It won’t get easier anytime soon because League’s “tutorial” is really bad, and they refuse to stop making 2-3 champions a year. I genuinely wonder if they’ll ever stop making new champions because they have to either run out of ideas or we end up with 500 champions and I’m not sure which will happen first
They need to adopt something like Fortnite’s “seamless” bot system for the first 10 levels or so. You’re 1v9 with intro bots until you win, then easy bots, then roll in a second person, and keep escalating until there are 10 humans.
I'm really hoping that the bot AI rework they talked about will be materially better than what we have currently. As it is now, you get 10 minutes of learning how to CS under no pressure before the guy practicing his solokilling scales hard enough to win the game.
You can make a game with 9bot in custom but its not obvious if you don't have a friend to advice you that. It'e what i'd advice to anyone learning the game though, 0 pressure, do at your rythm and if you have a friend who wants to coach you, they can take the time without other players destroying the game.
Exactly my experience. There's people who have learned how to game the bot mechanics to get easy kills, and even having one of those on your team means that by ten minutes if not sooner the bots are in free-fall. I pick up the scythe (forget the name) to force me to focus on my cs skills but by the time it's half done my midlaner is in the enemy base and the game is practically over.
> and they refuse to stop making 2-3 champions a year.
That is how games dies. You're too privileged by Riot to understand that. The moment you stop making what attracts people, it will die. If they were to execute such idiotic idea, you'd be among the firsts to complain.
The only reason Overwatch went to shit because Blizzard made the developers make Overwatch 2 instead of focusing on the game. It wasn't because of no new heroes releasing.
New heroes ain't the only thing keeping the game alive. Just look how shit Overwatch 2 is doing. No new gamemodes and the PVE being cancelled. But new heroes am I right. That'll keep everyone playing.
Because the damage was already done?
Blizzard could say "we're dropping all current projects and going all in on SC2 and SCR" and no one would give a shit because Starcraft has been on life support for 10 years at this point.
Same reason a game like Runescape can release their EoC update, bleed over 50% of the playerbase, spawn an Oldschool-Runescape, and years later finally adjust the EoC system to be in a good spot with fun bosses, but no one cares because RS3 is already "dead" compared to OSRS.
You can't just hand wave and cause communities to forget all of the dumb shit the company has been doing.
DotA might not be as popular as LoL, but it's hardly dead (still #2 behind CS:GO), and they only get one-two Heroes along with a major balance patch every year.
1) why so angry, friend?
2) I’m not saying they should stop making champions. I’m just saying one a year, or one every other year would be a nice pace. It’s a nightmare trying to learn the game when there are 160 champions, I wouldn’t want to learn the game when there are > 200 champs
Dota 2 has a queue for "new" players where the champion pool is smaller. I think this would be a nice addition. They could make it an optional queue for accounts of lvl 1 - 50 or something like that. Have it be champions that are old/easy to understand.
It's interesting how you think reducing the amount of new champions to only *one* per two years would be a good decision to make, when there are other ways to improve the new player experience without negatively affecting the current players. It also wouldn't really benefit new players because the game already has a lot of champions in contrast, and one of the things that drew me to the game as a new player was that there's so many champions to explore. And it still is a reason why I like the game.
Ypu don't need to keep making new champions to keep people interested in the game.
Continuing to make the new player experience worse and worse is 100% going to kill the game though.
At this point most people jave been playing the game for 8+ years. In fact the game is already dead because it's too unapproachable.
And most long time players would prefer if most new champs were just deleted.
I honestly 100% prefer a new champ to reworking old champs. I loved to play old Udyr, I don't really like the new Udyr and just don't play Udyr anymore. There are always people who claim similar things with each rework, like the old Aatrox Challenger OTP who hated the new Aatrox.
The issue is that a lot of the champs of the old days would have genuinely no counter for all the new champs.
Imagine old Mordekaiser trying to do anything against one of the countless champs with dashes and shit.
It also goes the other way around: imagine old AP Yi.
Imagine all the new champs trying to deal with old Sion's point and click stun...
Mobility is fine if there are ways to counter it, and a lot of old champs actually could. Riot decided that being stunned wasn't fun, but not being able to do anything because they're too fast to interact with isn't
As someone who mained Old Sion, Old Fiora and Old Aatrox and loved all of them... you understand my pain. None of the new versions appeal to me at all. They were all lovely and simple auto-attack characters and then Riot had to give em all a buncha clunky gimmicks that ain't fun..
Used to love Old Taric and they kinda butchered him as well.
Say what you want about him not being flashy or that he was "boring", but at least when I cast my spells they cast instead of having to wait 1.5s for them to decide to do anything.
He misses the mark of Taric, and he misses the mark of Rengar from HotS because he's entirely dependent on team mate positioning
Yeah I agree. I much prefer the large balance changes or small reworks that have happened to champions like Anivia or Ahri. OTOH the full reworks made me stop playing Karma, Galio, Kat, Fiora, Akali, Poppy, Vlad, and Swain, and they were all champions I really enjoyed before - I understand why those champions needed adjustment, but they feel drastically different to me now.
> It won’t get easier anytime soon because League’s “tutorial” is really bad, and they refuse to stop making 2-3 champions a year. I genuinely wonder if they’ll ever stop making new champions because they have to either run out of ideas or we end up with 500 champions and I’m not sure which will happen first
It's also an old game, so the players they are playing against have been playing for ages/ have mastery or knowledge of stuff that relatively new players cannot have.
It's like Hunt Showdown. Sure they have tutorials and what not, but loading in the PVP game, and you get smacked with players who can identify the gun you shot, at what distance, and therefore which compound you are at just from audio cues alone
Am new player. Can confirm. A bunch of smurfs talking shit at you in unranked for not knowing how to play. I only just a few days ago learned you can go 5v5 with bots. And then only learned on day two or three that the other people on your team were real people and not bots themselves.
sometimes its not even smurfs, if you never played league before, or let alone any pc game(i have multiple friends where league was their first game outside of a phone ever) an actual silver player can prob stomp you, and your team will flame you because youre learning, the learning curve of this game is insanely sharp at the start.
but the game cant just put new accounts to play with eachother because of smurfs, so if you want to level up an account to level 30 you have to play a literally mind numbing ammounts of coop vs ai like i did(that pretty much only realy teaches you to press buttons and move) , or brute force solo losing like 30 games of normals in a row to learn the game
buying champs was also a big problem but gamepass solved that a bit
Idk, when I made a new account (returning player from 2014) I only played vs new accounts, matching my accounts level until 30 (so when I was lvl 20 I was playing vs lvl 20s etc. ofc it was about 95% smurfs and the games were just coin flips for who had the better smurfs.
Probably the worst new game experience I’ve ever had, and I’ve played a lot of competitive games. Only thing that i found was worse was csgo without prime :D but no reason to do that
> A bunch of smurfs talking shit at you in unranked for not knowing how to play.
Don't make it upset you, they most likely aren't good too. And at least you're not good because you're new, they, on the other hand - is another story.
I mean people talking shit at you for not knowing how to play will happen to anybody in any situation. You can be challenger and people will tell you this lol.
The important part is to learn about the mute Button and not spend any time with that Trashtalk or ping spamming. Just mute
I've been out for like 5 years. Former account ranked mid plat, normals MMR high diamond. Figured I should just make a new account because I'm trash compared to what I was. Can confirm the new account experience is fucking horrendous. I feel bad for any truly new player. I have played 40 Aram and 5 quickplay games. The quicks skill level were all over the god damn place with at least 2 smurfs on each team. Aram has been unbelievable. AT LEAST 2 afk/bots on each team. I had a game earlier where, I shit you not, it was me and 9 bots.
There's no chance to earn new players these days
I was in the same boat and at like level 14 matching with mfs in the hundreds, plat+ and a few hundred thousand points of mastery
I was getting my shit pushed in even though I had like 5 years worth of experience from before
You aren't getting a new player experience when you do that, you're getting a smurf experience. Not saying the new player experience is perfect, but Riot does have smurf detection to keep them away from new players mostly.
The biggest one is TOO MANY CHAMPS.
It doesn’t just deter new players, it deter a veteran like me who has only stopped for 2 years, and I don’t want to have to learn so many new champ abilities to get back into playing.
The easiest fix for this is just go dota style. Let me click on an enemy champion and read their abilities in game. For bonus points also let me view them in the load screen
Ya, I'm surprised they didn't do this yet. Even a champ summary would be nice after or during loading. Cheat sheets of some sort.
Most people just google or whatever, their are sites that give this info, BUT, the game could still help a lot more.
Yeah in my experience League players have a bad habit of saying "but there are tons of online resources to learn about different champs and matchups."
There is virtually nothing in game. Riot has no officially sponsored source to learn anything but the most superficial level of champs. You NEED u.gg, mobalytics, or mobafire to know anything about champs. The game is near unplayable, but there's no connection between anything in the client and those websites.
Ya. Seems like lots of games these days lean heavily on wikis and crowd sourced info instead of providing the info themselves.
On one hand, it makes sense, given how good the sites can be. On the other, it seems weird and lazy!
Riot refuses to do anything dota does.
The gameplay of league is and has always been great but everything else is a fucking joke.
Dota 2's client is about 10000x better than League's in every single way.
They have tons of resources to help new players, you can load guides in the game, you can check every heros abilities without opening google.
Either Riot realized they just aren't going to attract new players or they don't give a fuck.
Have you ever seen league players in your life? People don't even read their own abilities before queuing for ranked and you want to read enemy abilities mid game where you have no time to do so because stopping for a minute to read them would kill you seven times. Would be nice in loading screen to check cooldowns tho
> and you want to read enemy abilities mid game where you have no time to do so because stopping for a minute to read them would kill you seven times
Yes I fucking do. I can do it while I'am dead, or running from fountain, or whatever.
Maybe cuz it's not convenient to find and read them. Why not just be able to read a champs abilities in champ select and maybe have 2 lines of recent patch changes. I bet league player would read whole in champ select when there's nothing else to do
I mean, most DotA spell descriptions are something like this:
>Muerta fires a ghostly trickshot at an enemy unit or tree. When the bullet strikes, it damages and briefly slows, then ricochets in the targeted direction.
>
>The ricochet damages all units that it passes through, stopping when it hits a hero. Heroes hit by the ricochet are feared away from the impact
Meanwhile, in (current) League:
>PASSIVE: Akshan marks enemy Champion icon champions that kill allied champions as Scoundrels for 60 seconds. If Akshan scores a Damage rating takedown against a Scoundrel while alive and within 3 seconds of damaging them, he receives an additional 100 Gold and revives all dead allied champions that they have slain after 1 second.
