Yes, but there are not many companies like Zynga.

There are many companies like EA.

Well, as far as market.

True, true.

I definitely agree with that and was very disappointed in Dragon Age from a mechanics standpoint. It seemed like they tried to simplify it, while also leaving out a lot of the depth and versatility that BG, BG2, IWD, and IWD2 had captured.

Specifically, the mage spells had a few clear dominant choices that were superior to all others simply due to the combat mechanics.

At least you can "share" it on Facebook -.-

<shivers>

Sure, Zynga is making a ton of money. But it's not clear they will sustain those rates -- it coudl be that a lot of people on FB are becoming 'inoculated' to FB gaming, and the total market size of social is still a lot smarter than core and midcore. Zynga is very resourceful and I'm sure they will continue to make money, but it's not a sure thing that social will continue to grow so quickly.

How do you balance Crowd Control?

That seems to me to be the toughest number to tweak, especially with things that have a strong anti-fun component for the target of the CC. This seems to be further exasperated when a team can stack CCs on a single target (or targets) in a team fight, and your team can't counter, either due to positioning or character selection.

Just looking at Elementz's tier list, we can generally predict that those characters with more and better CCs will be towards the top of the list, like Janna, Sona, Galio, Ashe, Annie, Amumu, Shen, while characters with fewer or harder to use CCs are towards the bottom, like Katarina, Lux, Swain, Urgot, or Tryndamere.

Granted this is not always the case, because Mal'zahar has a super CC and is bottom tier, while Corki is top tier with no CC, but for the most part, the metagame seems to be leaning towards CC stacking.

Is there some fix in the works, perhaps diminishing returns on CCs, that will level the playing field between characters with CC and characters without?

And EA releases so many hardcore games lately... All major labels like EA, Activision-Blizzard go more and more after not only casuals, but "ages from 8 to 80 with 30 spare minutes to spend".

They do not care about giving players a challenge, they give players cheap and fast entertainment for masses.
You follow the same pattern, with this fear of challenge and higher skill-cap and a bit of "burden of knowledge".

Sure it will make you money, sure it will look good on big screens for WCG, but i'm afraid level of competitive play in LOL will be a laughing stock of all competitive community in 1-2 years, if you continue to move in this direction.

P.S. And don't let me get started with how badly Zileas fails when he compares MOBA to RTS saying "Starcraft is simple mechanically, yet has great depth". This comparison fails on so many levels its completely invalid...

TL;DR : You give players challenge, or your game slowly faids away from competitive area, no matter how much $$$ you award at your tournaments.

I feel enlighten after reading the original post.

Thanks for the post Zileas, it really clarifies for me why the skill cap in LoL is so low. I guess the priority has always been on the casual experience over the competitive scene, hence why balance is never a top priority, why knee-jerk "fixes" like Leblanc getting insta-nerfed due to low-elo complaints happen, and why left-field changes like Zilean's ult getting toned down are implemented. Pandering to the lowest common denominator just insults players who are willing to invest time and effort into mastering the game's mechanics.