User blog comment:BIA-Kaboose/The Problem Behind Balance/@comment-5605969-20131211161837/@comment-5331854-20131211170805

True balance would be bad. Look at Chess, the time-tested mother*blooper* of board games. Perfectly balanced. And once you're a pro, it gets so boring that you play for stalemate/draw/rematch if someone does something different from the studied approaches. People can study chess for 40 years without changing things.

Luckily, there's Chess 2 from Ludeme Games (it's a thing).

As I mentioned below, RIot tries to approach the problem with perfect imbalance, meaning that there are subtle, carefully crafted imbalances so the gameplay will never feel stale, like in Chess. Perfect Imbalance is not as bad for the balance as you make it. It's extremely hard to make it right, though, because you need to deeply understand the game on a mathematical and intuitive level. Which, given the amount of items and champions in LoL, is a daunting and exhausting task even on only mathematical or intuitive levels. Hence the buffs and nerfs.

It wouldn't work without Draft Mode, though. pls improve draft rito