Riot adjusting framework for how champions are considered overpowered in League of Legends

It seems like Riot’s standards for OP champs are changing.

League of Legends lead gameplay designer Mark “Scruffy” Yetter discussed changes to Riot’s OP line in today’s Dev Corner post. The framework is used to determine whether a champion is overpowered and needs to be nerfed based on their win and ban rates.

“The Summoner’s Rift Team has a small but hopefully meaningful set of changes that we’ve been testing this year and are using going forward,” Scruffy said. “For both normal and skilled play, we’re tightening the OP line a bit after looking back at the full year (2019) and seeing that we trended towards buffs over nerfs.”

Here are the framework changes across all elos.

Normal play (Iron to Gold)

• Old: OP if 54.5 percent win rate and less than average ban rate, down to 52.5 percent win rate if over five times the average ban rate.
• New: OP if 54 percent win rate and less than average ban rate, down to 52.5 percent win rate if over five times the average ban rate.
• For example: Our new system flagged Diana for nerfs in 10.3 (at 53.7 percent win rate, 23 percent ban rate), which we would not have gotten from the old.

Skilled play (Plat to Master)

• Old: OP if 54 percent win rate and less than average ban rate, down to 52.5 percent win rate if over five times the average ban rate.
• New: OP if 53.5 percent win rate and less than average ban rate, down to 52.5 percent win rate if over five times the average ban rate.
• For example: Our new system flagged Senna ADC as OP in skilled when the old system would not have.

Elite play (Grandmaster to Challenger)

• No changes at this time, but we’re working on ways to have a more game data driven system here. Our current usage of picks and bans is approximately correct, but we think that we can get a more accurate picture of champion balance with game data like win rates here.

Professional play

• Unlike Elite play, we think pick and ban data here provides a very good representation of champ power. We’re still tweaking this a little to reduce the amount of patch notes for pro during most of the year and then amp up our focus as worlds approaches.
• Old: OP if more than 90 percent presence for one patch or more than 80 percent presence for two patches.
• New: OP if more than 95 percent presence for one patch or more than 85 percent presence for two patches. Increased focus for major events (Worlds/MSI).

These minor adjustments to the OP line should be able to help Riot’s team balance any outliers in the current meta.