User blog comment:Berryeater/Let's talk about the span of games./@comment-1330314-20160705211918

I take a few issues with this post. Aside from particular disagreements on the branding of several champions (Darius is more of an early game champion, Thresh is strongest early game and tends to fall off a little compared to most other supports, Tristana is more of a mid-game marksman relative to competition like, and , etc.), the main problem with this analysis is that it presumes late-game champions are bad purely because they're strongest in the late game. Admittedly, you yourself said you were biased in favor of early-game champions, and there might be a valid point in saying matches need to feature some kind of a guaranteed late game and balance accordingly, but you've set arbitrary bounds for what constitutes end-game (25 minutes? Really?),and what constitutes proper power curves, that make your entire analysis and conclusions flawed.

Basically, there's a lot I want to agree with here (no champion should be useless at any stage in the game, late-game needs to be more reliable, stalling games to the point where they become boring is not fun), but I can't really agree with the values you place here at the forefront. I'd much rather have longer, more interesting games than shorter, shallower ones, for example, which means I'd rather pick champions for their ability to stay consistently relevant rather than their potential for closing games early, and with that I'd argue that a lot of early-game champions, particularly many assassins and fighters, are poorly designed due to how binary matches can become with them around. Ultimately, it would be good to have a kind of delta of game spans, where both twenty-minute and forty-minute games would be common, viable and influenced mainly by player decisions and not rigid game systems (which is a big issues with the changes that occured earlier this season), so evaluations of this kind should come from a variety of players, and not just one perspective.