Chapter 154

Patch.

From small things like fixing in-game bugs or minor balance adjustments, to large-scale updates—it refers to all acts of modifying software.

And patch notes are posted at 6 AM on the day the patch is applied.

Simply put, it’s a guide that explains what content has been changed.

Usually, unless a new game mode comes out or a major event occurs, these patch notes tend to just flow by like water.

The number of people who check and monitor them regularly is small.

Coaches from professional teams who are sensitive to changes in the game.

And creators who post that information.

However, this patch had one more faction joining the battle.

It started with a post that went up the night before, after the official account’s broadcast ended.

[But what about Kael?]

==

No matter how you look at it, knowing the next pattern is way too broken, right?

Think about it, the time to stack 3 vital hits is 2 seconds.

The invincibility skill is basically just 2 seconds lol

==

Kael’s skills were fundamentally designed to focus on the time it takes to successfully land vital hits, so that higher skill levels could produce higher performance.

To explain the baseline again.

About 20 seconds is considered somewhat skilled. Even though it’s called “somewhat skilled,” this is actually the bottom tier when looking only at people with at least some proficiency.

In other words, it’s “somewhat skilled” by overall user standards, but it’s the bottom among Kael users who have some level of proficiency.

The average time is 15-20 seconds.

10-15 seconds is the peak performance you can achieve with Kael.

At least when facing opponents of similar skill, that is.

The absolute best is 8 seconds, but that’s only possible when a Challenger gets extremely lucky or is facing Bronze players.

-Oh right. That was a thing

-Kael discussions have been coming up occasionally, but will it actually be applied in a patch?

-But 10 seconds is more than enough to get crazy value with Kael, and 2 seconds is definitely crossing the line lol

-That’s 5 times faster!

-No, but how exactly did he do it anyway lol

Surprisingly, those who started getting interested and talking about this topic weren’t Kael one-tricks.

The Kael one-tricks were actually.

[Please don’t let Kael be in the patch notes]

==

Please please please please

==

They were praying.

The reason was simple. If Kael-related content was included in the patch notes and changes were made to the patterns.

-Let’s learn it too and get some sweet benefits!

-Don’t patch Kael, don’t touch him, just let it slide!

-Developers, only Seo-jun can get the sweet benefits anyway, so just don’t touch it

└There’s only one person who can get the benefits anyway, so we should touch it instead

└I don’t know about that, but I want to use Judgment Sword super fast someday too

└Give up that false hope, Kael one-trick

They would no longer be able to get those sweet benefits.

Of course, the overall public opinion was that it needed to be touched, but various opinions came up.

[No guys, think about it. Will that 2 seconds always be 2 seconds?]

==

When that streamer played Kael, if you look at his opponents, they were Bronze and unranked.

That’s why he pulled off such overpowered performance.

Against opponents of similar skill, even if you know the next vital hit location, you can’t easily exploit it. Of course, it would still be freaking strong. But is it nerf-worthy?

==

-Lol first of all, no one has Seo-jun’s skill level

└The Demonic Cult said this? Are you guys’ leader’s personality rubbing off on you?

└I’ll apologize on their behalf. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

-That makes sense

└Still, knowing the pattern is wrong, isn’t it?

└It does go against fairness

[Going against fairness—that’s also skill.]

==

Nerfing one hero by targeting one skilled person is a bit much.

The game company has some pride, you know

==

This also sparked debate about whether it was the right thing to say.

And in this kind of fight, other examples needed to come up.

[Has this never happened before? A precedent of targeting one person who was too good and nerfing them?]

It was unprecedented.

More precisely, it could have happened.

But at least in their memory, there had never been a case where a game company nerfed a hero character because of just one person.

-This time too, we don’t know if they’ll do it or not, so don’t get ahead of yourselves

-There have been cases where they nerfed because a small number of people were too overpowered. But never a precedent of nerfing because of ‘just one person’. We’ll see what happens this time

-What about that Windstorm Sword who supposedly learned from him?

└That guy regressed like shit lmao he was saying he wanted to get tutored again, but oh right. They’re on the same team now?