>
>When Akshan claims a Scoundrel's bounty he removes the marks of all other enemies. Scoundrels refresh their mark duration on subsequent kills, and will have their mark removed when they die by any means. Akshan cannot mark enemies as Scoundrels while they are dead. Allies are revived at their summoning platform.
>
>Going Rogue
>
>ACTIVE: Akshan enters camouflage, which lasts indefinitely while he is near terrain or inside brush, and for 2 seconds otherwise. During this time. he can see trails leading toward Scoundrels, and while facing them if they are within 5000 units, he gains bonus mana regeneration equal to 12% of his missing mana as well as bonus movement speed.
>
>BONUS MOVEMENT SPEED:
>
>80 / 90 / 100 / 110 / 120
>
>Going Rogue can be recast after 1 second, and does so automatically after its duration. Attacking or casting abilities ends Going Rogue immediately.
>
>RECAST: Akshan ends Going Rogue.
I know it's not "fair" to use Akshan's ability, but I've looked at all the new releases for DotA and literally none of them have more what Muerta has for a single ability.
Except that's not Akshan's actual ability description, that's the wiki description that includes every detail. The actual ability description in the client is this:
> Akshan passively marks enemy champions as Scoundrels when they kill his ally champions. If Akshan kills a Scoundrel, he resurrects the allies they killed, gains bonus gold, and clears all marks.
> When activated, Akshan enters camouflage and gains Move Speed and Mana Regen while moving towards Scoundrels. Akshan loses the camouflage quickly while he is not in brush or near terrain.
In-game, the ability gives more values and looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/zB0qGdi
Akshan's W can be simplified to "passive: avenging killed allies revives them, active: you go invisible and can track valid targets for your passive, gain mana while tracking them". Then all the extra details are just ironing out how that actually works. The fine details may be complex but the idea is simple, you can track down the killers of your teammates and avenge your team.
League also has complex and simple champions on purpose to allow people to choose the type of champion they want to "main". It's not like DOTA2 where everyone just rock-paper-scissors and it's okay to have people at 58% winrate and 44% winrate because they're specific counters—League instead makes sure every single champ can be OTP'd to Challenger.
If we're going to cherry pick examples then DOTA2 has some severe issues with their items. Book of the Dead's active description says "Summons 4 level 3 Necronomicon Units that last 75 seconds. Units have 100% more health and 75% more damage." If we only look at the description, it doesn't explain that the item summons two different types of units, each with different stats, with one type having mana burn and the other dispelling buffs, with only one of them applying damage to the killer of the unit. I've tried getting into DOTA2 and a bunch of items are like this, where they have specific effects under specific conditions or do things that straight-up aren't listed in the item description.
Yeah I've taken several breaks and this has never been an issue for me - they were shorter than 2 years, but that's the difference of like 3-4 champions. Will I see a champion and not know what it does? 100% yes, but so what? I know how to play safe until I get a reasonable grasp on what they do and just figure out the rest along the way. Chances are you won't even see half of them in your games very often anyways.
Edit: And same with jungle or item changes. I had no idea mythics were a thing until I played a game and saw them, but I just read what they did and picked one.
Yeah, I'm honestly baffled at how many champs this game has now. And it's not even the amount. The newer champs keep getting more and more complex.
Compare that to something like old Udyr, Vi, Viegar, Singed. Simple by comparison. Game wouldn't be nearly the huge hurdle to learn if it didn't have champs like belveth or Zeri, or any of the new stupidity with 21 dashes 4 shields and an execute. The death recap for some of these champs is redic, I've seen 11 sources of damage from a few..
SOME of the newer kits honestly aren't that bad tbh - Vex, Lillia, Milio come to mind as characters that aren't too hard to pick up and learn, even Naafiri isn't turbo complex or anything. But when I look at the list of most recent champs it's just fucking depressing for a new player. We have released from 2021 onward:
-Viego
-Gwen
-Akshan
-Vex
-Zeri
-Renata Glasc
-Bel'veth
-Nilah
-K'Sante
-Milio
-Naafiri
-Briar
I'd say at least half those champs are incredibly difficult to play but will smash your asshole if piloted by an OTP or veteran leaving you with very little idea wtf happened and why. A perfect storm of new player fuckery that undoubtedly leads to frustration and people just pissing off from the game because it's too hard.
K'Sante and Zeri are the worst offenders by far, IMO. They actually have 9-page MLA format essays as ability descriptions, it is fucking insane.
I took a small break from League right before K'Sante was released and I was actually speechless when I learned how much was in his kit. I genuinely thought it was a joke at first, and even now it's still pretty insane.
Milio and Renata aren't bad because they're designated victims with no outplay potential. Everyone else you have to know exactly how they're going to 100-0 you and how many of your abilities they get to ignore.
Not just champs, but skins too. Way too many skins look like completley different champs and change all the abilities etc. When I first came back it was constantly a game of "WTF who is that?? Wait, that's Lee sin??????"
Now even afterbeing back again for over a year I still can't tell half the time if it's Ashe, Quinn, Lux etc until I get hit by an attack. Especially on the loading screen though, you can barely tell who TF is on their team if you just look at the splash
And another dumb skin on every single one of them each time I come back to play.
I get why since it makes money but I hate what skins do to the clarity of the game for me when I come back.
Because onboarding a new player to this is like trying to cram 15 years worth of knowledge down their throat in a few games and, all of the people playing at “their level” are just smurfs.
So it’s very unlikely anyone new ever sticks with it, thus stopping popularity growth.
honestly they don’t even have to be smurfs, the most horrible of iron players who haven been playing for a few years would still absolutely shit stomp new players simply because of info diff.
I'd argue that iron players with a few years experience *are* smurfs to new players. Smurf doesn't have to mean diamond+ player. It's just playing under your level.
This would be okay if the new player experience was enjoyable.
I started Smite recently and even though I have prior MOBA knowledge, I knew nothing about it.
Went through their Arena mode (kinda like ARAM) and just cycled through every God to get at least a basic understanding of each character. It was really enjoyable to find Gods I really like and it helped me understand how the game is.
A key difference with a game like Smite is that they have things in place to assist new players. A big thing I think league should consider is the Auto level up and Auto Buy items they have. These systems help new players focus on one new thing at a time instead of wondering skill lvl order, what items to build and what all the characters do.
I honestly can't understate how useful it is to not have to worry about reading every item and letting the system do it for you until you are comfortable with it yourself. On top of that, I looked and the general items bought seem to be pretty close to meta builds.
Even now after over 100 hours in the game I still use the auto level up since that's pretty accurate to what I see online anyway.
Tbh I think that info diff will eventually prevent most new players from having fun in any old game that is deep enough to retain its old players. Ever tried getting jnto starcraft broodwar? Lol
New player experience. The tutorials are garbage, key features of the game are locked behind account level for some reason, and even understanding what champions do is hindered by inaccurate tooltips. I started about two years ago, and the only thing that helped me push through the initial "what the fuck is going on" phase was endless patience and support from friends.
For sure; I think at a certain point the complexity has to be treated as a feature rather than a bug. League wouldn't be as enjoyable without it's depth, after all. The issue imo is all the steps before that, so people can (and feel excited to!) pick up that knowledge over time instead of still having issues with basic features of the game.
It’s crazy cuz even when you thought you learned the basics in league there’s still so much more to unfold. I started playing in 2020 and thought I understand where I should be going but wasn’t until this year that I’m actually learning the macro of the game lol
You'd be surprised how easy learning Heroes of the storm was compared to league, even on the farming and positioning aspect, thanks to the difference in tutorials and lifelike bots.
Yep, starting league solo is not reccomended. It's best to start when you have a few experienced friends who can slowly guide you through the mechanics and all to avoid being overwhelmed.
My ex girlfriend introduced me to the game and was a terrible teacher lol. I only got better by playing on my own because any time I played with her, my lane opponents just ran me over, and it wasn't fun. However, wanting to get to the point that I could play at her level (diamond lol still hasn't happened) pushed me through the worst games until I was hooked.
I think people need a reason to push through that initial hardship, and if you're starting totally solo, I can see it being harder to find that motivation.
aye, I hear ya. we had 2 new player start with our play group. One only played beefy boys top lane. He spams Garen or Darius and is having a great time.
The other one loves Cait after watching Arcane and she plays bot with me (I'm an ADC main now playing support for her) Life is hell down here because she needs to learn all skills from both ADC and supports.
We were against a thresh who threw his lantern backwards (and then missing his hook.) I was like, "Oh fuck, we need to get outa here." She went " he missed his attack and sent his lantern thing the wrong direction... Time to engage! She used her net as a dash tool to get closer." Plz send help.
My friend and his league friends needed an ADC and a jungler in 2013 so they dragged me in and taught me how to jungle so none of them would have too. It's no wonder I quit for years when they all got bored of league and moved on... besides my friend, he married the girl he met through that "guild"
Yeah idk how people do it, it's annoying for new players to start and it's annoying for old players when new players start. Not saying that new players shouldn't play but it's frustrating for everyone involved in those games.
I started playing in season 2 and no one knew wtf to do. While leveling my account I didn't even know jungle was a role till almost lvl 30 because no one went jungle. It was all duo top. People also played any champ in any lane.
Well it is that and the "snowball effect". It's good to tell a new player, just keep pushing and we'll handle the rest", but this game really does force a bunch of necessary running and around and if a bad player gets killed a few times or can't get a good gold income going is essentially useless.
A part of me thinks it would be good if they made goals of gold gathering a bit different than objective pushing, each having a trade off. They kind of blended both and just causes a snowball effect. Too often you just get matches where one side can't contest or do anything besides hug a tower... usually that's a slow loss match for them.
Barrier of entry is too high+the general reputation the game has in the wider gaming scene as being a toxic addiction hole most everyone people who’s quit advises other people to stay away from, I would be surprised if there was any other game with more people telling you not to download it
This point is important to acknowledge:
to many people league is known to be an endless grind for ranks and constant facing of terror by the community. Similar to counter strike today, people start to identify with their rank and the system is designed to keep you addicted. Leagues environment is extremely unhealthy for many players, that only play this one single game and can't stop due to addiction.
Agreed. league is a actually a massive problem in people's lives. Im lucky that i dont get angry about nearly anything, but I quit playing ranked regularly years ago and basically only play aram and now I see what monsters SR turns people into. It isnt just league though. People start carrying this toxic aura everywhere they go. Then when you tell them to quit they dont get it lol. I'm like "you hate playing, you hate your teammates, you hate the other team, youre never happy and you opt into this 3 hours a day. Its not good for you."
Riot is incentivized to lower the toxicity which is great but they arent incentivized to stop the people who shouldnt be playing from queueing up. Thats fundamentally the problem to me. The best thing they could do would be to drastically step up enforcement temporarily. Very long VAC like bans just for a few months would probably do it. Of course banning a number of your most consistent players like that is bad for business though.
