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How does Riot rationalize making new players play hundreds of unbalanced games?

Squeakerpants·12/3/2014, 8:12:54 PM·2 votes·971 views

The journey to 30 takes a loooong time. A couple hundred games give or take. And along the way, the matches are extremely imbalanced. This isn't a QQ thread about losing a game, because sometimes I'm the one with an unfair advantage.

As an example I just played Sona vs Sona mirror match in the bot lane, level 17 vs level 27. I had 4/0/13 masteries and no runes. Enemy Sona had 21/6/0 masteries, and runes including 5 Mpen, 18 AP at level 18, 10 flat AP, 32 health, 2 armor, 1.6% cooldown reduction. If Riot gave the enemy Sona an additional 500 starting gold, it would actually be less extreme than the imbalance system currently in place.

In other low level games, half of the players will have access to flash or smite and half will not. If you've already completed the grind to level 30 it's easy to brush it off as "it's over before you know it," but it literally takes 100-200 hours of silly lopsided matches before you reach a level where everyone has the same fair starting position.

Why not make tier 1 & 2 runes free so that a level 19 player isn't forced into an extreme no-rune disadvantage, or just have separate queues for players who are above and below level 20?

5 Comments

Volt Cruelerz12/3/2014, 8:23:25 PM2 votes

I just played lots of bot matches...

Sir ArmaMalum12/3/2014, 8:33:10 PM1 votes

The rune system has been an agreed upon pain point in the leveling process and has been looked at several times. We even had a mention of a rune rebalance at the beginning of S4, but that turned out to be the small re balance. So really everyone agrees there from what I've seen.

For summoner spells, flash is at least getting it's level requirement lowered drastically (Level 8 I believe?).

Overall I agree it's a grind, but the grind itself is necessary for two reasons:

  1. The beginning tutorial isn't enough. To truly get the intricacies of 100+ champions and a huge amount of game assets in general, that kind of time commitment to getting used to these combinations is needed. The gradual introduction of several assets makes it easier for new players to process, imagine a new player having access to all the spells, runes and, say, 1/4 of all champions to start (because champion availability can also be argued to be against newer players). It would be a huge overload. Can it be done better? Of course! But we can't just toss them into level 30 matches either. 2bh I think the current "time till 30" is good, but the abundance of smurfs makes it more painful than it should.

  2. Prevent ranked alts. A long time till 30 is an obstacle for people who want alts for ranked and boosting. Obviously this doesn't make it impossible, but it makes it specifically not easy simply off of the time investment.

All that being said, the biggest issue against the new player experience, imho, is smurfing. It's a difficult problem to solve, as it's a tradeoff between making the game easily accessible and free versus creating barriers of entry (such as an initial purchase) to prevent the incredibly low cost of creating an alternate account. You can't track IP addresses if multiple people use the same computer, and you can't base it off K/D or win ratio as it can punish lucky new players. It's very very hard to reliably tell who's smurfing.

Very unfortunately as long as a system exists, there will be people who do everything they can to break it.