└LOL he’ll definitely ask Seo-jun during the tournament. He’s a true Kael one-trick!

[What about Eric then? That also looks overpowered as hell]

-Don’t touch Eric… If they nerf Eric, I’m seriously quitting the game (Eric 1,000 games certification photo)

└Whoa. Master? Lmao

└Basically only this person has built up Eric statistics in the upper tiers lol. No one else plays him

The League’s community was buzzing all night with this topic and LOS-related discussions.

The next day at 6 AM,

Now it was truly the time when only the real ones were left.

Posts started flooding in again.

[Kael appeared in the patch notes lol. They actually nerfed him. Still, other users probably won’t be affected.]

[No mention of the pattern formula. Just a skill cooldown. Radiance’s Blessing cooldown 7 seconds]

[What is the game company thinking?]

[As long as Eric survived T_T]

[The pattern might have been secretly changed]

[But seriously, this is causing a lot of controversy in many ways LOL. Just watching from the sidelines is freaking hilarious]

-He really is in a league of his own

-Just the goat!

-Hurry up and apologize, those fans lol

└Starting another fight, sorry sorry sorry sorry

* * *

[Senior]

[Senior]

[Did you see this? (link)]

[People are being pretty negative?]

[You didn’t change the pattern, right?]

The transition from late night to early morning at 6 AM.

Unless you’re quite diligent, most office workers who normally start work at 9 AM would be sleeping at this time.

And at this sleeping time, the message notifications woke up The League’s balance team manager.

Balance patches are usually carried out by headquarters based on tournaments. However, Korea’s solo queue also serves as a reference point, and more importantly, since team managers from each branch hold meetings every time, the distinction has become meaningless.

Therefore, the fact that the Korean team manager was deeply involved in this Kael balance patch was obvious.

[Senior, what’s this ambiguous 7 seconds about?]

[Is this the level of the game company?]

[And people are also curious about what happened with the pattern! Shouldn’t we tell them?]

The notifications kept ringing.

The team manager cursed as he woke up, then waited for his eyes to focus before reading the messages.

“Ugh, this freaking brat…”

It was a friendly colleague from another department.

[Are you trying to die?]

[Sorry! Then have a great day today too!]

He had actually asked the day before to let him know if the reaction was bad, being diligent. However, he hadn’t told him to make such a fuss.

“Hmm.”

He slowly checked the community reactions.

For people who work on patch-related matters, the most important thing is data.

The second is public opinion.

In the end, public opinion is also data from collective play experience. It just got pushed down in priority because it’s not as likely to be correct.

“As expected, just as I thought. This level is fine.”

Everyone seemed to acknowledge the necessity of the nerf itself.

They didn’t touch other people’s performance either.

However, there were two unresolved issues.

What’s the meaning of 7 seconds, and.

Was the pattern changed? And if not, why wasn’t it changed?

“7 seconds is just…”

An appropriate number that came out of the meeting. A restraining device to prevent users who figured out the pattern from having too powerful an overpowered advantage, based on the judgment that other users could still approach up to 8 seconds.

7 seconds would give Kael performance higher than his original design, but they judged that much was acceptable.

“And the pattern…”

Actually, when Seo-jun first played Kael, at the emergency meeting he had called, the discussion to modify the pattern came up first.

The idea was to appropriately change the existing generation formula so that existing users wouldn’t lose their feel while preventing that mysterious user from having overpowered abilities.

Many team managers agreed that this was the best way to minimize damage to existing users while preventing that somehow-accomplished user from gaining overpowered abilities.

It was certainly rational and fully feasible.

Modifying the formula appropriately would be a bit troublesome, but surely they could handle that much.

Most importantly, there was precedent for changing it.

The problem was.

‘The problem was what happened with that precedent.’

7 years ago.

There was a time when a Kael user’s data looked strange, so the team manager at the time had him investigated.

Back then, Kael had vital hit patterns and additional damage, plus extra effects, but rapidly attacking vital hits wasn’t the main focus.

