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

Squeakerpants·Dec 3, 2014·2 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 CruelerzDec 3, 20142 votes

I just played lots of bot matches...

SqueakerpantsDec 3, 20141 votes

I just played lots of bot matches...

I'd rather clean the house all weekend than play dozens of bot matches. Was it fun?

Volt CruelerzDec 3, 20142 votes

I thought so. Eventually I hit 30 and started playing ARAM and a bit of normal PVP. Then teambuilder came out and I played a lot of that. Now I play ranked. At every step along the way I enjoyed myself.

Sir ArmaMalumDec 3, 20141 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:

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.
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.

SqueakerpantsDec 4, 20141 votes

The rune system has been an agreed upon pain point in the leveling process and has been looked at several times.

I don't believe that early level runes have been considered seriously by Riot, because there are obvious solutions to address parity. Either put players above and below level 20 in separate queues, or abandon the silly three tiers of runes, and allow some number of tier 3 runes right away. That way a level 27 player might have more runes than you, but at least you don't have zero runes.

imagine a new player having access to all the spells, runes and, say, 1/4 of all champions to start

I don't follow your point here. Are we talking about the one in a million exception who has never played any video game before, or a normal gamer who intuitively understands that armor reduces damage and attack speed allows them to land more attacks? These are not hard to grasp concepts, and allowing somebody to equip ability power after "only" 50 or 100 games will not confuse them.

You talk a lot about smurfing, but that's an entirely different topic. Regardless of whether there is smurfing or not, I believe players should begin the game with reasonably similar starting stats. Giving one player an 800 gold stat advantage over the other at level one is a bad idea. Does anybody actually disagree with this?