Could this whole Runes Reforged thing just be a Paradox of Choice?
TL;DR Changed my mind, not TL;DR you should just read the post.
Now, I'm just gonna preface this with making it clear, that the Paradox of Choice is not a decided part of human psychology. As such take what ever i say here with a grain of "This might be valid, but not sound" salt.
The Paradox of Choice(a.k.a. overchoice/choice overload): is a cognitive process in which people have a difficult time making a decision when faced with many options.
> Here is the wiki page if you want a more in depth look at the concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice
Example:
This has interesting applications in the context of a highly complex system like league's out of game power. So as an exmple, the ice cream shop problem. You walk up to a Jen and Berry's ice cream shop (locally owned kappa), and they offer an array of 40 different flavors, ranging from cotton candy all the way to coffee. You also get your choice of 4 different kinds of cones and you get any combination of 2 flavors you want, and you can pick from a single of 20 different toppings (Quick off the cuff math, that's i think 12,800 combinations, and i think 19! more if you remove the topping restriction). So what combination do you pick? Do you just roll the dice, literally taking any combination of things? Do you contemplate which flavors would taste good together? Do you just stick to that same rocky road + mint chocolate oreo crumbles that you always get? Maybe spice it up a little and get crushed peanuts instead of oreo crumbles?
(sorry back with ice cream)
As i was saying. According to overchoice, due to the cognitive strain of considering the excessive # of combinations and variations, it makes you adverse to total consideration (like bounded recursion in programming) because it becomes expensive to contemplate and your brain is lazy and doesn't want to waste energy. So instead you will create heuristics to cut corners and avoid cognitive dissonance (mental discomfort experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values). Well, i'll just stick to the same cone/flavor(s)/toppings to reduce the discomfort created by the increased possibly of having made the non-preferable decision.
But let's go over what some of the so called preconditions are for this
- No prior preferences
- There must not be a clearly dominant option in the choice set
- Lower Expertise proportional to the quantity of choices
So are those precondition met? Well it's no exactly appropriate to address any of these as yes/no questions, as each will have a range of possible responses per capita. Though I think there is one important aspect to take away from these prerequisites. The NEWER a player is, the more likely they are to fit these criteria ( this is simply an assertion but not an unreasonable one). The only exception to this would arguably be #2, however, i think that the contention between appropriate compensation to champion stats is a fair indication that which choice was "optimal" was not as clear as people claim.
So in the context of league and the rune system, how would this play out? Well, for one, i think that the higher demand for a new rune system with fewer decisions is likely evidence of a greening playerbase rather than a flawed system. People feel who are far more new to the game, who were introduced to a highly complex system to which they could refer to another's expertise ended up making them feel that they never had a choice in the runes that they picked, because they built their preferences on other people's rather than their own. In effect, you've got a range of people, who each feel differently about if the new runes increased or decreased the number of choices likely most correlated with how much they looked to guides for rune pages (leaning -1) vs winging it on their own (leaning 1) (possibly even before guides were really reliable).
However, there is a little bit of asymmetry in this, based on what is objectively happening with the game.
Case 1: Riot objectively increases the choices in the game. Well then you'd see both groups with a very clear majority of players feeling this way. -1 leaning players, who had previously been mentally restricting their range of options are now going to be fresh to the new system and feel that they have more options, because no one has "solved" the system yet. While the older players, while probably salty that they're knowledge is now useless, will now have far more combinations of choices to pick from.
Cast 2: Riot objectively decreases the choices in the game. Well then you'll see a more divisive divide between each flanks. The more -1 leaning a player, the more likely they are to feel that there was an increase in decisions. The more 1 leaning a player, the more likely they are to feel that there was a decrease in the decisions.
What are we seeing though? Well based on my own observation, while people are generally complicit with exploring the completely new system, it seems that there is a pretty heavy divide between different groups of players on if this actually increased creative freedom for the players. Which following the logic i just laid out, would indicate that the new system likely reduced the number of choices we actually have.