[Kael is a sustained damage dealer, so why is this guy’s burst damage so high!]

[I’ll check it out!]

However, even then, rapidly exploiting vital hits could produce sufficiently high performance, which is why it caught their attention.

[Crazy… Is he reading the pattern?]

[It must be leaked information!]

[Really?]

[If we find out who the external leaker is, I won’t let them get away with it!]

They immediately modified the formula.

But it was useless.

[He’s reading it again! Again!]

[Damn it. Then we’ll exclude Manager Kim from the next modification work.]

They excluded team members one by one while searching for the leaker.

[He started reading it again!]

[At this point, isn’t it a bug user?]

[No. We must find that leaker.]

They made minor adjustments.

[He started calculating the pattern a few attacks into the game and grinned, then began predicting patterns again! He’s definitely laughing at us!]

[Is it really a bug?]

They made major changes too.

[This time he only started predicting after one game passed! But his accuracy rate is 100%!]

[Are you excited about this?]

[No, but is it even possible to predict just from knowing this formula?]

[I don’t know either.]

[Team manager?]

[Still, there must be something! I’m going to settle this with that bastard.]

After changing it several more times.

[Damn it, who is it!]

[You were the only one who modified it this time, team manager.]

[Was it me?]

In the end, the team manager at the time panicked and rolled back to the initial values.

Fortunately, it wasn’t extremely overpowered, so it was fine.

After all, only that one user noticed the changes, so they could proceed with submarine patches.

However, the team manager had to write a disciplinary report, and that user disappeared.

That user’s existence was forgotten, and Kael was reworked.

‘But that person came back?’

He couldn’t access users’ personal information, but he was certain.

Damn it.

Anyway, the reason they didn’t touch the pattern was one thing.

‘It would be useless even if we changed it.’

He desperately hoped that no more heroes would need strange modifications in the future.

* * *

“Hyung, are you okay?”

Lee Dong-soo, who had finished his morning workout and come down from the ring, took off his gloves and sat next to Seo-jun.

“What about?”

“Kael, you know. If they secretly changed the pattern formula with a submarine patch, wouldn’t that be way too much? The game company basically sniped you! No, why are you so calm about this!”

“Is that so? Well, whatever.”

“What? No, the skill cooldown is fine from a balance perspective, but if they touched the pattern, I’m seriously going to sue them. The whole identity is that skilled people can do it faster, but nerfing it because someone does it too well isn’t right!”

Instead of Lee Dong-soo getting angry on his behalf, Seo-jun was about to wave his hand dismissively when he became curious and asked.

“Hmm. Is the turnover rate high at that company?”

“Probably not? Surface is the majority shareholder, so it’s basically a subsidiary, plus the benefits are good and the treatment is good… But why the turnover rate?”

“Then they didn’t touch it.”

Seo-jun had been certain since meeting Windstorm Sword.

That someone who knew him was definitely still there.

Playing the game quietly was fine, so it wouldn’t matter if they knew, but he had had some unique experiences with the development company.

The nerf itself was justified.

He hadn’t failed to anticipate it, so he understood.

Most importantly, what could he do even if they changed the pattern?

‘Back then, every time I entered the game, the pattern would change, and it was fun solving the puzzle.’

He hoped that excellent developer who had provided such mini-games hadn’t quit.

“No, aren’t you frustrated at all! You can lose one guaranteed ban card!”

“I’m not frustrated. So what have you been up to lately?”

When Seo-jun changed the subject, Lee Dong-soo lit up.

“Oh? Finally asking that question, are you?”

What’s he talking about.

Seo-jun looked at Lee Dong-soo like he was looking at a weird guy.

“You need my help after all, right? I’ve been doing really well lately thanks to hyung, so I have free time if you want. That’s right. I’ll specially coach you. This Lee Dong-soo of FreeFall! We’re what kind of relationship…”

“No. That’s not it, I was just asking because you’ve seemed really free lately.”

“……”

“You bragged about finishing a 4,000-piece puzzle two days ago. I was wondering when exactly you practice.”

“……”