but this is next level. so youre saying that basically 99% of the players/their way of playing is irrelevant? alright. see you in diamond then

Do you know how I play lol? I play games with my favorite champs(unless I have to play some role I'm not good at). I don't care if they nerf or buff my favorite champs, I just like play with them(Lore makes me care, really).

+James Monson True, but 40K isn't a great example because it costs $200+ to make a new army and takes hours to play and set up. It can get pretty discouraging if your army has absolutely no chance against the enemy, since the money and effort you've just put into it feel wasted. In a typical free to play MOBA (say, League), you have a nice selection of champs to pick from in any role, and can get new ones just by playing the game.

+Marc Thompson +James Monson But there have been dominant strategies during certain iterations whcih 1D4 chan actually makes several mentions of. Devilfish strategies (fish of fury strategy), Space Marines especially Ultra Marines have been pretty OP when Matt Ward was responsible and Warhammer Fantasy has some bs stuff. Demons have been roundly powerful and in some sets unbeatable, not to mention banner of the world dragon is considered very OP by many.

Jesse P True, the game's always had that problem and a lot of the meta-game's evolution comes from GW making changes (Fish of Fury, while not a bad tactic, is nowhere near the gamebreaker it was in 5th edition). However I disagree about the Wardmarines. Fluffwise, yes, it was BS, but the crunch was fun, and _nowhere_ near as full of rage-inducing cheese as his Blood Angels or Grey Knights.

You always would have 33% chance of winning. BUT most people prefer Rock so you would have a chance of 66% to win if you dont use the Rock. I know everyone plays different and many People dont take Rock because they thing that the opponent knows that but Rock is still the most prefered.

really? As far as I have seen it, siccors where always the prefered choice :)

wechsel derg mabye, but not here in germany ^^

SirKhaan funny enough, schließlich bin ich auch aus Deutschland ;P

wechsel derg hätte ich mir bei dem Namen eigentlich denken müssen ^^

Yea there seemed to be a mix-up between asymmetry vs imbalance

I'm sure you mean Garchomp, Khan, Talonflame, ect. These certainly are some of the stronger team members, but them being so common makes their counters stronger. As a high ranking Battle Spot player I can tell you that my anti-meta team will win against any of those teams 80% of the time.

Garchomp and talonflame aren't really broken. But stuff like kyogre, lugia, mewtwo, darkri etc are

shellsamurai so legendaries are stronger. however, it is much more difficult to obtain them with perfect ivs.

shellsamurai In competitive play legendaries are not allowed. The only time you use legendaries is on your playthrough through the gyms and elite four.

I'm not sure about the newer games, but any of us who played the original Red and Blue know that Psychic type essentially had no weaknesses, and was super effective against Poison and Fighting type Pokemon. In addition, Alakazam had enough Speed and Special to one shot most Pokemon with Psychic, regardless of their type. A Pokemon like Alakazam was clearly superior to the vast majority of fully evolved Pokemon. At first I thought that was unfair, but the more I played the more I discovered that this imbalance had some interesting results. If Alakazam was naturally superior to most other Pokemon, that meant any Pokemon that could beat him would be valuable. After much experimentation and thought I was able to come up with several Pokemon that could clobber Alakazam with ease: Aerodactyl with Earthquake or Hyper beam, Jolteon with Thunderbolt or Thunder Wave (Pin Missle never seemed worth it IMO), Dugtrio with Earthquake, Snorelax with Hyperbeam or Body Slam, Chancey with Double Edge or Blizzard/Fire Blast/Thunder...each one of these Pokemon were suddenly more valuable to me due to the "meta game" of the day. The wonderful thing about a healthy dose of imbalance is that my friends slowly caught on and began designing teams to counter my counters to Alakazam, and I designed counters to their counters to my counters, ect.

With the whole weapon type mechanic?

Commandant Obvious FTW!

Vir Animus would they not make champion C a lance in that case?

