Although there haven’t been many changes to champions or items, the Pre-Season 2022 has created some extremely unbalanced gameplay. The most notable example is players abusing the Reward system by sending Support champions to solo lanes to make their four teammates as strong as possible. Not to mention the Akali gameplay with the Turbocharged Hexperiment, which prompted Riot to nerf these strategies in the recent past.
The question here is, these strategies have actually existed for a long time in League of Legends, so why didn’t Riot nerf them earlier and let them run rampant? In response to this, lead champion designer for League of Legends – Riot August revealed that they were actually aware of these strategies beforehand. However, Riot could not nerf them earlier because it would reduce player creativity and make League of Legends extremely dull.
Riot August: “You often ask me when we should buff champion A or nerf champion B… but the process of making that decision is actually very complex. We need to calculate carefully before adjusting a champion because it can create extremely unbalanced gameplay that players will exploit.
Honestly, I know that there are many overpowered strategies in League of Legends, but we still won’t nerf them because their pick rate is too low. If we just nerf champions mechanically like that, it will make the game extremely dull, plus it will reduce player creativity. If that were to happen, Kled would have been nerfed 10 times in a row because he is an incredibly strong Mid Lane champion. We made this mistake with Aurelion Sol and we won’t let that happen again.”
Indeed, when it comes to creativity and “off-meta” strategies, League of Legends players have come up with many unique gameplay styles. In the current patch 12.3 alone, some players have thought about using Viktor Top, taking the Grasp of the Undying rune, and building the Divine Sunderer to stack health and scale better into the late game. Some players even use Diana with the Sunfire Aegis or Irelia with Turbocharged Hexperiment to climb ranks.
From Riot Games’ perspective, they have data on these strategies, but nerfing things with extremely low pick rates is completely unnecessary. Even the Janna Top strategy with Smite wasn’t affected, even though it was created during the Pre-Season 2022. Only when this strategy was excessively exploited and its pick rate soared did Riot Games decide to nerf it.