[stargroup100]

Originally Posted by hi19hi19

Wow, they've changed so much, yay. Guess what, that's completely irrelevant to the argument because the problem still exists.
Nice red herring there m8

Remember that I said that absolute balance is not possible. My mentioning of these things is not to show that the map is now balanced, it's to explain that Riot is already aware of these issues and is taking measures to solve them. You seem to be very concerned with competitive balance, so I'm reassuring you that Riot is already doing the best they can and doing a good job.

Originally Posted by hi19hi19

The fact a game is too complicated to be solved should not stop a designer from making a change that would bring it closer to absolute balance without reducing any strategic complexity. I mean, I'm really trying to understand this from your point of view here but I can't think of any meaningful strategic depth that would have been lost by rotating the map 45 degrees.

Another point I didn't mention yet is that the amount of effort is takes to rotate the map plus other less significant (but still important) issues such as public relations makes it not worth doing because the advantages are so insignificant. Though I do realize you mention this later on yourself too. It's like running 80 miles for a dollar. Yeah, you're a dollar richer, but it's not worth the effort.

But again, absolute balance cannot be achieved and we don't know where it is. For most competitive games with rich strategic depth, balance comes from a Bayesian kind of analysis. You take the probabilities and payoffs of each strategy and weigh them appropriately. To achieve the best possible, most realistic balance, you want the expected payoff of each player to be as close to 0 as possible.

This means that a lot of social factors play into this, as flavor picks and strategies change the probability of other strategies, changing the expected payoff. Rock, paper, scissors is a game where you can outplay the opponent and read them perfectly and win by a large margin, but due to the probabilities the expected payoff for each player is always 0 (1/3 + 0 - 1/3), so the game is balanced.

Originally Posted by hi19hi19

It's very fucking obvious that blue side is winning more in the competitive scene and it's laughable that you are even arguing that is not the case.

I never said one side isn't balanced. I said that changing the camera angle doesn't fix this problem in this slightest.

Do you honestly think, realistically, that rotating this map by 45 degrees is going to even out or even significantly change that win ratio?

Originally Posted by hi19hi19

But that doesn't mean we can't discuss why that's a terrible design decision with real effects on the game's competitiveness. My argument is that it was a poor initial design decision to have the map be mirrored diagonally, and I've yet to hear specifics on what additional meaningful strategic depth and healthy gameplay this design choice offered.

Just to reiterate what I said before, Game design mechanics go further than just strategy. You also have to think about what is beneficial to the player, in terms of what makes playing the game easier to understand, more transparent, what is more fun to the player, etc. My whole point this entire time is that camera angle is an insignificant factor to competitive balance, so the choice of camera angle should be determined by these other factors.