I learned more from Extra Credit than I did from the video game class I had in college :/

i agree and disagree at the same time. True, moba's have a kind of static metagame (in terms of what can be done with a hero) but who makes it this way is not the developer, is the player and it's easy to see why. Almost everytime that you try a different build or diferent lanes with strangers in the team they can't trust that you'll make it work because they simply never saw you playing before. The only times that you see those changes happening is on games wich you are on a party with friends or people that already know your playstyle or on games that contain famous players for the same reason as before.

MossoDaBanana Your own argument though is a bit self destructive. You're saying that players are driving the strategy changes by refusing to change strategy. That don't really make a lot of sense. If anything that kinda proves that it's outside factors driving strategy changes (like changes in patches or high level tournament play) and not the meat and potatoes player. Because they are, as you're admitting yourself, refusing to do anything but the flavor of the month meta-game. Ironically though such adherence to the meta-game is, to me, why I hate these games and think of them specifically as unbalanced. A really great balanced game is one where nobody at all can even begin to agree on what's the best meta-game.

well, i didn't say that actually.

Then sorry if I misunderstood.

that's fine man, i wont get mad or anything unless you're disrespetcfull but you're actually really polite so thanks for sharing your opinion too :D

Came here literally just to say this. Amazing that so few people seem to know how to properly explain the concept

its the one reason i bought the game

I actually preferred some of the Japanese weapons, although they do seem less versatile than the American counterparts. Other than that, often times it seems like Japan has a superior map position to compensate for their arsenal's shortcomings.

Except they're wrong. They come up with fakey made-up controversial ideas to get views. They can't pay the bills if they tell the truth and say most modern competitive games are shit.

So true. While LoL is a very good game, it has a lot of problems that keeps the actual meta game fairly stagnate.

Stefan Lopuszanski I disagree, take the recent 3.15. Shyvana, Mundo, Rengar, and Renekton immediately became "the picks" top lane. The effect this had was the smarter players develop a counter'strategy and running champs like Trundle and Warwick for their % damage and scaling off the opponents tankiness. Without any patch changes, champions once seemed unviable are brought into the game for their unique skill set that counters the current popular metagame.

Kameron Damaska The smartest player like sOAZ or Darien ;)

Kameron Damaska Except that never happened and those champs just recently got nerfed.

Uh, everyone hates Smogon? That's news. Smogon is amazing and awesome and fixes the game more than anything else.

***** LOL , are u kidding me? Eu servers suffer every 2 days, and now u had 2 or 3 issues? You server is fine, Your teams suck.

Billy Coreman Actually, my unusually friendly and civil friend, a lot of NA ISP are having huge issues due to wide-spread DDOS. There have been hundreds (Conservative estimate) of dropped games on the Server's Side as well as crippling lag, to the point where for a while Riot switched the games to no-loss mode. Our Server is having tons of issues now as well.

Since the EUW players are so skilled, if they could play all the time they would beat NA players by a large margin, so they nerfed our servers. That balance team =D *btw it's a joke*

Riot is setting up a brand new server stasion for EUW. Then we'll have two and way less lag :)

The only "Broken" shit in this game are koreans. You fucker

Dota 2 didn't come out for nearly a year after this video. And back then, League had more variety. The League example this video presents doesn't hold up with current League

Logan Grimnar Dota and Dota 2 are pretty similar, so my point still stands. I think dota 1 was still more balanced than league back in the day.

I don't think Dota 2 was actually super relevant in the time of the release of this video. Currently League of Legends really doesn't follow the perfect imbalance formula to the point of being a good example, but Dota 2 does. While League of Legends may have champion counters, it isn't as in depth as Dota 2, Dota 2 has it where one hero can make another hero straight up useless. For example, Pugna is an exceptional hero at countering those who rely on spells heavily with high mana cost, Skywrath Mage suffering the absolute worst from this, while Pugna himself suffers from those who aren't very reliant on spells and have built in ways to stop him from fleeing or to stop his ult. Move on and you even have items. Eul's and Halberd counter Legion Commander because they both disable her capability of fighting in a duel. BKB counters many heroes that are reliant on spells to deal damage. MKB counters those with built in evasion, it goes on and on, this makes it where the game pretty much follows a formula of rock, paper, scissors, while hard counters exist, sometimes matchups actually happen to be pretty even. There's also a case of heroes being incredibly weak early on to become nearly unbeatable later on. Example include Spectre, Medusa, Slark, Faceless Void, and other hard carries.

