Why Doesn't the Boards Have a "Beginner's Guide"?

floppy1000·10/11/2017, 12:10:14 AM·1 votes·426 views

I've been reading many threads over time (and surely anyone active has seen similar) that the beginner's experience for the game is downright awful. The tutorial teaches the games most basic mechanics, but little about how the game is played beyond that, leaving the player woefully underprepared for actual games. The short period in which beginners play against AIs are not representative of how a game against players actually works because new players are not given any ideas about the meta or about game flow, and the AI do not show that either.

A new player would finish his mandatory vs. AI period feeling confident in their understanding to play vs. real players, and then proceed to get beat up (and likely flamed by some smurfs) because of their lack of understanding. Of course, Riot can alleviate this issue by updating their extremely poor tutorials and spend some time upgrading the AI, but that is a solution that takes considerable amount of time.

Yet, here on the boards, we have a fairly sizable amount of experienced players who have an understanding of how to play the game. Some even have knowledge on how to play the game at an exceedingly high level (Diamond, Masters, even some Challengers). Despite this, I am not able to locate an organized effort from the player base to create some resource for players.

Such a mega-thread could include links (or simply many, many sections) on all sorts of information about the game, ranging from basic information such as how to last-hit efficiently, how to build effectively, to intermediate information, such as how to manage waves, how to establish and interpret efficient vision, and how to exert map pressure, to very high level information, such as how to look at the minimap how to setup cross map opportunities at all times, or the many steps of the baron dance to guarantee a secure objective take.

If we had one thread containing information to all sorts of resources that was stickied to the boards, players of most skill levels, from beginners all the way up to maybe diamond players, would be able to visit the boards and read up on how to improve. Players who want to improve thus have the resources to do so, and players who just don't care enough to put in the time aren't affected (it's not like they're forced to do so).

Is a mega-thread containing links to community-created guides for various concepts simply too great of an undertaking for the community of one of the largest games in the world? Understandably, it is a daunting task because of the depth of the game, but as time goes on, LoL is only becoming a more complex game with more and more elements to steepen the learning curve.

5 Comments

Primaquarius10/11/2017, 12:35:08 AM1 votes

Because like every other guide, it will likely be buried without having many views or buried via troll downvoting

The only way to keep a Beginner guide relevant is to have it pinned ASAP by a mod, I think

Laughing Fish10/11/2017, 1:29:11 AM1 votes

There is one, it is located on of the sidebar on the left.

Here ya go: https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/community-moderation/atIUBQPe-boards-users-guide

Cyrosi10/11/2017, 3:18:12 PM1 votes

Riot could use some more beginner-friendly features, but there are lots of guides out there. If anything I'd like some more in-game beginner friendly options. Like an option to turn on hero tooltips in hero select for new players in blind or bot mode. Like maybe the wheel that shows hero abilities on the "support, damage, cc, etc." spectrum could show up above the hero portrait. Then you don't get people like me who go "Oh, a hero called 'Kindred' as in kindred spirit, that's probably a support hero, I haven't tried a support hero yet, I should try that in bot mode." (This actually happened to me by the way, I read all the bios of the free heroes that week, and promptly forgot what most of them actually did when I went to try some of them).

Another feature that isn't anywhere in the tutorial are masteries, or custom item lists, or in depth explanation of items in general. This is a really big problem because both of those things are required to be a good LoL player on any role. Is there a hero anywhere whose best item list is the basic recommended list? On top of that, there isn't any in game tip anywhere that says that items are built from other items. When I first started playing, I looked up a basic item list for Soraka online, but didn't realize that you could buy components of higher tier items and not have it cost more overall than just saving up for the item. There were 2 entire games starting out, where I saved up 2200 gold (or whatever it is) to buy item 2301. Then a friendly player sat me down after the bot match and explained proper item build paths to me.

The mastery page is a mess for a new player, too. When you are starting out and can only "sort of" play about 3 heroes, a lot of the masteries seem like they don't do that much even though they might be the most important masteries for that character. It took me watching a mastery video on Soraka to realize that the 5% cooldown mastery was actually very important for pretty much any spell caster, and a bunch of non-spell casters too. It also took me awhile to realize that the "does X% more damage" against enemy champions masteries were also useful for non-mid non-jungle champions too.