Change a Big Project

League of Legends in the most popular video game in the world today. No other game in the entire human history has achieved the same level as League.

Then this link.

The question was completely valid:

Were keystones a rushed idea? There’s no HUD visibility for spectators, for example, and several champions came out of nowhere into the meta because they weren’t adjusted with the new keystones in mind.

What was Riot’s answer? It’s also completely valid:

In projects like this, you frequently find that technically 50% of the work is almost trivial to implement, and 50% of the work is an uphill climb in the snow. We do try to make sure features are in reasonable shape before releasing them, but we also try to be mindful of diminishing returns. If spectator support had taken two more months, does it make sense to hold the feature for two more months when we’re not even sure players will really like it?

The same holds true of champion balance. We could go through and rebalance every champion (a monumental task) but that could totally be throw-away work if the keystone feature ended up being poorly received by players and needed a lot more work or even scrapped. Instead, we tried to hit the outliers and champs we suspected would be a problem. Then we adjusted others over time as they showed up. This is pretty much the way we operate all of the time. We’d never be able to ship anything (including other balance changes) if we had to make a comprehensive pass at the entire game whenever we made changes. We definitely make a pass, but we don’t catch everything.

In big projects like this, whenever you make a change to it, things get tough. The moral of the story is, sometimes it makes sence to do just enough and ship out the product, then wait for feedback and make appropriate adjustments later. Don’t let this change make you change all the components of the project, from the very beginning up to now, which will take an expotentially long time to do, and if failed, you will waste tons of resources.