Sometimes Riot makes mistakes.
There are dozens of times they've broken League of Legends by
accidentally creating something so hilariously busted and overpowered it dominates the game
for a week or two until they patch it out.
But in 2015 Riot went into Worlds with a patch full of those kinds of mistakes.
And the fallout has changed the way they've treated Worlds ever since.
In August 2015, Riot re-worked a handful of champions to create a new class called Juggernauts.
The idea was to have a few, mostly top-lane champs, be glaciers in lane.
Incredibly powerful, hard to kill and very slow.
Riot re-worked Darius, Garen, Mordekaiser and Skarner, who was actually so busted that Riot
hotfixed him six days after the patch dropped.
All of the champions were tweaked here and there, but by the time Worlds rolled
around in October, Darius was pretty strong, and Mordekaiser was comically busted.
"Mordekaiser's main strength is just being able to snowball the early game."
"He's bringing magic damage. He's a really good diver early on 2v1."
Darius’s power came in part from the damage and healing on his Decimate ability,
combined with the nasty execute on his ultimate.
If an enemy got low enough, Darius could dunk them and kill them,
which actually reset his ultimate letting him do it again.
That led to some unbelievable penta kills.
(Casting)
Meanwhile, Mordekaiser’s big change was that Riot wanted him to be played
in the bot lane.
Which was tricky, because Mordekaiser is a melee champ, and all of the AD carries he’d lane
against were ranged.
To offset that, Riot made it so that Mordekaiser gained 100 percent of experience for every minion
he killed, instead of sharing it with his support partner.
That meant that Mordekaiser hit level six when you were around level four.
It wasn’t fun.
(Casting)
Darius had a 72.6 pick/ban rate by the end of the tournament, making
it into 38 games with a 50 percent win rate.
Mordekaiser on the other hand had a nearly 100 percent pick/ban rate, and a 100 percent win
rate across all four games he made it into.You might be wondering how Darius made it into
so many games.
That’s because the Juggernauts weren’t the only balance problem with the Worlds 2015 patch.
Next came Gangplank, who was re -worked a few months before Worlds.
But was still in a pretty powerful place going into the tournament.
He was a late-game monster with super safe laning, letting him farm easily and build
items that turned him into a teamfighting machine. Gangplank was able to deal huge damage
to most champions if they walked into his barrels.
And if they survived that onslaught, his ultimate did enough damage to kill them in teamfights anyways.
Gangplank had a 100% pick ban rate. Winning all four games he made it into.
And of course, there were even more problems.
The jungle was pretty low in diversity in patch 5.18
And there were only really three competitive junglers.
Elise, Rek’Sai and Gragas.
Unfortunately, Gragas was disabled partway through the tournament, after a bug found during a
Fnatic vs. EDG quarterfinals game was deemed grame breaking by Riot.
This wasn’t a deliberate balance decision that Riot made, like Gangplank or Mordekaiser,
but it did negatively impact the rest of the tournament.
"The issue that appeared in-game prevented Reignover from casting the Gragas Q spell and the refereeing team
they did investigate and exhaust every single option to resolve the issue in game.
Including allowing Gragas to die and attempt to resolve the matter."
Elise and Rek’Sai were the only two viable junglers left after Gragas was disabled.
Combined with Gangplank and the Juggernauts, it all meant that red side was at a hilarious
disadvantage throughout the entire tournament.
Back to the stats.
Elise had a 97.3 percent pick/ban rate, while Rek’sai came in with a 76.7% pick/ban rate.
This was before League of Legends had 10 bans, which meant that red side was screwed.
They had to ban Mordekaiser and Gangplank, as well as one of the two main junglers
since not doing that gave the blue side the advantage of getting to pick the jungler they preferred
and banning the other.
Blue side, on the other hand, got their pick of the litter.
They usually banned Lulu, since she was also pretty powerful on that patch, but
otherwise?
They got to pick any strong champions red side left up, and they got to target players on the red side.
Think about it this way, in their grand finals series against SK Telecom T1, the Koo Tigers
couldn't target Faker at all.
They didn’t ban a single mid lane champion all series, even in games where they were on the blue
side, because they had their hands too full banning out OP top laners and junglers.
So why did Riot do all this?
Obviously it’s impossible to say for sure, but it's safe to assume that Riot
wanted to bring up some bad champions, namely Darius, Gangplank and Mordekaiser,
And it's also safe to assume that they probably wanted to shake up the meta a little bit and make things exciting
going into Worlds.
"This is the first time before Worlds that there's been the most changes."
"Like Mordekaiser AD carry bottom lane like nobody in their right mind would say two years from now
I'm going to be playing against Mordekaiser bottom lane. You go in solo queue, Mordekaiser, Darius, Garen
and Skarner are banned, somebody's like, am I in an alternate universe, did I just wake up
am I still dreaming?"
Instead, teams chose to create a fragile peace, built on the understanding that the League
of Legends they were playing at Worlds 2015 wasn’t the League of Legends they qualified
for the tournament on.
The teams at Worlds 2015 qualified through the summer split, on a patch without Juggernauts
and without an all-powerful Gangplank.
Riot changing the patch right before Worlds, meant that they just weren’t playing the
same game.
SKT were the favorites to win the tournament and they did.
Of course it didn’t hurt that they were one of the only teams who brought a carry
top laner to a tpournament with plenty of carry top picks, but that’s not the point.
The point is that Riot changed the game, by most accounts for the worse,
just before their most important tournament of the year.
It showed a complete lack of care for the competitive scene, and even though the
best team won out and most of the OP nonsense didn’t make it on stage, the tournament was fundamentally
changed because of Riot's decisions.
(Casting)
Worlds 2015 had the highest champion diversity of any Worlds up to that point.
But a lot of that was because most of the same champions were banned every single game.
"Yeah and as for EDG's bans. I think since they're on red side they may just be locked into
the Gangplank, Mordekaiser and Elise."
In the bracket stage alone. Blue side had a 58.3 percent win rate.
You weren't totally screwed on red side.
In fact SKT won two games on red side in their grand finals series against Koo Tigers.
But you were at a severe disadvantage.
These days, Riot is a lot more careful about letting their patches breathe before Worlds.
Towards the end of the tournament, Marc Merrill said that Riot was going to take a harder look at their patch
schedule around Worlds. And it seems like they've learned their lesson.
Worlds should be played on a stable patch, one that’s similar to the Summer Split.
It ensures competitive integrity.
And that fans get to watch the best League of Legends possible.
That the best teams win out.
These days, Worlds is in a much healthier place.
And that's probably worth one messy tournament.