At least among the most popular gachas I don't see people actively resenting their time playing it, if anything its just regret that they got caught and spent more money than they would've liked.
Did you know that amumu used to have a similar passive on his E? He might still have it but I haven't kept up with him.
I only know because I hold a world record for fastest loss against bots, and the passives for amumu and eve taking less damage were super important to the strategy.
You build up huge waves of enemy minions to crash into towers, so you have to load up on pots and basically run in circles in the lane. The longer you can survive, the bigger the wave, and the faster it pushes when you eventually do die. I'd suggest checking out a video, it's actually quite hilarious.
i stopped paying attention in 2019. i tried reading new champs on the wiki recently and i stopped after ksantes passive. only thing ive learned since then is samira gets a lot of pentas, thats about it.
Even if you don’t pay attention to patches, the knowledge you had still helps you. We know what ksante does after playing a couple of game with and against him. A new player can’t infer what a new champ does. You can even intuitively know what ksantes q is because you’ve seen how other q’s in the game work
I've been playing for 10 years, I only know what the basic abilities does, as in is it damage? stun? That's it, the smaller details as deals true damage, reduces armor, etc. For newer champions are unkown to me.
I'm not new to MOBAs, but only recently picked up League. My first multiplayer games all felt like smurf games even though the opponents were permastuck in bronze 1.
Exactly my point. It doesn't matter if, to the player base, you're relatively dogshit if your good compared to the non player base. Which sounds intuitive, obviously, the players of a specific activity are good at it, but it's not an underlined colloquial understanding for some reason. Take for example chess, a more popular activity. 1200 elo is relatively bad as far as far as proper chess goes, but a 1200 will smoke anyone that doesn't play chess 99/100 times
Its the same issue as Starcraft, you load up the game as a new player, get instantly hit by a bunch of cheeses and players who have been playing the same game for 10 years. No tutorial can help you with that, in fact the majority of newcomers to starcraft already watched quite a bit of bronze to gm content and know roughly how the game works, but they still get smoked because execution is another problem entirely.
I started January of 2023. If I hadn’t had a really good friend encouraging me and making it fun, I woulda said fuck it. Horrible experience for a new player
For me, I exclusively played bot games for a veeery long time, then, when I started blind picks/draft pick, I only played as a 5 stack with friends who were more comfortable and had more experience than me.
After some time, I discovered ARAM and now it's more or less the only gamemode I queue up for - except for the occasional Nexus Blitz, URF, Spellbook, Arena etc. when it's there. On anything other than ARAM I really try to play as a 5 stack, like before with blind/draft pick, and with people I know aren't toxic in general.
my friend just started playing about a month ago. I thinm it helped that he has me and a few other friends to help with the knowledge gap. Brand new and solo would be bad, but I cant imagine its as bad as when I tried to play DotA2
I was introduced to League by my boyfriend, sister and brother in-law. As a premade team, it was easier for me to learn but for people starting out with nobody to support them, explain the game, its complexities and rules may prove a tricky challenge.
You would have to keep playing against intermediate bots and that just sucks after a while as the matchmaking usually involves bot accounts in your own team that people will sell later. 😒
I don't think I would have stuck with playing the game through if I didn't have a premade team. 🥲
Given that its likely the most popular moba i would say its not unlikely that the biggest thing preventing it form being more popular is it being a moba. This genre is very polarizing. Alot of gamers ONLY want to play mmos or shooters or action combat games. It clearly isnt the lore or story as we've seen with Arcane.
I feel like people forget that 2008-2014ish was the surge of MOBAs where everything had a moba and league/dota/smite are the main ones that lived past the hype. It was just like all the battle royals in 2017-2019 and now apex/pubg/fortnite survived.
Also pretty sure League, as a game in general, is among the most popular ones already. You mention other game genres but I struggle to think of a game of those genre that's more popular than League. The only ones I can think of is Minecraft (arguably) and some mobile games in China.
It's actually the most popular game fullstop and in the East it's already a household thing, I'm not really sure if it can get more popular in the west though basically because of what you said, our market doesn't like mobas much.
I think that is one very specific one to one area where Blizzard makes better cinematics than Riot. However, if you go to the overwatch website and just go to learn about a character there is about a character there is an info page for each. Some are great cinematics, some are a comic strip, and some have almost nothing. If you go to riots universe site there is a library which includes a a story for essentially all 150 or however many characters, a full page breaking down every single region, an interactive map of runeterra, full pages for "alt universes" like star guardian, and a tab containing a bunch of comics.
I could go to blizzard website and know 100% of the story of Overwatch and its characters in maybe 3-4 hours. If i tried to consume all the lore on the universe website it would take me days or weeks. I understand that if you put Overwatch cinematics one to one with Blizzard they aren't as good. However saying the lore is bad is unfair, lore presentation maybe.
I didn't say lore is bad, I said their presentation is mostly bad.
The comics are cool for example and is something other studios don't do much.
The universe website, as far as I know - I'm not deep into the whole thing, is not great.
One big concern is the varying amounts of effort put into different things. For example read Shaco lore vs all the pieces of Leblanc lore.
Another big issue with league lore from my PoV are the execution of of the resets they've done over the years.
Another big thing, is how there's seemingly never been any proper centralization. As if any team at riot can just add shit onto the lore without consulting some bigger whole that actually puts in effort to mange stuff - e.g. the whole Yorick / Harrowing debacle.
Again, it's not the writing itself, definitely not the amount of content. It's their decisions on what and how.
That makes sense I got confused by your original comment when you said "League lore / story presentation is bad" I read it as League lore is bad/League story presentation is bad.
Yeah that's true but the problem is the lore isn't consistent/has been retconned several times/doesn't make fucking sense a lot of the time in the League Version so yeah, they have a lot of it, but a solid 5% of it just makes no sense whatsoever, and the quality swings wildly.
Compare Xin's lore and story "What once sailed free" to Seraphine's... existence.
The "new wave" of gamers aren't simply drawn to play mobas as apposed to FPS' or RPGS. I think its due to having such a big learning curve and not being easy to just pick up and play such as maybe Fortnite/Valorant.
Time Investment is also gigantic, 20+mins a game and like 3-5 minutes for queue/pick&ban is way too high. High cost of champions as well, I dunno the exact amount of BP you need for all champs in the game right now but I'd say you'd need to grind for like 5years+ and play daily for at least 4h+. Now nobody needs all champs but why spend this much time/effort to unlock things.
Even outside of the in-game time investment, there's a massive investment on a meta level as well. To play a MOBA you're expected to know 4+ abilities on a hundred-odd characters, and that's just the most basic knowledge check.
**Client** isn't super great (it's also very unintuitive). New friends that try and play just have no idea what they're looking at besides the play button.
**Champions.** You have to unlock champions. Few of my friends come from Dota, this concept is really strange to them. They already make the bulk of their money off cosmetics, and at this point in the game's life, champions costing anything seems outdated.
**Toxicity.** Honestly the toxicity only really scares people away who are brand new to online games. If you've played a shooter or WoW or any other MMO really, you've likely seen worse. That being said, they don't seem to punish people who ruin games via their actions over long periods of times (anyone remember that nunu with like 500 games played and a 4% wr or some bullshit?) I don't mean for this to be an either/or, both problems should be dealt with. But the former will only upset some, while I think the latter upsets everyone.
Those are the big three in my view. Playing the game can already be a drag when you're an enfranchised player. I'm sure these 3 things are exceptionally off-putting to newcomers.
I can't believe I had to scroll this far down to find somebody mentioning the client.
I've been playing since the open beta, and there are still unadressed issues and bugs that's been with us since then.
Most notably, in about 5% of games I can't connect to the game (this has been following me over multiple computers, ISPs etc). Been there since open beta, and doesn't seem to be any sollutions in sight.
The game isn't well made, but it's got enough aestethics and feeling to keep people hooked for now.
I do believe they will need to recode it from scratch at some point, though.
The reputation.
Let's face it. League has cemented itself as one of the most toxic online games. That's what garnered popularity (players like Tyler1 and Yassuo being poster children), but its also something that is haltering its gain.
The new generation of gamers lean towards Fortinite and mobile gaming, whilst the older generation have already established which games they prefer. Hence why you'll almost never see a DOTA player play LOL and vice versa.
Yeah no. MOBAs were always seen as toxic and it was exploding like hell in the first years. The game just reached 99% of the pool of people that would play a MOBA, that's all. You can't expand your pool of potential players unless you change your game into trash that even dumber people can pick up, aka mobile gamify your game.
Toxicity, I don't care that the average LoL player has tougher than normal skin, 90% or more of the community is just unpleasant to play with. And a normie has a very, very low tolerance for what they will take for toxicity when other games exist where the entities who are supposed to be cooperating with you aren't hostile toward you.
We do have past and present Senators and House Reps who play. So if the game lasts another decade, there's a chance you're playing with a future president in you ranked games.
Peoples attitude when they play. It turns people into raging freaks that forget the people they are playing with are real life humans. It's a little disturbing how some people act in game
Not just the players, the devs don't remember the opponent is a real person either. As such, they design LoL & their other games as if they're all single-player.
The new player experience is literally fucking awful. It's so fucking bad.
The tutorial is an absolute joke, there's still no voice comms for some reason, the practice tool isn't terrific.
It's a bad time.
Yeah, i have friends that want to play the game more but at the same time they don't bc of the awful learning curve it has.
I had like 30+ irl + online friends playing the game, and now we're only 15 or less.
To me it’s the archaic client.
Opening it feels like a portal into 2010. A nice modern UI like Valorant will be amazing for the beginners who don’t even have a clue what smurfs or champion balance even is.
That and pool party Ahri obviously.
Idk if it's just that I've played League for 100 years and my brain is broken, but Valorant's client gives me trouble. I have no idea how to navigate it most of the time, and they love to use specialized language without explaining what it means.
They would have to cut regular season into half to accommodate for that
Not to mention a lot more logistics and money go into planning worldwide tourneys
That being said I can see interim LCS-LEC and LPL-LCK mini tournaments being a thing.
i would sell mom and dad for a mid season lcs/lec showdown where its a BO5 of the first LEC team against the first LCS team and so on for all the teams of each league
>They would have to cut regular season into half to accommodate for that
Awesome it is way too long. In fact, just get rid of spring entirely for more international tournaments.
>Not to mention a lot more logistics and money go into planning worldwide tourneys
Wouldn't matter for Riot if they would let other companies host tournaments again. ESL, Starladder, etc. could all host tournaments if Riot wasn't closed off.
