Hey guys, I've tried to introduce my several of my friends to League, and have had some trouble when I do. It is oftentimes difficult for my friends to learn how to play the game. These include people with extensive gaming backgrounds- RPG, MMO, FPS and even RTS. They quickly grasp the basics, as taught in the initial tutorial, but have trouble figuring out mechanics that belong to MOBAs.
In the past couple of days, a post talking about how difficult it is for new players to get into the game made it to the front page (Link). While a lot of what he was talking about was the toxicity of other players, making the game easier to understand would be able to help.
I would like to see League become more accessible to new players and have a few thoughts that might help. I would also love to hear from you guys any thoughts you might have.
Problem: New players don’t know what kind of items to build.
What happens now: Players either:
- Build poorly and never improve.
- Get told how to build properly by their teammates either politely or rudely.
- Look up guides or watch streams online, and slowly improve.
Solution: Have a Shop and Items tutorial. Show players how different color numbers in abilities correlates to gaining value from different items. Talk about how armor and magic resist work, as well as armor penetration and spell penetration. Finally, touch upon how you can build to counter your opponents items.
Another option is to have a tutorial video accessible at any time from the Profile Page (maybe instead of the Achievements or Spells tab).
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Problem: New players become attached to a free week champion and become lost after the rotation.
What happens now: Players end up either trying to buy the champion that they liked, or feel kind of screwed over if the can’t afford it. Also, they are usually surprised by the rotation, because unless they’re told about it, they get very little warning before the only character they know how to play becomes unavailable. Players do eventually pick up other champions, but my anecdotal evidence tells me that they’re a little off balanced and bothered by their loss.
Solution: Have a tip in champion select saying that the champions marked with a ! are free for this week, and will be replaced with another 10 free champions within about a week. Ideally, it would include either a date or day of the week so new players can plan for when that occurs. Additionally, it would be great if new players could temporarily unlock a champion that was free the previous week for one extra week. This would give them time to become acclimated to a few more champions, while still having access to their favorite. However, since it only lasts a week, they still are likely to end up buying the Champion- they just have a more gradual weaning off.
Another option is that in the second “free week” they can only play one game a day with that champion, again, so they have access to it, but are encourage to play others as well.
Riot could also add a tab where the “Spectate Live” feature is currently located with a list of the free champions and when they rotate out, so that the information is prominently displayed and new players can see when the rotation occurs, before the game begins.
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Problem: New players are treated poorly because their teammates expect them to either be a smurf account or higher level than they actually are.
What happens now: The same old refrain that I've been going through- players denigrate new players skill, not because they are toxic, but because they assume the new player has more experience than they do. In some cases, they might use colloquialisms and technical jargon (Leash, bait, going ham etc...) that a new player might not understand. The apparent ignoring of perfectly sensible advice or questions can set people on edge and make them act more toxic than they normally would.
Solution: Try a “New Player” border or badge in champion select and on the loading screen. It would only be seen by your team, so the other team won’t camp the new guy. It might encourage players to be more lenient and give the new player tips and instructions when otherwise they would be quiet and just assume that the AP Ashe is a complete idiot.
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Problem: New players are put into games with toxic players.
What happens now: The new players believe that they are bad players, or believe they are worse than they actually are. They might not risk playing Normals, they might uninstall and leave the game, or in the worse case scenario, they lash out and become toxic players themselves. At the end of the battle tutorial, the game briefly mentions reporting other players, but doesn’t go into detail.
Solution: At the end of the tutorial, have an example player so you can show the report icon as well as the honor icon (which is currently not part of the tutorial). Additionally, in the tutorial, while telling players about chat, say that it is possible to mute offensive or mean players and that it is best to not engage the trolls.
Additionally, if at all possible, it would be nice to see if Riot could develop tools to determine if an account is a smurf. I don’t know how technically feasible it is to do that, but Riot does have massive amounts of data and could potentially analyze certain parts of the game to identify smurfs. One way of doing this would be to track the language used by higher level players, and see how frequently it is used. If a low level account, playing from the same IP as a high level account is using language frequently used by high level accounts or smurfs, then it could be flagged as a smurf. Accounts that are not smurfs could then be matched with other non-smurf accounts.
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tl;dr: Tools and accessibility for new players, while better than some other games, is also very far from ideal. These are just some ideas to make League an easier game to get into.
I’d love to hear the thoughts of other players, especially those who have started recently and have stuff to add. And don’t get me started on the Tutorials.
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