by hazered
Someone already talked about Starcraft: Brood War on page 1, but I'll bring it up again. The game was played professionally for over a decade, with no update patches from Blizzard. Contrary to popular belief, the game was never balanced, one faction always had an edge over the others. But players kept discovering new strategies to counter each other, so all 3 factions each had their time in the spotlight, dominating the others.There were many fighting games that couldn't be patched, and weren't balanced, but survived as interesting competitive games for years. Though I admit some of them would've been slightly improved with some adjustments to make worthless characters at least somewhat viable, but that's moot. They were still successful games, sometimes because of their wild imbalance, e.g. Marvel vs Capcom 2
That's why people disagree with this notion that games should be as perfectly balanced as possible, as an end in itself. It doesn't always lead to better games, and it's not always required when the players themselves can shape the game. What's important is that games are balanced to the point that they become more interesting.
I don't know the rationale behind Root's balance changes, but as far as I can tell from the designer's attitude, it's not necessarily an admission of defeat. I'm guessing it's to keep each faction making interesting choices, even when considering metagames and other players' reactions. A game where the Vagabond gets attacked immediately (because everyone is convinced it's OP), and half the board becomes hostile and difficult to move through, is arguably a more interesting game than one where the Vagabond just plays solitaire the whole time with no resistance. Hypothetically, if the Woodland Alliance stops revolting because it's widely considered a weak move, then as a faction it has become rather boring.
And not that anyone thinks balance patches are 100% bad, but most of the popular videogames that do so don't seem to ever solve anything. MOBAs, for example, are constantly adding in new content, upsetting the balance. Fixing one balance problem immediately leads to something else becoming overpowered. It seems futile to aim for perfect balance... which is why I'm convinced they're not really trying. They just need the meta-game to not become stale, so that people keep playing and spending money.