Riots' Challenges with League or Legends (An Ancient Gamers' perspective)

As a gamer that grew up with Atari, Pong, and Pet computers, later to write games in Qbasic, I feel that Riot is failing in one key component of being the ultimate game of choice. I feel that this primarily revolves its enticement for replayablity.

When you make a commitment to playing LoL you pretty much take and hour from your day to do so. For the average person this may at first seem okay, but add a few game losses and this can quickly add up to 3 or 4 hours a day. If Riots target is to keep players coming back then it must bare some responsibility to ensure that LoL has a payoff for its players within a certain period of time or its player base will slowly and eventually begin to fade. Riot has successfully used promotions of Esports and New champions to entice the player base and grow its popularity but has struggled with being able to produce payoffs to its players that like the game, but can't seem to get a win without a great deal of defeats. Riot is not blind to this challenge but I am not sure if Riot believes that this challenge is serious enough to engage resources to solve, what I believe, is an extremely important part of a gamers ethos. In order to make a successful game and keep it successful you need to first start with an enticing challenge that steadily increases in difficultly with the players skill levels. No matter what the challenge, the game presents, it must never seem to be unwinnable. The bar of difficultly must be constantly moving to promote a challenge but never stay as high to promote the feeling that it has become unwinnable. For example, I know that almost all of us have played a single player game that was great and memorable up to the point of an objective that we could Never get around. We plowed hours into this one objective and got frustrated enough to give up on the game entirely. This to me is a failure in the game, if I have committed time into a game I should be rewarded eventually without getting frustrated enough to leave and never return. The ideal scenario would be a difficultly scale that slightly adjusts for losses up the a point where it becomes easy enough for anyone to win without letting on to the player that it is adjusting its skill level to do so. Riot has created, in LoL, an ideal game for people to come together and challenge each other's skills. But for every promoter of the game their is also a person who has invested time and possibly money, who has become frustrated enough to remove LoL from his or her "Go To" game or possibly left the game entirely. It is difficult to say if Riot takes the opinion that players leaving LoL, not to return, serious enough to address with resources. The different game types within the game do show that Riot is aware that its primary 5vs5 game is too long for some players to commit too and give players the ability to Victory in other areas of the game.

A few possibilities to create a more robust player experience are available to Riot. The first one I would suggest is to alter the Match making process. Most of the games that I play in LoL end up with one team snow balling another team into a defeat. I view this as a less then ideal scenario but also as a opportunity for Riot. Multiple losses within a pre-set time alter a players' opponents match ups so that they are matched with players that are more skilled then them and against players that are less skilled then them. At first it may seem that this is an impossible task, but being a computer programmer I can assure you that it is not. It is possible to create player match ups that have a strong possibility with a pre-set win for one side or another. Riot would be less then forward in openly admitting that they would attempt to alter the match ups to allow people to Victory after a certain amount of Defeats but it would be in Riots' best interests to attempt too minimize players leaving LoL. Another possible area where Riot has been reluctant to 'dive' into is Single or Multiple player against Bots in a Story or Quest mode. Bots would be placed to quest against rewarding lore and items to trade within a Game mode. Players would learn about their champions skills, where their strengths or weaknesses are against Bots they are questing against. Ultimate boss victories could earn summoner icons or skin cromas. There is a whole world of possibilities in this scenario. I would like to thank you for your time in reading this.

"The Value in victory is only as great as the effort needed to achieve it." - David Edwards (AKA Ancient League) First Game Mastered - Star Raiders (c)1979 Atari 400 computer system. Rank : Star Commander Class 1