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I feel that he’s completely wrong saying that healers only lead to stalemates; consider a push without a medic ( no overheals, no uber, nothing to save people being focused ). This would obviously make pushing less viable and lead to a more stalemate-centered game. Medics using their ubercharge to gain positional/health advantage, and then using the fact that they can sustain the team is – in TF2 – the only reason why pushing is possible.

The same goes for other games, my example being Dota 2: Without an item like Mekansm, pushing would be nearly impossible, and in order to keep a push going you need some sort of sustain. I remember in particular a game where we stacked necrolyte, dazzle, omniknight, treant and some carry, and spent 5-10 minutes in the enemy base from the 10 minute mark (if you’re not familiar with dota: this is quite extreme). Just because of that sustain, we were able to not keep a stalemate up; we forced the opponents to react to our aggressiveness (allowed by the sustain).

Apparently (judging by the thread) there is no such thing as sustain in LoL, but from my limited experience this will only lead to any sort of group action either leading to either team wiping entirely, or nobody taking a fall at all. Because there’s nothing to keep you in the fights, most often both teams will retreat without really engaging fully (and occasionally there are chases which end with someone using the 100% retarded flash spell).

To conclude: Medics/Healers/Sustainers is what allows for aggressiveness in this kind of games. This person claiming healing leads to stalemate seems to be a prime example of what LoL and Riot Games are: stuck in mindsets that won’t take gaming forward.

(on a sidenote: interesting that he actually follows comp TF2; sad that he (as a developer of a competitive game) doesnt see the need for a difference in meta between pub and comp play.)

Quoted from MoZz

To be honest, I don’t know why stalemates are considered to be something bad.

The team that is better will capitalize on their opponents mistakes to break the stalemate in their favor.

If it wasn’t for stalemates a match would degenerate to a 24/7 dm fest, where positioning i.e. makes a minor difference.

I think he said that stalemates are just a result of a bad game design, in this case that ubers can be only countered by other ubers.

Quoted from Enef

I do find it interesting that a high level employee in Riot watched Competitive TF2 for a while, maybe another mixup match player there?

Well he is leading champion designer for lol, so yeah I guess if your job is to balance champions then you should explore different games with differents styles and so.