Will the easiest class in Riot's MMO still be able to win at the very top of the game, or is it a stepping stone you outgrow once you get good? Riot has never said. An MMO is a game where thousands of players share one persistent online world, and nearly every one of them hands you a class on day one, a fixed set of abilities you then live with. The single thing Riot has confirmed about its own is that it is set in Runeterra, the fictional world of League of Legends, its free five-on-five team battle game, known as League.
League has just answered that question in public. Phroxzon, the lead gameplay designer on League, wrote on September 12 that a champion you can learn in a single evening has to stay strong at every rank, the professional leagues included. A champion is one of League's playable characters, and Phroxzon is the name Matt Leung-Harrison posts under. His reason was not competitive purity. It was that most players have jobs, school or kids and cannot play hundreds of games a year.
That is League's answer. The MMO has none, and the gap between the two is what this piece is about. RuneGrove's read, and it is ours rather than Riot's: the MMO should take the same line, then go one step further. Every class should be able to clear the hardest content in the game. The player who has put in a thousand hours should still be plainly better than the player who has put in ten. Time invested is allowed to separate players. The class you picked on day one is not.
What League Decided, in Two Points
Phroxzon posted "Simple Champions and Frustration" on September 12 and it had about 179,000 views six days later. Four numbered points; two of them settle the question an MMO has to answer.
The post is an X article, the long-form format on X, and it is titled "Simple Champions and Frustration". Phroxzon runs the teams behind League's champions, balance, preseason and game modes. Balance is the work of deciding how strong each champion is allowed to be. He published the piece at 23:51 UTC on September 12. By September 18 it had about 179,000 views.
The complaints he is answering are about champions with very few moving parts. Nasus, a jackal-headed brawler whose signature strike grows permanently stronger every time it lands a killing blow, has been one of the most requested nerfs in Riot's own player surveys across the West (in his post that means North America, Europe and South America). A nerf is a deliberate cut to a character's power. Viktor, a mage who whittles enemies down from range, has been a running argument on social media in the same three regions.
His position is that Riot should hold the line. "Nerfing simple champions until complex champions are always better again is not a healthier state," he wrote. He left both doors open anyway. Riot may cut Nasus again, and it is watching Viktor, though he called that case "less clear" because being frustrating is not on its own a reason to weaken a character.
If high-level success is only reserved for difficult champions, League becomes increasingly hardcore and less welcoming over time, especially with work, school, kids, etc.
— Matt "Phroxzon" Leung-Harrison, lead gameplay designer on League of Legends, September 12 2026, the post
Read that sentence as an MMO designer and it stops being a balance note. It is a statement about who the game is for. The people it protects are the people who will get a few hours a week in a shared world, if that.
1 A simple class has to work at the top, not just at the start
His first point is that simple champions "need to be strong at all skill brackets". They should not be training wheels that fall off the moment a player gets good. He wants at least some of them to keep "an aspirational path to mastery even in Elite and Pro play", meaning the top of League's ranked ladder and the professional leagues. His example is Nocturne, a demon assembled out of nightmares. Somebody who learned the game on Nocturne should get to watch the best players in the world win with it, instead of being told to drop a favorite because they improved.
The MMO version of that sentence writes itself. If the simplest class in Riot's MMO stops working once the hardest content starts, it was never a class. It was a tutorial with a name.
2 A hard class gets paid in agency, not in damage
His second point is that difficult champions are "often paid in agency". They get "more ways to control a situation; choosing engagements, escaping ganks, pressuring risklessly." A gank is a surprise attack from an enemy who walks into your lane, and a champion with a dash over a wall can simply leave one. Plenty of simple champions, he wrote, "can't make up for a mistake by just escaping over a wall."
That is the currency an MMO would have to pay in as well. What mastery buys is control over the fight, not a bigger number on the same button.
The trade has to hold at the very top too. If Kiin, a professional League player, got more out of mastering Nasus than out of mastering K'Sante, a tank whose ultimate ability transforms his entire kit mid-fight, "the incentives would be wrong," Phroxzon wrote. He does not think that is where League sits today.
