| This manual has too many AI-isms so I couldn't force myself to read through it. I wish they had just published the text in whatever way they wrote it. Nobody is impressed by walls of text anymore, it's not a sign of quality or effort. But since we're on the topic: Riot has a lot of incredibly knowledgeable game designers who have spent years sharing much of the reasoning behind various design decisions. The two main ones that stand out to me are Riot August (creator of Jinx and Jhin) and Riot Phreak (previous head of the balance team). Phreak in particular has been publishing videos on YouTube for years explaining their reasoning for the balance changes in each new patch. I don't even play and I still check out the videos sometimes. The other one is Riot August. I've occasionally opened up his livestreams where he's answering questions and yapping, but the highlights are usually posted on social media platforms as clips. There's a lot for which you can criticize Riot, but they're actually pretty transparent about communicating the decision making behind balance changes and listening to the community. Most games updates come in the form of receiving a set of patch notes, where if you're really lucky they might include some explanations for why those changes were made. Don't take community communication for granted. As for balance, I think they've actually done a pretty great job. League of Legends has 171 champions and in MSI 2026, their latest international esports event, 104 were played. For comparison, DotA2 has 126 heroes and in The International 2025, 107 heroes were played. |