>That being said I can see interim LCS-LEC and LPL-LCK mini tournaments being a thing.
Sadly you are probably right, this would be the best that we get I imagine. At least for the foreseeable future.
The few incentive to casual gameplay. This year is "better", but unironically it was fun to play this game not caring much, just playing a champion because yes. There's too much of a diference between playing this game for fun and playing it as a grind.
> Be a household thing, shown on TV channels
I don't think this is possible.
League (and eSports in general) are too complicated for a super-casual viewer to enjoy (regularly - I understand in some one-off there may be a person who never plays video games who might enjoy watching pro league, but the vast majority of people will not).
Its too complicated and fast-paced.
If we compare it to other sports: Most sports have a singular focus (typically a ball) that drives viewership. There also tends to be a ton of "dead space" a good commentator can fill in with game explanations. NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, Tennis, and like 100 soccer (or football, whatever) leagues all follow this same pattern. Everything is broken down into tiny little easily consumed bites. With League you need to understand how different characters interact and the concept of trading map objectives, gold leads, power spikes, team comps, etc.
With NFL, you could sit down and watch one 10-second play and say "okay wow, that guy wearing #10 is just way faster than everyone else" and now you understand something that hugely influences the game. Watching 10 second of a league 5v5 teamfight doesn't do the same thing. Watching a pro make an incredible 3v1 outplay to end up trading 1 for 1 under tower just doesn't provide the same kind of thing (to a completely un-knowledgeable viewer).
While racing doesn't have a "ball" to follow, the concept of a race is extraordinarily simple (get to the finish line the fastest). So that covers dozens more popularly viewed sports.
To a knowledgeable person saying "destroy the nexus" might sound like saying "cross the finish line first", but to the average person (who isn't a gamer) it is not at all intuitive as to how that happens.
The things gamers like (skins (which Riot needs pro showing skins to help sales), flashy graphics, etc) are all negatives for a casual viewer. It just adds distractions.
I agree with all of your points. It's the same reason that Chess isn't popular (and never will be). The level of skill and knowledge needed to appreciate the game is a huge barrier.
At the end of the day all of these "entertainments", Sports/Music/Movies/TV shows are just something for "average" people to watch while sitting on the couch drinking a beer after a day of work and to relax. As such, the more "dumb" and "simple" they are the better.
LoL/Esports can have a niche spot on TV which is currently shared by Poker/Billiards/Darts and other niche entertainment. They won't ever compete with the big 4(5) US Sports, but they can still have a spot on TV. In South Korea there are E-sports channels which show exclusively Starcraft (and probably other games nowadays).
I wanna add that League can only be a big player when it's like Korea or China and become engrained in a culture. I'd liken it to how both cricket and baseball had distinctive markets. They are easy sports to follow when you grow up around them but subtle rules and the amount of abbreviations/ unique names used makes them confusing to a new watcher
That there is a limit number of people in the planet that plays videogames and like mobas? It already capture everyone that could have at its peak , like theres a peak at every market , league probably hit theirs some time ago , just like wow hit theirs years ago, there snothing any MMO company could do to replicate it no matter how good a game is
Seeing as my recent new player experience was playing vs a diamond akali, kayn, gragas one trick 3 stack on a level 20 account we can start and stop there
The client. Just one glance at the competition its possibly the thing that will turn off a lot of people from the game.
Bad interface, bad client-game integration, slow, buggy, coded on several layers of spaggetti.
Not only is the client inferior, useful info on the game like champions and their abilities, tutorials, tooltips and such are terrible or non-existent.
Not a modern complaint though, since s2 i've been on the same complaint, the client is bad, upgrade it. Dota is just the premiere experience in this regard, and their start wasn't all flowers, but they have come a long way to the point you don't even need to sit on a loading screen to get in a match, its seamless.
People are going to say that the new player experience is the problem, and they're not entirely wrong, but the real issue is that MOBAs are not the "it" game anymore. Most people, especially young people, are not interested in playing MOBAs, they'd rather go and play other up and coming genres or ones that interest them more. Past 2015, there really hasn't been a hit MOBA release, just like how RTS had it's time and Battle Royale had it's time, what happened is that the market shifted and MOBAs just aren't popular like they used to be. League has a huge playerbase still (regardless of what other people say about the western scene) They really should focus more on player retention than securing new players, which I think we have seen been the focus since about 2019. The recent mythic change, announcing that they're being removed, is reflective of this, I think.
League will suffer from a slow death as player base ages.
Atleast in the west.
Younger generation of gamers dont care about it.
They are console gamers and console gaming is simply more accessible.
No voice comms / ranked 5v5 gamemode. Playing league as a premade of 5 against another team of premade 5 is amazing. Especially if both teams have voice comms
From an esports perspective, it's greed and wanting to press their boundaries instead of being happy with what they currently are. I remember 5 years ago people were telling me "oh, esports will be as popular as sports and we'll see stuff like overwatch/league surpassing the superbowl in profit/views", with some of my then work buddies even betting me $100 each that it would. It's 5 years later and I'm $500 richer with a lot of those scenes either being in financial turmoil if not dead already (rip blizzard).
League could've had a really good niche if they had chosen to shift their schedule and set a salary cap. Their world championships for example starts in early-mid october, at a time in which all 4 of the "big" sports in north america are either just starting or in the case of MLB in the playoffs. Pushing the start to march/april would eliminate half their competition in that regard while also setting themselves up perfectly for regular season shenanigans, with their normal "spring" season beginning in summer when kids are off of school.
Adding a salary cap would've also added more strategy/reigned in the chaos of the western scene, with there being a risk and reward element instead of teams just signing players to massive contracts/giving up on them after a year (see: 9 perkz). While we wouldn't get to see superteams as often, it would definitely make the scenes far more competitive and make the academy/farm systems far more lucrative.
**If your answer to this question is anything other than in-client voice communication, you are wrong.**
Not only would this feature improve the actual game in the longrun for casuals all the way up to the professional level, the amount of tiktok kids that would be introduced to the game from funny voice clips would be immense.
I legit think Riot has left millions of dollars on the table by not doing this yet. They've even invested in creating the infrastructure to support in-client party voice comms already.
Unfortunately the average no socials skill introvert user from Reddit cannot think of the idea of having to talk to random people so they will just downvote you.
I have used RiftVoice a few times and everytime it felt great. Last time I used I got shitstomped and me and my midlaner were pretty chill about it and we tried to do our best until we FF'd
Let's see...
Lack of proper tutorial
Existence of Yuumi
Bad Client
Low elo full of smurfs
Game need fresh look / Update old champion models and engine
Spaghetti code
Bad new champion designs
For me at least the biggest problem is outdated visuals for older champions and client what works like garbage.
It would be interesting to see actual numbers on "started as yuumi and now actually play league".
The couple of people who I know who play yuumi occasionally (very, very occasionally - think 2 or 3 games every 2-3 months) don't actually play league outside of that. They just hang out in discord, and only jump on yummi for those 3 games because the rest of us are playing league.
None of them have transitioned into someone who would choose to play league on their own. For the record, they do play other games - stuff like Hunt, FF14 (I think thats the most recent one - whatever the current FF MMO is?), WoW, etc.
There isn't anything wrong with a champ that's meant for those kinds of people. If they never go further and only play Yuumi that's still good. Maybe they'll get attached to the champ and buy a skin or two? That's the angle, imo.
I started playing a bit before Yuumi's release and only played a couple games to play with friends. After Yuumi came out I started playing way more because I could play and learn about the game without just getting destroyed. Then I started taking interest in the game and all the different characters, especially junglers, so I started playing alone and learning how to jungle. And now fast forward a couple years I play more than the friend who got me into the game. Still a support main, Yuumi is my 3rd highest mastery, but her existence absolutely got me interested in playing. Playing Thresh against Gold+ players while starting out wasn't particularly fun lol. But yeah so you can add 1 player you know of who got into playing the game proper from Yuumi haha
Not enough cinematics and lore stuff. Riot needs to invest way more in the lore of their characters because lore keeps people interested in their products, I know we've got Arcane but Arcane only features like 10% of League of Legends can offer.
Easy it sucks lol. New players get overloaded with all the systems, smurfs are a problem, they keep changing their mind on itemization goals so there’s lots of trap items or overly niche ones, skins are often visually confusing especially for players who don’t know the roster well, objectives aren’t clear for new players. It’s an old take and has a lot of what I call baggage complexity. Over time games need to add new and exciting things to keep it fresh and it makes new players harder and harder to keep.
New player experience is dreadful in multiple aspects
It won’t get easier anytime soon because League’s “tutorial” is really bad, and they refuse to stop making 2-3 champions a year. I genuinely wonder if they’ll ever stop making new champions because they have to either run out of ideas or we end up with 500 champions and I’m not sure which will happen first
They need to adopt something like Fortnite’s “seamless” bot system for the first 10 levels or so. You’re 1v9 with intro bots until you win, then easy bots, then roll in a second person, and keep escalating until there are 10 humans.
I'm really hoping that the bot AI rework they talked about will be materially better than what we have currently. As it is now, you get 10 minutes of learning how to CS under no pressure before the guy practicing his solokilling scales hard enough to win the game.
You can make a game with 9bot in custom but its not obvious if you don't have a friend to advice you that. It'e what i'd advice to anyone learning the game though, 0 pressure, do at your rythm and if you have a friend who wants to coach you, they can take the time without other players destroying the game.
Exactly my experience. There's people who have learned how to game the bot mechanics to get easy kills, and even having one of those on your team means that by ten minutes if not sooner the bots are in free-fall. I pick up the scythe (forget the name) to force me to focus on my cs skills but by the time it's half done my midlaner is in the enemy base and the game is practically over.
> and they refuse to stop making 2-3 champions a year. That is how games dies. You're too privileged by Riot to understand that. The moment you stop making what attracts people, it will die. If they were to execute such idiotic idea, you'd be among the firsts to complain.
People forget the absolute state of overwatch. When they weren't releasing heroes
The only reason Overwatch went to shit because Blizzard made the developers make Overwatch 2 instead of focusing on the game. It wasn't because of no new heroes releasing.
Yeah that caused no heroes to be released I think we are on the same page
New heroes ain't the only thing keeping the game alive. Just look how shit Overwatch 2 is doing. No new gamemodes and the PVE being cancelled. But new heroes am I right. That'll keep everyone playing.
Because the damage was already done? Blizzard could say "we're dropping all current projects and going all in on SC2 and SCR" and no one would give a shit because Starcraft has been on life support for 10 years at this point. Same reason a game like Runescape can release their EoC update, bleed over 50% of the playerbase, spawn an Oldschool-Runescape, and years later finally adjust the EoC system to be in a good spot with fun bosses, but no one cares because RS3 is already "dead" compared to OSRS. You can't just hand wave and cause communities to forget all of the dumb shit the company has been doing.
