Legends of Runeterra's Live Design Lead, Steve Rubin, responded to one of content creator SilverFuse's recent tweets about Wiggly Burblefish with some fascinating insight about how Riot reacts when they discover a potential power combo between a soon-to-be-released card and existing cards.
Quote From Steve 'RubinZoo' Rubin SilverFuse: I remember when people thought Burblefish wouldn't be good. Now, it is lowkey the most broken card in the game.
Early dev versions of Wiggly Burblefish had Attune and 2 health. We prune often, but also knowingly ship strong things. We generally prefer letting players "break it". We went against pre-changing:
- Pre-nerf to Ezreal prior to adding Make it Rain & Riptide Rex to the game
- Changing Boxtopus trigger from Play to Summon for Aphelios
I'd add that severity matters for sure. Our mentality here only goes so far. If Boxtopus was a 3|10 that dealt 9 to itself when played, there would be a different call here.
For Taric + Playful Trickster we went the other way even though it tested shippable on power level. We decided that infinite attack loop experience was not something that was beneficial to allow players to break in that case.
Speaking from the players' prospective, we really appreciate the result this approach has on the overall user experience. It's been fun watching Wiggly Burblefish totally reshape the meta a month after its release as the ultimate underdog card or abusing Crescendum to pull a 3|4 Challenger -- speaking of, if you haven't yet tried it make sure to check out this deck before any balance changes go into effect!
What are your thoughts about Riot's approach? Do you appreciate when they knowingly ship hidden power combos for the community to discover on their own? Let us know in the comments below!
Comments
meanwhile others are like "oops we didnt want that interaction to happen, a fix will be deployed soon"
Riot is constantly tweaking, so it's interesting to see that they consciously allow stuff like this to happen. They seem to never let things get TOO busted for too long.
Neat insight.
I think that combos like this are fun at first and shake up the meta, but if they don’t get nerfed soon it becomes problematic. Although I know this isn’t the best example, when Lee Sin first got buffed it was pretty fun for the first two weeks or so. However, after that it got really annoying and the nerf didn’t come soon enough (and debatably wasn’t a big enough nerf).