His other two points fold into one idea: mechanically simple does not mean simple to play well. Nasus, Viktor and Master Yi, a swordsman and one of the last masters of an old sword art from Ionia, a Runeterra land of spirit and balance, put their skill into knowing the matchup, reading where the enemy is and picking the moment to commit. "A lot of the time you can't see all the difficult decisions these players are making to achieve success," he wrote. He also wrote that simple champions "reach close to peak output quickly", so when Nasus is overtuned, most Nasus players can show you exactly how strong that is. A player with thousands of games on Azir, an emperor who fights by commanding soldiers made of sand, is often still nowhere near that character's ceiling. That is why a small change to a simple champion lands so hard.
The line that matters most for an MMO sits in his third point. "Difficult champions are opt in," he wrote: pick one and you are "opting into the higher pressure and burden to execute well to outplay some of the simple champions." You cannot do the hard thing to build a lead and then stop doing it. He closed on a sentence that reads like policy: "We think power in simplicity is value worth fighting for."
None of this arrived out of nowhere. On August 4 he posted the Patch 26.16 preview, and when a player asked for the survey data behind it, he answered with a design position instead: League needs the right amount of frustration to survive, a post more than 778,000 people have now read. On September 11 he put out a 43-minute video walking through Patch 26.18, a League balance update. The X article landed the next day.
August 4
Patch 26.16 preview
The thread where a player asked for the survey data.
September 11
Patch 26.18 rundown video
Frustration by region, in 43 minutes.
September 12
"Simple Champions and Frustration"
The X article, posted at 23:51 UTC.
September 18
About 179,000 views
Where the post stood six days later.
Swap the word champion for the word class and every line above is a decision Riot's MMO will have to make before anybody logs in. It has not made one out loud.
What This Means for the Riot MMO
Riot has never described class difficulty for its MMO. Our position: every class clears the hardest content, and the hours a player puts in still show.
Riot has not publicly described class design or difficulty for its MMO. The game is being built by a different team from the one balancing League, and in June 2026 that team hired Brian Holinka, a combat designer who worked on World of Warcraft, Blizzard's long-running MMO. Phroxzon is a League designer, not an MMO developer, and his post never mentions the MMO once. What it is, instead, is a statement of what Riot values in its biggest game.
Our read, and it is ours rather than Riot's: the MMO should adopt both points as written. Every class, including the one a new player can learn in a night, should be able to clear a raid, the hardest group content most MMOs have. The reward for putting in the hours should be agency, more ways to steer a fight, rather than a bigger number on the same button.
Those are two separate promises and both have to hold. The class you pick should never decide whether you are allowed in the room. The time you put in should still decide how well you do once you are in it. A game that breaks the first promise turns hardcore by accident, which is the exact drift Phroxzon says League refuses. A game that breaks the second one tells its most committed players that their hours bought nothing.
| Side by side | League, per Phroxzon | Riot's MMO |
|---|---|---|
| Simple characters at the top | Must stay strong at all skill brackets | Not revealed |
| Difficulty | Opt in: the hard pick carries the burden to execute | Not revealed |
| Who it is tuned for | Players with work, school and kids | Not revealed |
| Regional differences | Surveyed region by region, with different verdicts | Not revealed |
| Setting | Runeterra | Runeterra |
- A class with a handful of buttons should be able to hold its own in a raid, rather than only carrying new players through leveling, the early stretch where a character grows stronger.
- "Difficult champions are opt in" maps onto optional hard modes sitting over a gentler default, rather than one hard game for everybody.
- The audience Phroxzon describes, people short on time, is the likeliest first wave for anything Riot launches next.
- League ships one patch and lets each region argue on its own ladder. A shared world cannot split the argument that cleanly, and Riot has said nothing about how it would try.
One studio has already taken the opt-in idea literally. Star Wars: The Old Republic, an MMO set in the Star Wars universe that launched in December 2011, is testing a difficulty dial for its open world, and on its test server two friends can fight the same monster on different settings while standing next to each other. That is the MMO version of opt in: the hard game is there, and nobody is forced into it.
That is the MMO version of opt in: the hard game is there, and nobody is forced into it.
