Although there are not too many changes in champions and equipment, the 2022 Pre-Season still creates some extremely unbalanced gameplay. The most typical is the fact that gamers abuse the Bounty system and take Support generals to single lane to help their remaining 4 teammates be as strong as possible. Not to mention the way Akali plays on Accelerated Armor, as a result, Riot has had to nerf these gameplay in recent times.
The nerfed Accelerator Armor and Emerald make Akali no longer abuse these items
The question here is that these playstyles have actually existed for a long time in League of Legends, but why didn’t Riot nerf first and let it rampage like that? In response to this, the leader of League of Legends champion design team – Riot August revealed that they actually knew about those gameplay in advance. However, Riot cannot nerf first because it will reduce the creativity of gamers and make League of Legends extremely bad.
In the last stream, Riot August tested Renata on the PBE server and answered a series of questions from gamers
Riot August: “You guys often ask me when to buff hero A, nerf character B… but the process to make that decision is really complicated. We need to think carefully first. when editing a champion because it can create extremely unbalanced gameplay and be abused by gamers.
Honestly, I know a lot of cool gameplay exists in LoL, but we still don’t nerf because its pick rate is so low. If we just mechanically nerf champions like that, it will make the game extremely bad, moreover it also reduces the creativity of gamers. If that happened, Kled would have nerfed 10 times in a row because this is an extremely strong Mid lane champion. We made this mistake with Aurelion Sol before and we won’t let it happen again.”
Aurelion Sol was heavily nerfed despite the extremely low pick rate
Indeed, in terms of creativity as well as “weird cards”, League of Legends gamers have come up with a lot of very special gameplay. Even in this 12.3 patch, someone thought about using Viktor Top lane, holding the Gem of Immortal Power, on the God-Slaying Ax to store health and scale more strongly towards the end of the game. Even gamers also use Diana on the Coat of the Sun or Irelia in the Acceleration Armor to go crazy.
There are a lot of weird gameplay created by gamers and Riot knows this
As for Riot Games, they all have data on these gameplay, but nerfing things with too low selection rate is not necessary at all. Even Janna Top lane with Smite is not affected even though it was created in the 2022 Pre-Season. It was only when this gameplay was abused by too many people and the pick rate skyrocketed that Riot Games only reduced power.