Thebausffs: "People just hate Phreak for no reason. Since Phreak got into office and became part of the balance team, instead of complaining about the balance team they complain about Phreak as a person. It's the same flame, the same thing the league community was always upset about"

Sion buffs inc

The funny thing is, Baus might have actually got AD Sion nerfed, but in an indirect way. It was never strong in the first place (Prowler's Sion was reasonably popular but like ~45 winrate in all elos) but him winning games in high elo with his godlike CS scores caused a legion of his fanboys to int their silver games without having the mechanics to win with the pick.

Riot nerfed it to try and get everyone else to stop playing a game-losing build while he was somehow making it work.

I remember the ahri Changes where they gave MS on Q and nerfed DMG. This sub was convinced ahri was dead only for her to become highest winrate Champ in hours

The Mortdog experience

asol goes to 55% winrate

community: how could they make this champion so weak

As Poe devs said, players are good at spotting problems but terrible and solving them 

Mortdog does the exact same thing with TFT. Pretty sure he doesn't even have a hand in balancing any more given how he reacts on stream to playing new patches but he will happily take all the flak online for bad balancing.

Well, reddit has always known balance

Phreak's been around for so long, he understands that the vast majority of players don't know a goddamn thing about balance.

The Vlad incident, where they put his changes in the patch notes but forgot to actually implement them, and then the playerbase freaked out at how OP Vlad now felt is a perfect example. People just make shit up or confirm their own biases.

Quite a lot of people in the community think that high rank = great understanding of how to balance the game, and that Phreak not being Challenger in solo queue means he's unsuited to his job.

I'd take someone with a good ability to communicate, good ability to use statistics, access to Riot's internal data and the ability to see the bigger picture of a fairly complex game (168 individual champions, items, runes, the influence of drafts, the different requirements of different elos and pro play, summoner spells and the map/jungle/minions) over someone with higher elo than Phreak any day of the week.

I remember when Aatrox rework launched, and this entire subreddit and anyone on Twitch was laughing about how it was just a trash Riven.

A million nerfs later, he's still a top tier pro pick

Remember the 200 years of collective game design meme? The one where everyone likes to mock Riot for how comedically arrogant/haughty it sounds?

That was in response to the Wukong community saying that the 10.6 gameplay update would make him completely unplayable. The same update that made him the best top laner with no lane counters at any time of the game.

Also the community is terrible at thinking about balancing,

because the vast majority of complaints have little to no actual bearing on the competitive experience in terms of the fine tuning.

It's the same sort of anger that anyone in customer service knows well -- the lead paint-poisoned boomer who hates his or her life and is looking for anything or anyone to bear the brunt of that seething self-hatred, externalizing that pain because they lack the emotional processing skills to actually help themselves.

I imagine on patch day he wears an alistar costume and is just going to town on a cowbell all day.

damn I liked mark yetter coz I always remembered his name for twitter balance changes xD

I feel like Phreak tried to become League’s Mortdog and the community just didn’t let it happen. TFT streamer gets unlucky RNG and says ah I got Mortdoged. League streamer dies to Maokai and says disgusting Phreak season go GP q irl

I wonder what PSZ thinks about Mr Yetter.

The issue is people actually believe what you are saying in the second paragraph

theres plenty of people that genuinely think that phreak is responsible for all balance changes made

You say this is jokes but for many this is not. There’s an incredible amount of people who do in fact blame Phreak for everything. And we do need big streamers like Bauffs to speak up and do things like this to at least help in this situation.

It really boils down to being the person who is the face of the game.

people forget that when morello was the face of the balance team, people shat on him just as much

it really boils down to who is the face of the balance team and right now that's phreak... obviously they're the same complains that were directed to the balance team, because before the perception of responsibility was spread, now that phreak is the face, the perception is that it's him.

this is actually not that weird, people haven o one else to tell that they disagree with changes, so of course it's gonna go to the person that is in charge of communicating those changes

Let's be honest, Phreak is amazing. Maybe his personality feels a tad over the top at times for some people, but who gives af - all our personalities are grating at times. Phreak has non-stop contributed to this community since the very beginning and dedicated his life to the game. He is a massive, massive boon to the community and it would NOT be the same without him.