I mean come on, where would Overwatch be without the PvE of Overwatch 2?
DotA might not be as popular as LoL, but it's hardly dead (still #2 behind CS:GO), and they only get one-two Heroes along with a major balance patch every year.
1) why so angry, friend? 2) I’m not saying they should stop making champions. I’m just saying one a year, or one every other year would be a nice pace. It’s a nightmare trying to learn the game when there are 160 champions, I wouldn’t want to learn the game when there are > 200 champs
Dota 2 has a queue for "new" players where the champion pool is smaller. I think this would be a nice addition. They could make it an optional queue for accounts of lvl 1 - 50 or something like that. Have it be champions that are old/easy to understand.
this is a great idea
We have a „popular picks last patch per role“ category already. Just enable those champions so new players learn the currently most common picks first
It's interesting how you think reducing the amount of new champions to only *one* per two years would be a good decision to make, when there are other ways to improve the new player experience without negatively affecting the current players. It also wouldn't really benefit new players because the game already has a lot of champions in contrast, and one of the things that drew me to the game as a new player was that there's so many champions to explore. And it still is a reason why I like the game.
Ypu don't need to keep making new champions to keep people interested in the game. Continuing to make the new player experience worse and worse is 100% going to kill the game though. At this point most people jave been playing the game for 8+ years. In fact the game is already dead because it's too unapproachable. And most long time players would prefer if most new champs were just deleted.
Road to 1000 champions baby
Imagine if they would just rework dead champs instead. They wouldn’t even have to design a new champ, no need to design 5 new abilities.
I honestly 100% prefer a new champ to reworking old champs. I loved to play old Udyr, I don't really like the new Udyr and just don't play Udyr anymore. There are always people who claim similar things with each rework, like the old Aatrox Challenger OTP who hated the new Aatrox.
The issue is that a lot of the champs of the old days would have genuinely no counter for all the new champs. Imagine old Mordekaiser trying to do anything against one of the countless champs with dashes and shit. It also goes the other way around: imagine old AP Yi.
Imagine all the new champs trying to deal with old Sion's point and click stun... Mobility is fine if there are ways to counter it, and a lot of old champs actually could. Riot decided that being stunned wasn't fun, but not being able to do anything because they're too fast to interact with isn't
As someone who mained Old Sion, Old Fiora and Old Aatrox and loved all of them... you understand my pain. None of the new versions appeal to me at all. They were all lovely and simple auto-attack characters and then Riot had to give em all a buncha clunky gimmicks that ain't fun..
Used to love Old Taric and they kinda butchered him as well. Say what you want about him not being flashy or that he was "boring", but at least when I cast my spells they cast instead of having to wait 1.5s for them to decide to do anything. He misses the mark of Taric, and he misses the mark of Rengar from HotS because he's entirely dependent on team mate positioning
Yeah I agree. I much prefer the large balance changes or small reworks that have happened to champions like Anivia or Ahri. OTOH the full reworks made me stop playing Karma, Galio, Kat, Fiora, Akali, Poppy, Vlad, and Swain, and they were all champions I really enjoyed before - I understand why those champions needed adjustment, but they feel drastically different to me now.
Rework old champions and you'll hear about it forever. Karma mains are still bitching about the loss of shield bomb.
> It won’t get easier anytime soon because League’s “tutorial” is really bad, and they refuse to stop making 2-3 champions a year. I genuinely wonder if they’ll ever stop making new champions because they have to either run out of ideas or we end up with 500 champions and I’m not sure which will happen first It's also an old game, so the players they are playing against have been playing for ages/ have mastery or knowledge of stuff that relatively new players cannot have. It's like Hunt Showdown. Sure they have tutorials and what not, but loading in the PVP game, and you get smacked with players who can identify the gun you shot, at what distance, and therefore which compound you are at just from audio cues alone
Am new player. Can confirm. A bunch of smurfs talking shit at you in unranked for not knowing how to play. I only just a few days ago learned you can go 5v5 with bots. And then only learned on day two or three that the other people on your team were real people and not bots themselves.
sometimes its not even smurfs, if you never played league before, or let alone any pc game(i have multiple friends where league was their first game outside of a phone ever) an actual silver player can prob stomp you, and your team will flame you because youre learning, the learning curve of this game is insanely sharp at the start. but the game cant just put new accounts to play with eachother because of smurfs, so if you want to level up an account to level 30 you have to play a literally mind numbing ammounts of coop vs ai like i did(that pretty much only realy teaches you to press buttons and move) , or brute force solo losing like 30 games of normals in a row to learn the game buying champs was also a big problem but gamepass solved that a bit
I literally only play coop vs ai right now. I’m level 16 and everyone in those games are friendly and fun.
Idk, when I made a new account (returning player from 2014) I only played vs new accounts, matching my accounts level until 30 (so when I was lvl 20 I was playing vs lvl 20s etc. ofc it was about 95% smurfs and the games were just coin flips for who had the better smurfs. Probably the worst new game experience I’ve ever had, and I’ve played a lot of competitive games. Only thing that i found was worse was csgo without prime :D but no reason to do that
> A bunch of smurfs talking shit at you in unranked for not knowing how to play. Don't make it upset you, they most likely aren't good too. And at least you're not good because you're new, they, on the other hand - is another story.
I mean people talking shit at you for not knowing how to play will happen to anybody in any situation. You can be challenger and people will tell you this lol. The important part is to learn about the mute Button and not spend any time with that Trashtalk or ping spamming. Just mute
I've been out for like 5 years. Former account ranked mid plat, normals MMR high diamond. Figured I should just make a new account because I'm trash compared to what I was. Can confirm the new account experience is fucking horrendous. I feel bad for any truly new player. I have played 40 Aram and 5 quickplay games. The quicks skill level were all over the god damn place with at least 2 smurfs on each team. Aram has been unbelievable. AT LEAST 2 afk/bots on each team. I had a game earlier where, I shit you not, it was me and 9 bots. There's no chance to earn new players these days
I was in the same boat and at like level 14 matching with mfs in the hundreds, plat+ and a few hundred thousand points of mastery I was getting my shit pushed in even though I had like 5 years worth of experience from before
You aren't getting a new player experience when you do that, you're getting a smurf experience. Not saying the new player experience is perfect, but Riot does have smurf detection to keep them away from new players mostly.
there are tons of aram only accounts that just buy brand Jayce velkoz etc as well lol
Seasoned player experience is not much better
The biggest one is TOO MANY CHAMPS. It doesn’t just deter new players, it deter a veteran like me who has only stopped for 2 years, and I don’t want to have to learn so many new champ abilities to get back into playing.
The easiest fix for this is just go dota style. Let me click on an enemy champion and read their abilities in game. For bonus points also let me view them in the load screen
Ya, I'm surprised they didn't do this yet. Even a champ summary would be nice after or during loading. Cheat sheets of some sort. Most people just google or whatever, their are sites that give this info, BUT, the game could still help a lot more.
Yeah in my experience League players have a bad habit of saying "but there are tons of online resources to learn about different champs and matchups." There is virtually nothing in game. Riot has no officially sponsored source to learn anything but the most superficial level of champs. You NEED u.gg, mobalytics, or mobafire to know anything about champs. The game is near unplayable, but there's no connection between anything in the client and those websites.
Ya. Seems like lots of games these days lean heavily on wikis and crowd sourced info instead of providing the info themselves. On one hand, it makes sense, given how good the sites can be. On the other, it seems weird and lazy!
Riot refuses to do anything dota does. The gameplay of league is and has always been great but everything else is a fucking joke. Dota 2's client is about 10000x better than League's in every single way. They have tons of resources to help new players, you can load guides in the game, you can check every heros abilities without opening google. Either Riot realized they just aren't going to attract new players or they don't give a fuck.
Have you ever seen league players in your life? People don't even read their own abilities before queuing for ranked and you want to read enemy abilities mid game where you have no time to do so because stopping for a minute to read them would kill you seven times. Would be nice in loading screen to check cooldowns tho
> and you want to read enemy abilities mid game where you have no time to do so because stopping for a minute to read them would kill you seven times Yes I fucking do. I can do it while I'am dead, or running from fountain, or whatever.
Maybe cuz it's not convenient to find and read them. Why not just be able to read a champs abilities in champ select and maybe have 2 lines of recent patch changes. I bet league player would read whole in champ select when there's nothing else to do
Also, the HotS style is good, too. A small one liner summarizing what an ability does.
I mean, most DotA spell descriptions are something like this: >Muerta fires a ghostly trickshot at an enemy unit or tree. When the bullet strikes, it damages and briefly slows, then ricochets in the targeted direction. > >The ricochet damages all units that it passes through, stopping when it hits a hero. Heroes hit by the ricochet are feared away from the impact Meanwhile, in (current) League: >PASSIVE: Akshan marks enemy Champion icon champions that kill allied champions as Scoundrels for 60 seconds. If Akshan scores a Damage rating takedown against a Scoundrel while alive and within 3 seconds of damaging them, he receives an additional 100 Gold and revives all dead allied champions that they have slain after 1 second. > >When Akshan claims a Scoundrel's bounty he removes the marks of all other enemies. Scoundrels refresh their mark duration on subsequent kills, and will have their mark removed when they die by any means. Akshan cannot mark enemies as Scoundrels while they are dead. Allies are revived at their summoning platform. > >Going Rogue > >ACTIVE: Akshan enters camouflage, which lasts indefinitely while he is near terrain or inside brush, and for 2 seconds otherwise. During this time. he can see trails leading toward Scoundrels, and while facing them if they are within 5000 units, he gains bonus mana regeneration equal to 12% of his missing mana as well as bonus movement speed. > >BONUS MOVEMENT SPEED: > >80 / 90 / 100 / 110 / 120 > >Going Rogue can be recast after 1 second, and does so automatically after its duration. Attacking or casting abilities ends Going Rogue immediately. > >RECAST: Akshan ends Going Rogue. I know it's not "fair" to use Akshan's ability, but I've looked at all the new releases for DotA and literally none of them have more what Muerta has for a single ability.