Dota 2 was in beta WAY before this video came out though.

Dota 2 is and always was relevant!

+MonthyPyton only real thing is that with pokemon they have the problems they listed with chess and starcraft where they list off all the counters to each pokemon using the same stock sets. and they like to ban pokemon as well, but i guess that's just smogon for you. even still, it's entirely possible to create your own sets to counter the enemies you face. so i guess pokemon is a little bit of both actually (and it can go to pretty large extremes too. dig in a bit and you'd be surprised how flexible even pokemon with limited movesets can be)

TheGlaswegianGlalie Most pokemon will probably never be useful, they've really only achieved perfect imbalance for the top 100 or so and the rest are wildly too underpowered and are only used once due to some crazy loophole or are not used at all.

I think Pokemon is the perfect example.

happens literallay 100% of the time. NA picked up morganato combat leona and thresh, karma was picked up in korea because of the new changes to spellthiefs

Morgana was picked up for a number of reasons and people were already playing this way back for counters to them but then with the spelltheif, ap supports like morgana are op.

dukes onuchu europe did before. Team roccat before was cool.

dukes onuchu Unforunately Riot has to do something, as there is little to no counter to the stale top meta atm.

John Tree The meta is not stuck. Ryze risently went top and there you have champion B, now wait for the meta to move along in other lanes and we'll have a group of champion C ;).

not true because while the first player is able to move earlier they also have to reveal their plan first which allows the second player to predict ahead and gain the advantage,

P. V.C Actually it's the opposite: the white player knows what will be the first move and can anticipate with this data. It's a well known fact in the chess comunity (especially considered by top level players), or just google "first move advantage". Some text: The art of chess-play: a new treatise on the game of chess (1846) page 33: archive.org/details/artofchessplayne00walk Some statistics: computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/404FRC/opening_report_by_eco.html web.archive.org/web/20130217074950/web.archive.org/web/20080317104159/http:/www.chessgames.com/chessstats.html

amadexi but there are also argument for the opposit. not saying that being white is not advantageous but its not an absolute advantage.

P. V.C Yes it's not absolute, no one said it was, the game would't be played otherwise, but it's enough to be considered. For the opposite, i doubt it, the white has a significant statistical advantage. It's not even a "guess" it's a well known fact in chess.

P. V.C white does have an absolute adv at the start of the game.

Well...isn't it though? I don't play at a high enough level to be an expert, but I had a tournament level deck with Mirror Force, Dark Hole, Goblin Attack Force, ect. and I stopped playing for a while. Since I returned to the game, even in casual games with my friends I get destroyed every time. Let's say Yu-Gi-Oh! is "perfectly" unbalanced. That doesn't change the fact that it suffers from Power Creep. Each new year cards are released that are clearly superior to everything that existed before, and all of the time and money we spent assembling tournament level decks are wasted. We might as well not have bought them because these cards are effectively useless. In fact, rather than provide counters for the best cards, Konami just bans them from tournament play. "You know that card that is the cornerstone to your 300 dollar deck? You know how we limited it to 1 per deck? Well, we're banning it, so...yeah. Later!" You can't even trade these cards back, because no one else wants them either. The company has the audacity to print thousands of rare cards and sell them for huge profits, and then flip the bird to all their loyal customers by banning them. Congrats, you spent hundreds of dollars on something you can't use. Yu-Gi-Oh may be the most popular CCG, but that's because of the TV Show, not the game itself. It's a zombie: it acts as if it were alive and well, but it's already beginning to decay.

