In the talk “Balancing League of Legends for Every Player, from Bronze to Bengi” given by Greg Street at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2017, he discusses the ideology behind balancing a video game and designing it to include both low skill players and high skill players. Through the work, he discusses the example of “AI-Dependant Power”, citing examples such as Heimerdinger from “League of Legends”, The Engineer from “Team Fortress 2”, and Torbjorn from “Overwatch”. Greg Street would go on to explain “The problem with AI power, in this case, the turrets, (but it also could be like your character has a pet) is that AI power doesn’t scale really well with skill level. If you think of the power as a pie chart, the AI part of that takes up a really big part of that pie chart… So as developers, we kind-of have to have to choose where we turn those turrets…”.

The issue with AI implementation into an competitive environment would be scaling it so the computer is a formidable foe to both novice and experienced players without giving the player controlling the AI too much to just sit back and rely on. This becomes an issue where if the turret is too powerful and kills too easily, then it’s difficult for everyone at the floor of the skill chart. If it was catered towards them, then the turret wouldn’t have any viable use in competitive play. The goal of the game designer is to find the porridge that tastes just right, the middle ground that can attract both novice and experienced players towards both being an opponent to the turret and playing as the turret.

Greg Street also brings up Latency and how that could affect how others play. He says “We recently did a study to look at play rates and win rates of certain league champions according to different ping rates. We found that places like Korea (which has really good internet) actually allowed players to use different champions and have different win rates than players in the US…”. This provides an interesting dilemma on how the designer would account for the various internet speeds of people around the world. One example to mitigate this issue is to extend the window for attacks or provide some sort of input delay.

Source: https://youtu.be/ii_Q4OCoHvU