People will complain about everything anyway. Lethal Tempo is too broken. Removes Lethal Tempo oh no why'd you remove lethal tempo crit needs to be 25% gives 25% crit why'd you make the other stats lower.

The sudden Mortdog gaslighting made me chuckle

He's ALWAYS been this way too. Even as a caster, he would very frequently "umm akshually" pro players builds mid-game by referencing stuff like "in high elo, this build has a .3% better WR, just objectively wrong for them to build this way"

Yeah, he gets a lot of unwarranted hate, but he also puts himself in situations because he is arrogant and stubborn.

Unfortunately, most people on this sub see in black and white only, so he is either a garbage human who should unalive himself, or the best thing that ever happened to league and we should count ourselves lucky.

I agree. I don't personally hate on him, but whenever I see posts about him, they are usually about something arrogant he said about the playerbase.

It's similar to the hate Mort received in the early sets of TfT, especially set 3.5 where he claimed the community just doesn't understand what strong and what isn't and they're all wrong (this was mostly about Urgots execute, which looked strong, but wasn't). Eventually, he just gave in after a long time and the community forgave him (mostly...).

Was he correct about the community being wrong? Yes. But that didn't help his case.

Amen

Also getting K'Sante out of proplay jail worked really well. 

yeah we're allowed to dislike horrible PR from a really condescending person (not including death threat levels)

i sitll remember his first buff being caitlyn mana because if the tyler1 "you habe no mana" clip. This sealed the deal on him slipping in personal balance changes which has been proven with his balance changes and his playrate on said champions

This.

People don't randomly dislike phreak for 0 reason.

He has said some incredibly dumb shut and then doubles down instead of admitting mistakes. And he's done this for like 10 years now.

He's arrogant and smug.

Phreak was right on the Velkoz E not casting when he died. It was a different Vel'koz bug people were complaining about.

Well when one side is "Guy is sometimes bad at wording things on his 3 hour podcast he does for fun" and the other side is "they want the other guy to kill himself in violent ways"

It becomes a bit one sided methinks.

Phreak isnt good at wording things sometimes

It is my understanding that in many cases, he's actually intentionally provocative in his wording and/or intentionally claims hot takes. It's more or less how he worked as a caster too. He'd say a lot of stuff, that he'd eventually get corrected on (and often apologize for the mistake), and would use the good information from then on.

He's basically weaponizing Cunningham's Law to get peoples' opinion.

And personally, I think that it works really well for him since :

1. He's used to degenerate gamers, and has a thick skin. He's able to take on all the hate, and sometimes extract useful information from it. This shouldn't be a thing, but sadly it is.
2. He's really good at steering a discussion, and having you challenge his understanding. He's not just spouting shit and saying "fight me"; he's explaining his train of thoughts and the conclusion he came at, and makes you wonder why you don't come to the same conclusion as him.
3. He's good enough at explaining mechanics and the maths behind them that people are willing to engage with his content.

Phreak is a condescending Asshole but he's not the one responsable for all the Balance Changes. Honestly this Season has been good so far (apart from some of the MSI Changes) so I got nothing to say about the Balance itself (I love the Crit Changes for next Patch).

Phreak is a condescending Asshole though who has had a History of misinterpreting Data to suit whatever Opinion he has of the Game.

Being nice didn't save Mark Yetter or Ghostcrawler from being flamed.

Also this same playerbase has consistently been telling Phreak to kill himself in different ways for years.

This was my first thought. Phreak keeps using the first person instead of referencing the collective balance team. It's logical that people would, in turn, put all the blame on him.

and it is often a terrible one

Is it though, or are people just pre-convinced that anything Phreak does will be bad?

Have you seen this sub? If you don't have disdain for most of these people then you're doing it wrong