Riot is changing its criteria for how League champs are considered overpowered at high levels of play

League of Legends lead gameplay designer Mark “Scruffy” Yetter outlined some of the changes that the team will be using when trying to figure out which champions to adjust in future patches in Riot Games’ developer’s post today.

“In our last update to the balance framework, I mentioned that we were feeling that our Elite band method wasn’t fully satisfying our goals,” Riot Scruffy said. “The old method using ban rate captured high popularity, high frustration champions that were overpowered, but would fail to discover overpowered champs in classes that are less banned.”

As a result, Riot is now expanding its MMR range. It will look at data from Diamond II and above, rather than Master and above. This is because Riot’s old MMR range didn’t provide enough data to assess power from champion win rates. Keeping it at Diamond I didn’t give as much data as the team needed either, so they pushed the range even further.

Here are the new criteria for champions to get nerfed or buffed, compared to the old criteria:

• Old “overpowered” threshold
  • Greater than 45 percent ban rate.
• New “overpowered” threshold
  • Greater than 50 percent ban rate.
  • Greater than 54 percent win rate if below average ban rate, down to 52.5 percent win rate if more than five time average ban rate.
• Old “underpowered” threshold
  • Less than five percent combined pick/ban rate.
• New “underpowered” threshold
  • Less than 7.5 percent combined pick/ban rate.

This new system should help Riot identify which champions truly need nerfs or buffs so that balancing issues are kept to a minimum in upcoming patches.