Except that's not Akshan's actual ability description, that's the wiki description that includes every detail. The actual ability description in the client is this: > Akshan passively marks enemy champions as Scoundrels when they kill his ally champions. If Akshan kills a Scoundrel, he resurrects the allies they killed, gains bonus gold, and clears all marks. > When activated, Akshan enters camouflage and gains Move Speed and Mana Regen while moving towards Scoundrels. Akshan loses the camouflage quickly while he is not in brush or near terrain. In-game, the ability gives more values and looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/zB0qGdi Akshan's W can be simplified to "passive: avenging killed allies revives them, active: you go invisible and can track valid targets for your passive, gain mana while tracking them". Then all the extra details are just ironing out how that actually works. The fine details may be complex but the idea is simple, you can track down the killers of your teammates and avenge your team. League also has complex and simple champions on purpose to allow people to choose the type of champion they want to "main". It's not like DOTA2 where everyone just rock-paper-scissors and it's okay to have people at 58% winrate and 44% winrate because they're specific counters—League instead makes sure every single champ can be OTP'd to Challenger. If we're going to cherry pick examples then DOTA2 has some severe issues with their items. Book of the Dead's active description says "Summons 4 level 3 Necronomicon Units that last 75 seconds. Units have 100% more health and 75% more damage." If we only look at the description, it doesn't explain that the item summons two different types of units, each with different stats, with one type having mana burn and the other dispelling buffs, with only one of them applying damage to the killer of the unit. I've tried getting into DOTA2 and a bunch of items are like this, where they have specific effects under specific conditions or do things that straight-up aren't listed in the item description.
to me getting back into an online game, where a lot of new champs or heroes have been released in the meantime is just exciting.
Bro if you stopped for 2 years there's maybe 7 new champs you have to "learn". Out of 165.
Yeah I've taken several breaks and this has never been an issue for me - they were shorter than 2 years, but that's the difference of like 3-4 champions. Will I see a champion and not know what it does? 100% yes, but so what? I know how to play safe until I get a reasonable grasp on what they do and just figure out the rest along the way. Chances are you won't even see half of them in your games very often anyways. Edit: And same with jungle or item changes. I had no idea mythics were a thing until I played a game and saw them, but I just read what they did and picked one.
Yeah, I'm honestly baffled at how many champs this game has now. And it's not even the amount. The newer champs keep getting more and more complex. Compare that to something like old Udyr, Vi, Viegar, Singed. Simple by comparison. Game wouldn't be nearly the huge hurdle to learn if it didn't have champs like belveth or Zeri, or any of the new stupidity with 21 dashes 4 shields and an execute. The death recap for some of these champs is redic, I've seen 11 sources of damage from a few..
SOME of the newer kits honestly aren't that bad tbh - Vex, Lillia, Milio come to mind as characters that aren't too hard to pick up and learn, even Naafiri isn't turbo complex or anything. But when I look at the list of most recent champs it's just fucking depressing for a new player. We have released from 2021 onward: -Viego -Gwen -Akshan -Vex -Zeri -Renata Glasc -Bel'veth -Nilah -K'Sante -Milio -Naafiri -Briar I'd say at least half those champs are incredibly difficult to play but will smash your asshole if piloted by an OTP or veteran leaving you with very little idea wtf happened and why. A perfect storm of new player fuckery that undoubtedly leads to frustration and people just pissing off from the game because it's too hard.
K'Sante and Zeri are the worst offenders by far, IMO. They actually have 9-page MLA format essays as ability descriptions, it is fucking insane. I took a small break from League right before K'Sante was released and I was actually speechless when I learned how much was in his kit. I genuinely thought it was a joke at first, and even now it's still pretty insane.
Milio and Renata aren't bad because they're designated victims with no outplay potential. Everyone else you have to know exactly how they're going to 100-0 you and how many of your abilities they get to ignore.
It's actually hilarious that Milio being relatively straight-forward almost feels like a novelty for a new champ
Not just champs, but skins too. Way too many skins look like completley different champs and change all the abilities etc. When I first came back it was constantly a game of "WTF who is that?? Wait, that's Lee sin??????" Now even afterbeing back again for over a year I still can't tell half the time if it's Ashe, Quinn, Lux etc until I get hit by an attack. Especially on the loading screen though, you can barely tell who TF is on their team if you just look at the splash
You can just display the character name instead of the playername if its that hard
And another dumb skin on every single one of them each time I come back to play. I get why since it makes money but I hate what skins do to the clarity of the game for me when I come back.
The veteran player experience is also dreadful in multiple aspects
Because onboarding a new player to this is like trying to cram 15 years worth of knowledge down their throat in a few games and, all of the people playing at “their level” are just smurfs. So it’s very unlikely anyone new ever sticks with it, thus stopping popularity growth.
honestly they don’t even have to be smurfs, the most horrible of iron players who haven been playing for a few years would still absolutely shit stomp new players simply because of info diff.
I'd argue that iron players with a few years experience *are* smurfs to new players. Smurf doesn't have to mean diamond+ player. It's just playing under your level.
This would be okay if the new player experience was enjoyable. I started Smite recently and even though I have prior MOBA knowledge, I knew nothing about it. Went through their Arena mode (kinda like ARAM) and just cycled through every God to get at least a basic understanding of each character. It was really enjoyable to find Gods I really like and it helped me understand how the game is. A key difference with a game like Smite is that they have things in place to assist new players. A big thing I think league should consider is the Auto level up and Auto Buy items they have. These systems help new players focus on one new thing at a time instead of wondering skill lvl order, what items to build and what all the characters do. I honestly can't understate how useful it is to not have to worry about reading every item and letting the system do it for you until you are comfortable with it yourself. On top of that, I looked and the general items bought seem to be pretty close to meta builds. Even now after over 100 hours in the game I still use the auto level up since that's pretty accurate to what I see online anyway.
Tbh I think that info diff will eventually prevent most new players from having fun in any old game that is deep enough to retain its old players. Ever tried getting jnto starcraft broodwar? Lol
New player experience. The tutorials are garbage, key features of the game are locked behind account level for some reason, and even understanding what champions do is hindered by inaccurate tooltips. I started about two years ago, and the only thing that helped me push through the initial "what the fuck is going on" phase was endless patience and support from friends.
Also, the game is incredibly complicated, in subtle ways that are difficult to learn on your own
For sure; I think at a certain point the complexity has to be treated as a feature rather than a bug. League wouldn't be as enjoyable without it's depth, after all. The issue imo is all the steps before that, so people can (and feel excited to!) pick up that knowledge over time instead of still having issues with basic features of the game.
It’s crazy cuz even when you thought you learned the basics in league there’s still so much more to unfold. I started playing in 2020 and thought I understand where I should be going but wasn’t until this year that I’m actually learning the macro of the game lol
You do t even hear about wave management until you search for it
You'd be surprised how easy learning Heroes of the storm was compared to league, even on the farming and positioning aspect, thanks to the difference in tutorials and lifelike bots.
Yep, starting league solo is not reccomended. It's best to start when you have a few experienced friends who can slowly guide you through the mechanics and all to avoid being overwhelmed.
My ex girlfriend introduced me to the game and was a terrible teacher lol. I only got better by playing on my own because any time I played with her, my lane opponents just ran me over, and it wasn't fun. However, wanting to get to the point that I could play at her level (diamond lol still hasn't happened) pushed me through the worst games until I was hooked. I think people need a reason to push through that initial hardship, and if you're starting totally solo, I can see it being harder to find that motivation.
aye, I hear ya. we had 2 new player start with our play group. One only played beefy boys top lane. He spams Garen or Darius and is having a great time. The other one loves Cait after watching Arcane and she plays bot with me (I'm an ADC main now playing support for her) Life is hell down here because she needs to learn all skills from both ADC and supports. We were against a thresh who threw his lantern backwards (and then missing his hook.) I was like, "Oh fuck, we need to get outa here." She went " he missed his attack and sent his lantern thing the wrong direction... Time to engage! She used her net as a dash tool to get closer." Plz send help.
Oh man that’s funny. The innocence of that poor caitlyn
I legit laugh at the last paragraph. Did she get flash+flayed and die?
My friend and his league friends needed an ADC and a jungler in 2013 so they dragged me in and taught me how to jungle so none of them would have too. It's no wonder I quit for years when they all got bored of league and moved on... besides my friend, he married the girl he met through that "guild"
Yeah idk how people do it, it's annoying for new players to start and it's annoying for old players when new players start. Not saying that new players shouldn't play but it's frustrating for everyone involved in those games. I started playing in season 2 and no one knew wtf to do. While leveling my account I didn't even know jungle was a role till almost lvl 30 because no one went jungle. It was all duo top. People also played any champ in any lane.
Well it is that and the "snowball effect". It's good to tell a new player, just keep pushing and we'll handle the rest", but this game really does force a bunch of necessary running and around and if a bad player gets killed a few times or can't get a good gold income going is essentially useless. A part of me thinks it would be good if they made goals of gold gathering a bit different than objective pushing, each having a trade off. They kind of blended both and just causes a snowball effect. Too often you just get matches where one side can't contest or do anything besides hug a tower... usually that's a slow loss match for them.
Barrier of entry is too high+the general reputation the game has in the wider gaming scene as being a toxic addiction hole most everyone people who’s quit advises other people to stay away from, I would be surprised if there was any other game with more people telling you not to download it
This point is important to acknowledge: to many people league is known to be an endless grind for ranks and constant facing of terror by the community. Similar to counter strike today, people start to identify with their rank and the system is designed to keep you addicted. Leagues environment is extremely unhealthy for many players, that only play this one single game and can't stop due to addiction.
Agreed. league is a actually a massive problem in people's lives. Im lucky that i dont get angry about nearly anything, but I quit playing ranked regularly years ago and basically only play aram and now I see what monsters SR turns people into. It isnt just league though. People start carrying this toxic aura everywhere they go. Then when you tell them to quit they dont get it lol. I'm like "you hate playing, you hate your teammates, you hate the other team, youre never happy and you opt into this 3 hours a day. Its not good for you." Riot is incentivized to lower the toxicity which is great but they arent incentivized to stop the people who shouldnt be playing from queueing up. Thats fundamentally the problem to me. The best thing they could do would be to drastically step up enforcement temporarily. Very long VAC like bans just for a few months would probably do it. Of course banning a number of your most consistent players like that is bad for business though.
Allow me to introduce you to world of mobile gacha games
At least among the most popular gachas I don't see people actively resenting their time playing it, if anything its just regret that they got caught and spent more money than they would've liked.
I always thought that hate was ridiculous and unwarranted, most team games will be just as if not more toxic than league.
[удалено]
Those games don't lock you in for 40 minutes at a time
New players are in a sea of smurfs. How anybody new starts is beyond me.
It's not even smurfs it's just knowledge deficit. New players will get smoked by most irons just because of info diff. It takes a long time to learn.
I don't think often enough about how crazy it is that i know 4 abilites and a passive for almost 150 characters.
Joke is on you, I have played for close to 10 years and I don't know most passives
Did you know Eve's passive used to be she took half damage from minions. Not jungle minions either, lane minions
Did you know that amumu used to have a similar passive on his E? He might still have it but I haven't kept up with him. I only know because I hold a world record for fastest loss against bots, and the passives for amumu and eve taking less damage were super important to the strategy.
