Talk:VPBE/@comment-4270771-20151120071604/@comment-11025032-20151121163411

It's true that having more gold on minions early will put you even more behind if you're getting denied which isn't good. But if we don't take denying into account, then if you farm well there's less differences in gold (in % atleast). This also means that we're gonna reach up mid game earlier, as more gold means getting items earlier, so some champs that requires one or two essential items to be useful will be

About the pushing advantage, the Enraged buff will only happen in games that are already stomps (or if there's an afk) as requiring to have the whole team 3 levels ahead means the other team already can't do much against you. So it's more an help to finish the game faster. But yeah, on the other side, sometimes you can manage to turtle and come back, but with such a level difference (and a lot of gold difference), it's quite rare. So, that one isn't really bad.

The lower buffs (for less than 3 levels ahead) means minions will push your lanes by themselves, so either you try to push and stomp by taking turrets, meaning you're getting in a weak position, vulnerable to ganks; or you avoid pushing your lane and try to help the other lanes. For the enemy, it means they can either farm safer, but on the other side they'll have to defend their turrets and depush more often. In the end, yes, it helps at stomping but it can be managed if your team isn't too much behind as it forces the enemy team in an always offensive position.

Death Timer changes means it will take more time to respawn mid-game but less late, which means you've gotta play safer, but yeah early/mid-game throws are gonna be even more dangerous, especially combined to the pushing advantage it might give to the enemy. But everyone getting free homeguards at 20mins means the time you lost with the increased death timer will be given back through getting back on a lane faster (ok you can already buy homeguards at 20mins or even earlier, but when you're behind, those 475g can be used for something more useful in fights/turtle-ing).

They're also buffing T1 and T2 with 500 more hp each, so they're gonna fall a bit later, even if it means you're not safer than before under your turret, you'll benefit from the turret's protection for more time and the enemy will have the bonus gold from turret later, which means less stomp.

In conclusion there's both things that help at or prevent from stomping/snowballing, so my thoughts on this is that we have to wait a bit for the meta to be more stable and defined. With the preseason, there's too much changes happening in a short time, creating too much disbalance (good example of this being the warlord's bloodlust mastery that alone made a few champs op) and players not knowing how to deal with this changing meta (look when a new champ is released the time it takes before people learn how to fully make use of it or how to play properly against it). So yeah, we've got to give it some time. With a more stable and more balanced meta, snowballs won't be that common. Riot is already doing some balancing (look at the last hotfix with the Warlord Bloodlust's and Graves' nerfs + Kog'Maw buffs) and more will come in the future, maybe not that much on 5.23 as they're still working on preseason additions and it takes time to see what's wrong/good with the preseason changes, so 5.24 or 6.1.

@TacoParadox : Fast games aren't a problem, look at Dominion, a very close game will rarely get past to 20 minutes, and it's still interesting. Problems are the stomps which aren't fun for both teams (ok, one-shotting people can be fun once in a while but gets to be boring as there's no challenge, and getting stomped aren't as you can't do anything). In my AoS-like games experience (i dislike the MOBA term which doesn't mean much), the thing i always preferred was the long and close games (by long, i mean 1h/1h30+, either be it in LoL or others) which are quite intense. But that doesn't mean i dislike fast games either. Aslong as they're not a team stomping the other, if there's no or few downtimes, always action happening, everyone having near-equal chance of winning until the end, etc... then it's a good game, even if it only lasts 30mins or less, good examples of this being Dominion and other game modes from LoL (Ascension, Showdown, etc...)