Kevin Middleton Honestly though, I use an Earthbound Immortal deck that was popular and really good back in 2011-2012. I then started to lose because of new decks getting really powerful and people making strategies for them. But as new cards are introduced, old cards can be brought back to new decks because of strategic loopholes. It's really interesting to see how one day, you're getting destroyed and you have to play a new deck to win. And then, cards come back and work really well. It just takes some patience.

***** I guess. As I said, Yu-Gi-Oh! may be a good example of perfect imbalance, but it still suffers from power creep IMO. In case you were wondering how I've adapted, I now use YGO Pro which is a Yu-Gi-Oh! simulator with a system that automatically applies the effects of the cards you activate (no arguing over rulings) in which all the cards are free :-) Also, in all of my experiments no deck wins more consistently against a variety of decks than Exodia decks. That probably encourages players to build side decks with cards that attack the hand or deck, but I wouldn't call that a meta game. It's more of a "Oh, you use that deck? Well I'm going to surrender and then change my deck so I have 5 cards that defeat you every time."

Kevin Middleton Yup I use DevPro only because it seems to have more server stability.

***** nice

+Soda POP 67 You got the idea.

What about Kirby, king of the Noobs.

Yush. Cyclical imbalance at work.

Yes! Finally someone mentions that! Starcraft is NOT CHESS!

you can not expect a perfect balanced game like chess(technically speaking chess does have some imbalance, if you take an extreme example of the two sides making the best moves possible the white set piece will have the advantage, due to the fact they make the first move), and all the races in SC have completely different play styles, and build orders, thus it is implausible to balance the game perfectly, but Blizzard has been doing a damn good job at balancing the game(if we don't consider SkyToss vs Zerg composition), and if you have trouble countering certain builds, you're just lacking in skills, which has little matter with the games balance system.

+GrandDracolich ehr, i was present and she was not nerfed at all. She got her W changed, losing burst damage in exchange of waveclear power. That same waveclear became one of her strongest points to consider while picking her or not, while at the same time losing a thing ( burst ) that was already very very common on many champions.

+Enrico Boccardi Her ultimate was also changed, it used to affect minions as well, it granted attack speed to everyone nearby, and the speed bonus didn't decay slowly. The change to her W also reduced the speed of the ricocheting projectile by a lot, so the only utility that ability has is the bonus attack speed.

GrandDracolich But now the W can apply multiple times, since more than one attack can benefit from that ( while before was just a single quick attack ), effectively pushing better the lane and giving her more aoe damage while ina teamfight. About her ult, now has not a cast time making it far less clunky to use and more effective, and her attack speed bonus now applies to W so it applies more frequently in short bursts. She doe snot provide anymore as boost in aoe, but that was not her intended niche since it can empower too much or too few certain compos ( not everyone benefit the same way for as ) and those kind of aura effect are being removed aniway, while MS is still strong and impactful.

Arabic

you can choose the language of the subtitle, just click the cc button

I frequently get Polish

mine switches between like 5 different languages

oh hey I know you

+KingStix *its

What's a pimp?

Noah Grün Basically, a prostitute's manager.

+Noah Grün And thus, a 'bitch' is pimp slang for a prostitute. +KingStix As someone who has immense nostalgia for AOE2 (even though I'm an intense noob at it), I cannot agree more.

+KingStix StarCraft is King, AoE may kneel before it, at best.

#Chessracism

+Shiningleaf X #BlackPiecesMatter

+Locutus Borg actaully i would argure that black has the advantage because they can react to what white does, and will counter what white does

+Zachary Morris No, white definitely has an advantage; being forced to react limits your options. In tournament play, white wins about two percent more often.

+Kevin Baker Actually it's a bigger advantage than that. At high level play, white wins 37-40% of the time (depending on what database you look at). However, because draws are common at a high level, black only wins about 30% of the time, with the remaining ~30% being drawn. This means that white wins almost 25% more often than black. However, because of the way games are scored - with a draw being worth half a win - white's scoring advantage is indeed 2-6%. EDIT: I got that a little wrong. On average white will score around 0.52 to 0.56 points per game. Because the points per game add to 1, this means black scores 0.44-0.48 on average, which is more like an 8% to 27% scoring advantage for white.

