Bad New Player Experience
So I am new to LOL, and I have found that the current new player experience is confusing, frustrating, and toxic.
BLIND PICK To start, blind pick is a nightmare, where in addition to picking your hero, you also need to negotiate your role with the other members of the team. Without extensive game knowledge regarding what characters go in what roles, there is no way to tell what a teammate has chosen, leading to unintentional screwups of the team comp. The people playing blind over draft are either new players who don't want to jump into draft yet, or more experienced players that want to play something typically banned.
I would suggest changing the format of blind to allow for roles like draft. This would allow for better matchmaking and less toxicity from unintentional mistakes. I would also suggest giving new players access to smite immediately. Limiting players from playing a role is also bad game design.
AFK SURRENDER/REMAKE Moving to draft has been better, but the number of people who AFK during the game is ridiculous. The surrender and remake options are supposed to handle this issues, but fail to do so in the most frustrating manner possible. Surrender is the most commonly known command, but it can't be used until 20 minutes. 20 minutes after a person has DCed at minute 1. Remake doesn't work due to either first blood on the wrong side or because the player was there for the 1st minute. So now the player is either locked into a frustrating loosing game, with commands that are supposed to take care of the issue, but don't. The last game I where this occured I decided to simply quit and take leaver penalties rather than get more aggravated. THIS IS NOT GOOD GAME DESIGN! I am sitting here at the leavebuster warning which is telling me about how it waste's peoples time, when I left exactly due to those actions of another player and the lack of sufficient means of resolution in-game.
I would suggest that the surrender command be changed so that it can be used before 20 minutes if a player has disconnected or is afk. This solves the issue of frustrating games due to players DCing. I would also suggest that surrender be changed to still go through even with 1 dissenting vote. This prevents players from being locked into a loosing game by someone deciding to be a troll.
RUNE AND SPELL SETUP Finally, the way systems like runes and spells are tied to champions is also confusing and can lead to unintentional mistakes. When switching to a different champion, a player can forget to swap runes or spells. This has occured to me a number of times. The limited number of rune pages available is also an issue, as new players are limited to 4 templates + 2 pages for >6 characters that need to be played. The easiest way to play a new character is to follow a guide, and there is no way to currently set up rune pages in that manner per champion. Given the cost of a new rune-page is more than a champion, and there are issues.
I would suggest the following, to reduce the confusion for new players and allow for better user experience. Each champion has a default rune setup (specific to that champion), a default spell setup (specific to the champion), and a recommended set of items (like current). When a champion is selected, the current active rune-page and spell setup switches to the player's default settings for that champion. For the first levels: the player gets used to item buying and the mechanics of the game. After level threshold 1: players can change the spells for a champion (per-game customization), as well as change the default spells for that champion. After level threshold 2: players can change the runes for a champion (per-game customization), as well as change the default runes for that champion This is the point where the player can by additional rune-pages to set up alternate builds. Another QOL change here would be to allow for players to set a rune-page as generic, or assign it to a specific champion.
These changes would allow for newer players to follow the "RIOT guide", and then begin to experiment after a point.
In regards to data storage, rune pages are only a few bytes per champion. In many cases the player likely will not change the default, allowing for data savings there. In regards to sales, there is still incentive for players to buy additional rune-pages, as many champions have multiple rune-sets.
Conclusion Overall, these changes would massively improve the new player experience, leading to improvement of blind games. The changes to remake/surrender would drop frustration levels in games, leading to less toxicity and improved player experience.
