Mastery Levels and Player Participation
Orientation The central principle in tuning the game is to make it as popular as it can be, enjoyed and played by the largest population possible for their amusement and as a result enrich the company and its staff in compensation.
Two factors have been identified as conducive to this cause and worthy of promoting: Player skill and Player participation. I’d like to go into some detail on the difference between these two aspects of the population.
Champion Mastery Player skill is more than a summoner’s mechanical ability with a champion; it is also the psychological comfort zone of how a player wishes to participate in the combat. For example, some prefer to roam the map hunting for opportunities to catch and kill the enemy team members, the mindset of a Jungler.
The role fit then narrows their favored champion pool to a set which they can acclimatize and become proficient in, with the other roles being secondary skill maintenance, similar to a depth-first search.
Player Participation As implied by the recent patches, participation appears to be an effort towards a breadth-first approach to playing, which may be the preference of some who wish to sample all there is without committing to a specific specialty. This is a psychological fit for part of the population.
These two approaches and the tendency toward one or the other are inherent attributes of the player, and so the best that can be done is to make a measurement of the proportions of each within the population, and thereby obtain the ideal target for percentage of appeal to each section of the audience.
I have a hunch that the fractions of the player-base that are drawn to each of the five roles are not of equal distribution, with the main reason for it being what people want to do.