+simivb Wait I don't understand. You're basically saying what he said in different wording. In Chess where the game hasn't changed, definitive strategies have been formed. This is what LoL tries to combat by making changes. If you leave the game in a state no matter what it is then the most optimal strategies will emerge. This is what he was trying to get at in the video.

+lzn60 Ok I had to rewatch the video because I didn't remeber everything :D, but I think that my point still stands: He talks about Balance vs. Imbalance. How Chess and Starcraft are balanced, and LOL is not (to a certain degree), and how that is the reason why LOL dosen't have definitive strategies. Im talkin about Changes vs. no changes, which is something completly different. I claim that LOL and Starcraft have the EXACT same approach to balancing, by using a rock paper scissor system, whereas he doesn't. And he doesn't even take updates into account, besides at the very beginning. He doesn't say at any point, that the constant changes made to LOL are the reason for it not being stale, instead he thinks it is that "imbalance". And "cyclic Imbalance" is one of the worst descriptions for the thing. It is just plain rock paper scissors: A gets beaten by B, but C can beat B. This is the exact definition of rock paper scissors. Rock paper scissors itsself is perfectly balanced. Therefore "cyclic Imbalance" = "perfect balance" ????!?!?!? And if you take a closer look at starcraft now, where you have the same thing with the classes of the units, you can't possibly clame, that LOL and Starcraft have a different approach to balancing. Therefore I think this video is complete bullshit. Love the other ones though :D

+simivb The part you're missing is that one "build" shouldn't be able to be good at everything. In Starcraft, the reason there is rock-paper-scissors balance is because every unit in any given race has specific counters in the other races, so (as long as you are scouting well) the game just comes down to finding out what the opponent is doing and doing *the* thing that counters that. In essence, every race can do everything well. On the flip side, in LoL (at least as presented in the video, I don't know because I don't play it) any given hero has weaknesses they can't overcome, meaning that if they come into popular use, other heroes who are good at exploiting that weakness will become more effective in the current meta. There is no way to counter this with the first hero, so the effective strategy is to switch to a different hero. This provides a situation where new players don't have to know everything to be competitive (as they do in Starcraft), they just have to settle on a hero who does well in the current meta, drastically reducing the barrier to entry for competitive play. Meanwhile, more experienced players have more to think through by looking at ALL the heroes they're seeing in play commonly and deciding which hero they think will be the strongest overall and potentially driving the meta in a new direction. I don't know how cleanly it works. I don't play LoL, and I don't know if LoL executes it well. But that's the design EC is talking about, and seem to believe LoL does better than many other games. The major issue with it that I see is that it means some playstyles are simply worse in any given meta, meaning personal preference can become a handicap, which is not ideal. It even leads to new players hitting a (different) brick wall, where they find heroes they like but just can't seem to do well because of the state of the meta.

