I already know what most of your answers will be on this question, but I participated in a situation so bizarre today that I knew I had to write a post. For anyone who may not know, power creep is essentially the process by which a game becomes unbalanced, often by the continual addition of powerful features and mechanics. In the case of League of Legends, power creep can be seen in the amount of AP on an average late-game carry, or the health/damage ratio of a bruiser, just to name a few examples. On with the story.

I decided to play a quick game before bed, as I often do. I was playing Vayne, planning to run the build I used when she first came out (Sheen -> Wit’s End – > Trinity – not sure I’m in love with it). I ended up in our bottom lane with my ally, Kennen. We were up against a Graves and an Amumu, which went really well for us. Well enough that Kennen was unstoppable within 12 minutes. It was a solid game. What baffled me, though, was Kennen’s rapid AP increases. I hadn’t looked before the game started, but suddenly he was level 7 with more than 100 AP. It wasn’t long before he was over the 300 mark, which is when I attempted to do a little mental math.

Kennen was sitting on something like 365 AP with just a Deathcap and a Will of the Ancients. That’s it. At first I thought, my god, he only has 190 AP in items and yet I’m seeing 365. I had forgotten about the aura from WotA, which brought him up to 220 base. Even with the bonus from Rabadon’s and the 5 percent mastery, that would still only be 297. Shortly thereafter, Kennen bought another Needlessly Large Rod, bringing his base up to 300. His shown AP: 535. Yup. He had 535 AP with just 300 AP in items. What the hell is going on there?

That’s power creep, and it’s totally out of hand. One of the biggest problems I see is that it can be difficult to understand and difficult to predict. Players are already dealing huge amounts of incoming information for an average game. Do we really need to be performing this kind of math while playing, too? Trust me, I don’t think things are going to change; Riot has been using the additive method of problem solving for far too long. I do wish we could go back to a slightly simpler time, though, when a player’s items and his numbers lined up in expected ways.

Plain and simple. DotA had this feature, whereby you could choose a hero that your teammate might want. It’s a great feature because often the guy with first pick rights on your team doesn’t want to play a highly desired character. Swap allows him to pick a more contested character, making much better use of the early draft position than would otherwise be possible.

There is one big drawback here – the champion unlock system. Because most players don’t have access to every champion, the draft system can be a bit ugly. When I was playing a lot with players from SoloMid I would often end up with a less than desirable comp or a toon that I wasn’t great with, if only because we wanted to have the strongest comp and I was the only player on my team with a given toon unlocked.

This all goes back to a post I made some time ago regarding champion balance as the primary matchmaking problem. Balance problems encourage players to use a limited subset of heroes, meaning they don’t get to know the rest of the available champions. Ranked play might even exacerbate this problem, simply because players will get the idea of a strongest comp, post it in the forums, and the mob will follow.

Still, swap would be better than no swap. Every team, even those in solo queue, should have a chance to make the most of their highest draft positions.