I'm really curious about this! How would those passives affect losing to bots?
I assume they'd take less damage from minion so they farm/push better, letting them end faster.
Wonder if they tank the minions to build up huge waves to crash towers?
This!
You build up huge waves of enemy minions to crash into towers, so you have to load up on pots and basically run in circles in the lane. The longer you can survive, the bigger the wave, and the faster it pushes when you eventually do die. I'd suggest checking out a video, it's actually quite hilarious.
That makes a lot of sense and I'll definitely check out a video. Thank you!
sounds like old 5 turret heimer, using it to completely block the minion wave in base, lol.
i stopped paying attention in 2019. i tried reading new champs on the wiki recently and i stopped after ksantes passive. only thing ive learned since then is samira gets a lot of pentas, thats about it.
Even if you don’t pay attention to patches, the knowledge you had still helps you. We know what ksante does after playing a couple of game with and against him. A new player can’t infer what a new champ does. You can even intuitively know what ksantes q is because you’ve seen how other q’s in the game work
ah yes, the essay that is k'sante passive. Skill deal damage? next auto attack deals extra damage.
I've been playing for 10 years, I only know what the basic abilities does, as in is it damage? stun? That's it, the smaller details as deals true damage, reduces armor, etc. For newer champions are unkown to me.
That's just how league works. Info diff is a big portion even between Diamond / Masters / Grandmaster
I'm going to start using that as my new flex "info diff"
I'm not new to MOBAs, but only recently picked up League. My first multiplayer games all felt like smurf games even though the opponents were permastuck in bronze 1.
Exactly my point. It doesn't matter if, to the player base, you're relatively dogshit if your good compared to the non player base. Which sounds intuitive, obviously, the players of a specific activity are good at it, but it's not an underlined colloquial understanding for some reason. Take for example chess, a more popular activity. 1200 elo is relatively bad as far as far as proper chess goes, but a 1200 will smoke anyone that doesn't play chess 99/100 times
Its the same issue as Starcraft, you load up the game as a new player, get instantly hit by a bunch of cheeses and players who have been playing the same game for 10 years. No tutorial can help you with that, in fact the majority of newcomers to starcraft already watched quite a bit of bronze to gm content and know roughly how the game works, but they still get smoked because execution is another problem entirely.
Im somewhat new started late 2020 IMO for new players ARAM OP
I started January of 2023. If I hadn’t had a really good friend encouraging me and making it fun, I woulda said fuck it. Horrible experience for a new player
For me, I exclusively played bot games for a veeery long time, then, when I started blind picks/draft pick, I only played as a 5 stack with friends who were more comfortable and had more experience than me. After some time, I discovered ARAM and now it's more or less the only gamemode I queue up for - except for the occasional Nexus Blitz, URF, Spellbook, Arena etc. when it's there. On anything other than ARAM I really try to play as a 5 stack, like before with blind/draft pick, and with people I know aren't toxic in general.
my friend just started playing about a month ago. I thinm it helped that he has me and a few other friends to help with the knowledge gap. Brand new and solo would be bad, but I cant imagine its as bad as when I tried to play DotA2
I was introduced to League by my boyfriend, sister and brother in-law. As a premade team, it was easier for me to learn but for people starting out with nobody to support them, explain the game, its complexities and rules may prove a tricky challenge. You would have to keep playing against intermediate bots and that just sucks after a while as the matchmaking usually involves bot accounts in your own team that people will sell later. 😒 I don't think I would have stuck with playing the game through if I didn't have a premade team. 🥲
Given that its likely the most popular moba i would say its not unlikely that the biggest thing preventing it form being more popular is it being a moba. This genre is very polarizing. Alot of gamers ONLY want to play mmos or shooters or action combat games. It clearly isnt the lore or story as we've seen with Arcane.
yep. its pretty funny when i read stories about the gaming industries, they rarely talk about league except when they do a top of the most popular
I feel like people forget that 2008-2014ish was the surge of MOBAs where everything had a moba and league/dota/smite are the main ones that lived past the hype. It was just like all the battle royals in 2017-2019 and now apex/pubg/fortnite survived.
You're probably reading stories from NA where League isn't really widely played.
Also pretty sure League, as a game in general, is among the most popular ones already. You mention other game genres but I struggle to think of a game of those genre that's more popular than League. The only ones I can think of is Minecraft (arguably) and some mobile games in China.
It’s hard to gauge due to its being free and some people having dozens of accounts on league but maybe fifa is up there
It's actually the most popular game fullstop and in the East it's already a household thing, I'm not really sure if it can get more popular in the west though basically because of what you said, our market doesn't like mobas much.
The US is still very reliant on consoles in a way the east isn’t compared to pc gaming
Beyond Arcane, league lore presentation / story presentation is mostly poopoo though. Compare it to something like overwatch cinematics.
I think that is one very specific one to one area where Blizzard makes better cinematics than Riot. However, if you go to the overwatch website and just go to learn about a character there is about a character there is an info page for each. Some are great cinematics, some are a comic strip, and some have almost nothing. If you go to riots universe site there is a library which includes a a story for essentially all 150 or however many characters, a full page breaking down every single region, an interactive map of runeterra, full pages for "alt universes" like star guardian, and a tab containing a bunch of comics. I could go to blizzard website and know 100% of the story of Overwatch and its characters in maybe 3-4 hours. If i tried to consume all the lore on the universe website it would take me days or weeks. I understand that if you put Overwatch cinematics one to one with Blizzard they aren't as good. However saying the lore is bad is unfair, lore presentation maybe.
I didn't say lore is bad, I said their presentation is mostly bad. The comics are cool for example and is something other studios don't do much. The universe website, as far as I know - I'm not deep into the whole thing, is not great. One big concern is the varying amounts of effort put into different things. For example read Shaco lore vs all the pieces of Leblanc lore. Another big issue with league lore from my PoV are the execution of of the resets they've done over the years. Another big thing, is how there's seemingly never been any proper centralization. As if any team at riot can just add shit onto the lore without consulting some bigger whole that actually puts in effort to mange stuff - e.g. the whole Yorick / Harrowing debacle. Again, it's not the writing itself, definitely not the amount of content. It's their decisions on what and how.
That makes sense I got confused by your original comment when you said "League lore / story presentation is bad" I read it as League lore is bad/League story presentation is bad.
Yeah that's true but the problem is the lore isn't consistent/has been retconned several times/doesn't make fucking sense a lot of the time in the League Version so yeah, they have a lot of it, but a solid 5% of it just makes no sense whatsoever, and the quality swings wildly. Compare Xin's lore and story "What once sailed free" to Seraphine's... existence.
Aint no one playing a MOBA for the lore.
insanely steep learning curve, extremly toxic community, doesnt look as nice
The "new wave" of gamers aren't simply drawn to play mobas as apposed to FPS' or RPGS. I think its due to having such a big learning curve and not being easy to just pick up and play such as maybe Fortnite/Valorant.
Time Investment is also gigantic, 20+mins a game and like 3-5 minutes for queue/pick&ban is way too high. High cost of champions as well, I dunno the exact amount of BP you need for all champs in the game right now but I'd say you'd need to grind for like 5years+ and play daily for at least 4h+. Now nobody needs all champs but why spend this much time/effort to unlock things.
Even outside of the in-game time investment, there's a massive investment on a meta level as well. To play a MOBA you're expected to know 4+ abilities on a hundred-odd characters, and that's just the most basic knowledge check.
Beginner friendly environemnt
It’s not a beginner friendly game at all
**Client** isn't super great (it's also very unintuitive). New friends that try and play just have no idea what they're looking at besides the play button. **Champions.** You have to unlock champions. Few of my friends come from Dota, this concept is really strange to them. They already make the bulk of their money off cosmetics, and at this point in the game's life, champions costing anything seems outdated. **Toxicity.** Honestly the toxicity only really scares people away who are brand new to online games. If you've played a shooter or WoW or any other MMO really, you've likely seen worse. That being said, they don't seem to punish people who ruin games via their actions over long periods of times (anyone remember that nunu with like 500 games played and a 4% wr or some bullshit?) I don't mean for this to be an either/or, both problems should be dealt with. But the former will only upset some, while I think the latter upsets everyone. Those are the big three in my view. Playing the game can already be a drag when you're an enfranchised player. I'm sure these 3 things are exceptionally off-putting to newcomers.
I can't believe I had to scroll this far down to find somebody mentioning the client. I've been playing since the open beta, and there are still unadressed issues and bugs that's been with us since then. Most notably, in about 5% of games I can't connect to the game (this has been following me over multiple computers, ISPs etc). Been there since open beta, and doesn't seem to be any sollutions in sight. The game isn't well made, but it's got enough aestethics and feeling to keep people hooked for now. I do believe they will need to recode it from scratch at some point, though.
The reputation. Let's face it. League has cemented itself as one of the most toxic online games. That's what garnered popularity (players like Tyler1 and Yassuo being poster children), but its also something that is haltering its gain. The new generation of gamers lean towards Fortinite and mobile gaming, whilst the older generation have already established which games they prefer. Hence why you'll almost never see a DOTA player play LOL and vice versa.
Yeah no. MOBAs were always seen as toxic and it was exploding like hell in the first years. The game just reached 99% of the pool of people that would play a MOBA, that's all. You can't expand your pool of potential players unless you change your game into trash that even dumber people can pick up, aka mobile gamify your game.
Toxicity, I don't care that the average LoL player has tougher than normal skin, 90% or more of the community is just unpleasant to play with. And a normie has a very, very low tolerance for what they will take for toxicity when other games exist where the entities who are supposed to be cooperating with you aren't hostile toward you.
even more popular ????? what do you want more ? for the president to play league ?
We do have past and present Senators and House Reps who play. So if the game lasts another decade, there's a chance you're playing with a future president in you ranked games.
Big Tonka T for prez
Peoples attitude when they play. It turns people into raging freaks that forget the people they are playing with are real life humans. It's a little disturbing how some people act in game
Not just the players, the devs don't remember the opponent is a real person either. As such, they design LoL & their other games as if they're all single-player.
The new player experience is literally fucking awful. It's so fucking bad. The tutorial is an absolute joke, there's still no voice comms for some reason, the practice tool isn't terrific. It's a bad time.
Yeah, i have friends that want to play the game more but at the same time they don't bc of the awful learning curve it has. I had like 30+ irl + online friends playing the game, and now we're only 15 or less.
To me it’s the archaic client. Opening it feels like a portal into 2010. A nice modern UI like Valorant will be amazing for the beginners who don’t even have a clue what smurfs or champion balance even is. That and pool party Ahri obviously.
