Why Doesn't the Boards Have a "Beginner's Guide"?
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.
. Then a friendly player sat me down after the bot match and explained proper item build paths to me.