+Sean Tommy Firstly, I want to clarify that I feel a bit different about the definitive strategies than the video: There are no definitive strategies in starcraft (like strategie A is not beatable), but definitive counters (if strategie A is playes strategie B is the best answer). I think this definition might aid the discussion. Now to your comment: You basically say that starcraft is balanced, because every race can counter every unit of every other race and that lol is not(or cyclic or whatever) because not all heroes can counter all other heroes if they just changed ther strategie or something like that. I think that you are comparing oranges to apples: A better analogy would be: starcraft is balanced because every race can beat every unit of every other race, and lol is balanced, because every team can have champions that beat every champion of the enemy team (combined, so each one can beat another, therefore -> whole team can beat whole other team). So I would compare Race to Teams and Champions to Units instead of Champions to races, as you did. And when you look at it this way, you see that having a champion who has weaknesses he cant overcome is not an imbalance. His weakness makes him lose against certain champions, just like a unit loses against certain other units. No difference here. Now: the comparison Team -> Race is still not exactly apples to apples: I wrote "every team can have champions that beat every champion of the enemy team" and the "can" is important: you can fuck up the picking phase, so that you end up with a team that loses against the enemy team, because you didnt pick champions that counter the enemy's chammpions. An analogy here would be that you picked 10 units before every starcraft match. So not exactly apples to apples. BUT: At the pro-level (and we are talking about pros, because in sc2 silver, there are no definitive strategies :D) you can always ensure to have such a team by picking intelligently. And the meta is really just changing because champions are imbalanced (which is not a contradiction to what I said! :D) by each update: to use the rock paper scissors analogy again: it would be like before the update rock beat scissors and paper, and after it would be beaten by both. Champions are to strong/weak to be countered by others/counter others as they should be, and thats just beacuse it would take many iterations to get it right, and since there are new champions coming all the time you dont get that many iterations. Now to your last statement about new players: I don't really disagree, but i dont think that you are onto something either: The definitive starcraft strategies dont apply to new sc2 players because they cant execute them , and the counter champions dont apply to new lol players because they cant use them propperly. So if you say its harder for new players to get into sc2 beacuse there are definitive strategies, but in lol there are not, i have to say: No, because they will play against people who dont know either. Its like letting 2 children play chess. They dont know shit, therefore they will both make mistakes and have fun. And I think we can agree that chess is the most stale game here :D

I appreciate the detailed response :) To address the last, and imo most important, issue you mentioned first, the issue doesn't have to do with people at the very bottom or very top. It's not about what two children do when playing chess. The question is what has to be done to move from the bottom into the middle tiers. In any system, the player has to learn strategies that are effective in order to get better. In an ideal unbalanced game, the amount of strategies the player has to learn to see improvement is much smaller, because anyone can be effective if they get good at a strategy that works well in the current meta. Moving from the mid-tier to top tier then involves learning lots of strategies for lots of metas, rather than simply knowing one or two. In Starcraft (or chess), however, learning a single strategy doesn't get you very far, because the opposition is guaranteed to have an answer to your strategy if they know what they're doing. There's no give and take, there's just a brick wall of strategy to learn before you can be "competitive" in any sense. And then the difference between mid-tier and top-tier becomes a matter not of knowing more strategies, but of knowing the strategies more intimately. Thus, mid-tier is closer to top-tier than it is to bottom-tier, making it difficult to get into competitive play. That's the issue with purely balanced strategy games from a beginner's standpoint. From an expert's standpoint, it becomes an issue of static vs. dynamic play. Purely balanced games provide a problem for top-tier players that doesn't evolve: they know all the strategies and all the units involved stay the same, so they only have new information to think through when someone (maybe them) comes up with a new strategy that doesn't suck, which becomes less and less common as a game ages. In an unbalanced game, there's a constant give-and-take based on the current meta, because in a complex system multiple different options will be popular at any given time, creating a large, organic variety of possible playing fields for top players to think through. If champions B, K, and M are popular, that's a different field than if champions B, D, and G are popular, which means individual counters aren't the only consideration, and you have to balance the pros and cons of champions who are good against, say, B but not K, or D but not B. Now, to address the teams vs champions idea. I didn't think about that before, I admit. As I said, I'm not too familiar with LoL. That particular mechanic makes me feel like, on a strategic level, low-level players aren't even playing the same game as high-level players. When you can't count on your team, the game becomes more of a single-player, or even random, affair, where your teammates will win or lose games for you regardless of your own performance, so you're more concerned with personal progress and finding ways to exploit enemy weaknesses on your own. Teamwork and large-scale strategy don't come into play much until you are at a level where teammates can be relied upon. Just spitballing really, and I guess the real point is that maybe LoL isn't a great example for perfect imbalance because of the team dynamics aspect. Also, I get your point about LoL being unbalanced as a result of patches rather than original design. I'm speaking from a more idealogical design standpoint, and can't attest to whether or not you are correct about that, so taking you at your word leaves me simply reiterating that LoL may not be the best example of this idea of perfect imbalance.