Runeterra, the world the MMO is set in, has been staging this exact argument for centuries of its own fiction, in Shurima, a desert empire that sank under the sand and has since risen again.
Nasus is one of the Ascended, the god-warriors of ancient Shurima, mortals raised to immortality by a ritual. His own biography casts him as a keeper of knowledge and a strategist whose judgment steered the empire for centuries. That is a strange echo of the third point in the post, where the case for Nasus is that his players win on knowledge rather than on hands.
The ritual ran through the Sun Disc, a colossal golden disc that hung above the capital of Shurima, and Riot filmed the empire's return around it. "Shurima: Rise of the Ascended", the official League cinematic below, opens on Sivir, a mercenary who turns out to be the last of Azir's bloodline, bleeding out in a sealed tomb until the emperor rises over her.
K'Sante comes from Nazumah, a free oasis city on the southern edge of Shurima. Its founders were mortals who refused to bow to the Ascended and walked south until they found water. His biography has him fighting colossal beasts and ruthless Ascended to keep the place standing.
So the easy pick is a god-warrior and the hard pick is the mortal who hunts god-warriors. Nobody on the balance team planned that, and we are not claiming they did. It is still the cleanest picture of the trade the post describes: raw reliable power on one side, more options and more work on the other. If the MMO ever lets you play either kind, that is the trade its designers will have had to price.
That map is the world Riot draws on, not a launch plan. Which regions the MMO opens with, how much of the map it covers, how big it is, what era it sits in, what it runs on and what it costs are all unrevealed. Shurima gets the attention here because Nasus and K'Sante come from it, and the crests above illustrate the fiction rather than a starting area.
Riot co-founder Marc Merrill has said the company jokingly calls the MMO the Grail internally, and whoever designs its classes inherits the audience League is now openly balanced for: people with work, school and kids who cannot play hundreds of games a year. Riot keeps changing how League treats those players in other ways too, down to opening voice chat to whole teams of strangers.
One Game, Two Verdicts
Riot's own surveys read Nasus as weak in Korea, China and Vietnam and strong in North America, Europe and South America. A shared world does not get to answer twice.
There is one thing League can do that a shared world cannot. It can give a different answer in each region. Players disagree about Nasus depending on where they play. In the East (Korea, China and Vietnam, in the examples he uses), Nasus's "performance and frustration at higher skill levels seems low, while the West think he's still very strong." His guess at why: "probably because the East is stronger at laning phase," the opening stretch of a match where players mostly face their direct opponent.
The video he posted the day before goes much further into that split. It runs 43 minutes, it is called "Frustration Man Speaks!", and it opens on case studies rather than patch numbers. Seraphine, a singer who fights with sound, is the cleanest one. PCGamesN, a PC gaming news site, reported on September 12 that she rates highly on Riot's frustration surveys in the West while being "basically not really complained about in eastern regions."
Nasus gets the same treatment in the video. Surveys from the West asked for the nerf, while players in China, which he describes as a region that likes simple champions, told Riot the recent Nasus changes had landed well. He also explains where those numbers come from. Riot sends surveys out region by region, and what comes back often disagrees with what social media says.
An MMO does not get that luxury. League ships one patch and lets each region's ladder argue on its own. A shared world has a much harder time keeping those arguments apart, and Riot has said nothing about how, or whether, its MMO will group players by region. Whichever way that goes, the question this piece opened on is the one that decides the rest: does the class you can learn in a night still hold up when the hardest fight in the game starts?
Your Take
Should the simplest classes in Riot's MMO be viable at the very top of endgame?
Sources and What to Watch
Where this piece came from, and three more RuneGrove reads: the frustration argument that came first, one MMO testing the opt-in idea, and what Riot has said out loud about its own.
Sources: the X article "Simple Champions and Frustration" by Matt "Phroxzon" Leung-Harrison, posted September 12 2026 at 23:51 UTC and re-read on September 18; his Patch 26.18 rundown video of September 11; and PCGamesN's September 12 report on that video. Riot's words are quoted as Riot's. The read on the unannounced MMO is RuneGrove's, it is speculative, and it is labelled that way wherever it appears.
