200 Years Game Design Mem

Critical Play: Game Balance

A commentary on game balance in League of Legends

If you mention game balance to a League of Legends player, you'll most likely get a chuckle. If you ask them what game balance is, they might sarcastically respond with "What's that?", insinuating League of Legends lacks that concept. Balance is such a humorous concept in the League community that it has become a meme in various forms.

After a famous player complained about his champion (character he plays as in the MOBA) not being strong, a League of Legends game designer dismissed the player's concern by saying that the designer trusted the company's "200+ collective years of professional game experience" over his opinion.

Twitter exchange between League player and League of Legends game designer

Little did Nathan know that once he posted that, his words would forever live on. Riot, the game designers of League of Legends, releases new characters for the players throughout the year. In 2019, they released one so powerful the champion could fight the entire other team, and so he was donned "200 Years".

Satirical Video on the "balance" of newly released character. Has 1.2M views

I've included some highlight comments of the video, which take aim at the game designer's pride in the balance they designed:

"R" referring to the ability used by a character when the "R" keystroke is pressed. All other characters in the game require more than pressing one button to do significant damage.

While I'd love to keep delving into the rich meme culture of game balance in League, it might be more important to ask: if players don't think the game is balanced, then why do they play it? Why is their user base growing and now at 115 million monthly users? How have they established one of the largest competitive eSports scenes with 100 million viewers?

The answer is: the game is balanced… enough. I'll now go into how it's balanced, using concepts from this game balance course.

Balance in Strategies

League of Legends has been known to be a rich game because it's composed of many different layers, which allows for many strategies to be developed. For instance, one aspect of the game is the "laning phase". In the laning phase, a player stands across from the opposing player. During this phase, the player tries to deal the fatal blow to a monster to get gold, hit the opposing player to decrease their health, or dodge the abilities from the opponent. While there are fundamental principles that a player should adhere to, a player cannot employ the same fixed proportion of laning strategy aforementioned from game to game, and instead has to adjust to the way the opponent is playing. This means that the strategies introduced in the laning phase are balanced because for a particular strategy opponent adopts, the player can adjust his strategy and not succumb to an inauspicious situation.

A screenshot of two players in the lane together

Balance between Game Objects

The game objects concerned with balance in the game are the champions (characters player chooses to play as throughout the game), items, and runes. To keep things simple, I'll only discuss how champions are balanced in the game. There are six main champion classes in the game — tank, fighter, slayer, mage, controller, marksman.

Tanks often possess lots of health and armor.
Fighters possess a moderate amount of health and high damage.
Slayers deal high damage, have low health, and high mobility.
Mages deal high damage from distance but have low mobility and health.
Controllers can control the mobility of other champions but deal low damage.
Marksmen deal damage from range and their damage increases as the game goes on but have low health.

Slayers are strong against mages and marksmen but weak against fighters and tanks. Marksmen are good against tanks and fighters, but bad against mages and slayers. And so forth. The point is that there is a counter move for every type of champion class chosen, which leads to balance in this aspect.

League of Legends has been one of the best games I've played because of the entire ecosystem it's built. From the meme culture to the professional eSports scene, it's been marvelous be a part of the community. If you're a fan of MOBAs or are looking for a new game to try out or are curious about the eSports trend, I would highly recommend trying out the game.