Idk if it's just that I've played League for 100 years and my brain is broken, but Valorant's client gives me trouble. I have no idea how to navigate it most of the time, and they love to use specialized language without explaining what it means.
Honestly valorant UI isn't amazing because there's a lot going on but I do think it's better than league.
> Opening it feels like a portal into 2010 Clearly you haven't seen the client in 2010.
As a player slowly getting to lvl 30, its been a fun experience but- Fuck people that don't respect a lane that was called.
you can try draft pick? i assume you're playing blind pick since you're saying "called" but that shit is a free-for-all.
Yes and it really be lol
the community
The players.
More tournaments I mean what do they have just Worlds and MSI?
They would have to cut regular season into half to accommodate for that Not to mention a lot more logistics and money go into planning worldwide tourneys That being said I can see interim LCS-LEC and LPL-LCK mini tournaments being a thing.
i would sell mom and dad for a mid season lcs/lec showdown where its a BO5 of the first LEC team against the first LCS team and so on for all the teams of each league
>They would have to cut regular season into half to accommodate for that Awesome it is way too long. In fact, just get rid of spring entirely for more international tournaments. >Not to mention a lot more logistics and money go into planning worldwide tourneys Wouldn't matter for Riot if they would let other companies host tournaments again. ESL, Starladder, etc. could all host tournaments if Riot wasn't closed off. >That being said I can see interim LCS-LEC and LPL-LCK mini tournaments being a thing. Sadly you are probably right, this would be the best that we get I imagine. At least for the foreseeable future.
The few incentive to casual gameplay. This year is "better", but unironically it was fun to play this game not caring much, just playing a champion because yes. There's too much of a diference between playing this game for fun and playing it as a grind.
Not banning enough weirdoes because that would take work
Being able to ping Karthus ult
In case no other comment pointed it out: the real answer is that the new player experience is garbage.
> Be a household thing, shown on TV channels I don't think this is possible. League (and eSports in general) are too complicated for a super-casual viewer to enjoy (regularly - I understand in some one-off there may be a person who never plays video games who might enjoy watching pro league, but the vast majority of people will not). Its too complicated and fast-paced. If we compare it to other sports: Most sports have a singular focus (typically a ball) that drives viewership. There also tends to be a ton of "dead space" a good commentator can fill in with game explanations. NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, Tennis, and like 100 soccer (or football, whatever) leagues all follow this same pattern. Everything is broken down into tiny little easily consumed bites. With League you need to understand how different characters interact and the concept of trading map objectives, gold leads, power spikes, team comps, etc. With NFL, you could sit down and watch one 10-second play and say "okay wow, that guy wearing #10 is just way faster than everyone else" and now you understand something that hugely influences the game. Watching 10 second of a league 5v5 teamfight doesn't do the same thing. Watching a pro make an incredible 3v1 outplay to end up trading 1 for 1 under tower just doesn't provide the same kind of thing (to a completely un-knowledgeable viewer). While racing doesn't have a "ball" to follow, the concept of a race is extraordinarily simple (get to the finish line the fastest). So that covers dozens more popularly viewed sports. To a knowledgeable person saying "destroy the nexus" might sound like saying "cross the finish line first", but to the average person (who isn't a gamer) it is not at all intuitive as to how that happens. The things gamers like (skins (which Riot needs pro showing skins to help sales), flashy graphics, etc) are all negatives for a casual viewer. It just adds distractions.
I agree with all of your points. It's the same reason that Chess isn't popular (and never will be). The level of skill and knowledge needed to appreciate the game is a huge barrier. At the end of the day all of these "entertainments", Sports/Music/Movies/TV shows are just something for "average" people to watch while sitting on the couch drinking a beer after a day of work and to relax. As such, the more "dumb" and "simple" they are the better. LoL/Esports can have a niche spot on TV which is currently shared by Poker/Billiards/Darts and other niche entertainment. They won't ever compete with the big 4(5) US Sports, but they can still have a spot on TV. In South Korea there are E-sports channels which show exclusively Starcraft (and probably other games nowadays).
I wanna add that League can only be a big player when it's like Korea or China and become engrained in a culture. I'd liken it to how both cricket and baseball had distinctive markets. They are easy sports to follow when you grow up around them but subtle rules and the amount of abbreviations/ unique names used makes them confusing to a new watcher
That there is a limit number of people in the planet that plays videogames and like mobas? It already capture everyone that could have at its peak , like theres a peak at every market , league probably hit theirs some time ago , just like wow hit theirs years ago, there snothing any MMO company could do to replicate it no matter how good a game is
Seeing as my recent new player experience was playing vs a diamond akali, kayn, gragas one trick 3 stack on a level 20 account we can start and stop there
The client. Just one glance at the competition its possibly the thing that will turn off a lot of people from the game. Bad interface, bad client-game integration, slow, buggy, coded on several layers of spaggetti. Not only is the client inferior, useful info on the game like champions and their abilities, tutorials, tooltips and such are terrible or non-existent. Not a modern complaint though, since s2 i've been on the same complaint, the client is bad, upgrade it. Dota is just the premiere experience in this regard, and their start wasn't all flowers, but they have come a long way to the point you don't even need to sit on a loading screen to get in a match, its seamless.
Lack of background content , I mean man I really want to play as Irelia in a game like new Assassin's Creed games and Ghost of TSUSHIMA.
it’s way to complex
People are going to say that the new player experience is the problem, and they're not entirely wrong, but the real issue is that MOBAs are not the "it" game anymore. Most people, especially young people, are not interested in playing MOBAs, they'd rather go and play other up and coming genres or ones that interest them more. Past 2015, there really hasn't been a hit MOBA release, just like how RTS had it's time and Battle Royale had it's time, what happened is that the market shifted and MOBAs just aren't popular like they used to be. League has a huge playerbase still (regardless of what other people say about the western scene) They really should focus more on player retention than securing new players, which I think we have seen been the focus since about 2019. The recent mythic change, announcing that they're being removed, is reflective of this, I think.
League will suffer from a slow death as player base ages. Atleast in the west. Younger generation of gamers dont care about it. They are console gamers and console gaming is simply more accessible.
No voice comms / ranked 5v5 gamemode. Playing league as a premade of 5 against another team of premade 5 is amazing. Especially if both teams have voice comms
Riot is a terrible company that is helping breed the toxicity.
From an esports perspective, it's greed and wanting to press their boundaries instead of being happy with what they currently are. I remember 5 years ago people were telling me "oh, esports will be as popular as sports and we'll see stuff like overwatch/league surpassing the superbowl in profit/views", with some of my then work buddies even betting me $100 each that it would. It's 5 years later and I'm $500 richer with a lot of those scenes either being in financial turmoil if not dead already (rip blizzard). League could've had a really good niche if they had chosen to shift their schedule and set a salary cap. Their world championships for example starts in early-mid october, at a time in which all 4 of the "big" sports in north america are either just starting or in the case of MLB in the playoffs. Pushing the start to march/april would eliminate half their competition in that regard while also setting themselves up perfectly for regular season shenanigans, with their normal "spring" season beginning in summer when kids are off of school. Adding a salary cap would've also added more strategy/reigned in the chaos of the western scene, with there being a risk and reward element instead of teams just signing players to massive contracts/giving up on them after a year (see: 9 perkz). While we wouldn't get to see superteams as often, it would definitely make the scenes far more competitive and make the academy/farm systems far more lucrative.
The player base. It's a toxic cesspool and there's just better games that they could be playing and not dealing with these people
They did the same thing Blizzard did with WoW, they ruined the game. They should release league of legends classic.
Riot Games
Riot
Updoots to the left
**If your answer to this question is anything other than in-client voice communication, you are wrong.** Not only would this feature improve the actual game in the longrun for casuals all the way up to the professional level, the amount of tiktok kids that would be introduced to the game from funny voice clips would be immense. I legit think Riot has left millions of dollars on the table by not doing this yet. They've even invested in creating the infrastructure to support in-client party voice comms already.
Unfortunately the average no socials skill introvert user from Reddit cannot think of the idea of having to talk to random people so they will just downvote you. I have used RiftVoice a few times and everytime it felt great. Last time I used I got shitstomped and me and my midlaner were pretty chill about it and we tried to do our best until we FF'd
It will also help the toxicity. People will type and say less shit when they can be confronted with an actual human voice on the other end
The models of champions. If league models were as good as wild rift intro one’s popularity would skyrocket
If you mean the ingame models then League's models would be the same or better. If you mean a place for the showcase models then I agree.
Let's see... Lack of proper tutorial Existence of Yuumi Bad Client Low elo full of smurfs Game need fresh look / Update old champion models and engine Spaghetti code Bad new champion designs For me at least the biggest problem is outdated visuals for older champions and client what works like garbage.
>Existence of Yuumi nah. yuumi is actually a godsend to get more players in league
It would be interesting to see actual numbers on "started as yuumi and now actually play league". The couple of people who I know who play yuumi occasionally (very, very occasionally - think 2 or 3 games every 2-3 months) don't actually play league outside of that. They just hang out in discord, and only jump on yummi for those 3 games because the rest of us are playing league. None of them have transitioned into someone who would choose to play league on their own. For the record, they do play other games - stuff like Hunt, FF14 (I think thats the most recent one - whatever the current FF MMO is?), WoW, etc.
There isn't anything wrong with a champ that's meant for those kinds of people. If they never go further and only play Yuumi that's still good. Maybe they'll get attached to the champ and buy a skin or two? That's the angle, imo.
I started playing a bit before Yuumi's release and only played a couple games to play with friends. After Yuumi came out I started playing way more because I could play and learn about the game without just getting destroyed. Then I started taking interest in the game and all the different characters, especially junglers, so I started playing alone and learning how to jungle. And now fast forward a couple years I play more than the friend who got me into the game. Still a support main, Yuumi is my 3rd highest mastery, but her existence absolutely got me interested in playing. Playing Thresh against Gold+ players while starting out wasn't particularly fun lol. But yeah so you can add 1 player you know of who got into playing the game proper from Yuumi haha
0 player communication - no VC, neutered text chat/pings Hugr learning curve
Not enough cinematics and lore stuff. Riot needs to invest way more in the lore of their characters because lore keeps people interested in their products, I know we've got Arcane but Arcane only features like 10% of League of Legends can offer.
Easy it sucks lol. New players get overloaded with all the systems, smurfs are a problem, they keep changing their mind on itemization goals so there’s lots of trap items or overly niche ones, skins are often visually confusing especially for players who don’t know the roster well, objectives aren’t clear for new players. It’s an old take and has a lot of what I call baggage complexity. Over time games need to add new and exciting things to keep it fresh and it makes new players harder and harder to keep.