Just make LoL 2 already

(should probably note that this is a smurf account but that will be obvious)

League of Legends problems and solutions

• Communication
  • How do I get answers from Riot? How do I report a bug with a hope of a response? Do I go to Twitter, Reddit, a forum page, some other page, or through the client? There is information seemingly everywhere and it is not well-coordinated. Even information on upcoming LCS events can be very difficult to corroborate as any given page might be missing a crucial piece of information, such as a dates, times, involved parties, locations, etc.
• Items
  • With over 120 selectable Champions, massive cross-referencing is needed for balancing items, with untold resource cost for Riot whenever a significant change is made.
  • Makes it far easier for edge-cases to slip through and ruin balance, increases time needed for development and QA, and above all, renders Riot sluggish and unresponsive as a company on correcting issues.
• Lack of any way to alter a use-case for Champion abilities
  • Need methods to subtly alter a Champion’s utility; a greater variety of potential abilities, a “talent” system, etc.
  • Too much power is loaded into stat growth; when everything in the game scales with time, shouldn’t being ahead allow access to more interesting things instead? Being completely unable to fight an enemy three levels higher than you through little fault of your own is not interesting gameplay. Most other competitive games express advantage in where it naturally occurs: winning objectives and battlefield positioning. LoL goes too far to reward personal snowballing.
• Roles
  • Concurrently with the above, role change through itemization is not currently very flexible. It is basically restricted to increasing damage or tankiness. Champions are generally not capable of expanding their role by adding additional dimensions of usefulness.
    • Mastery system could be altered into a role selection system with a set variety of much stronger statistic changes.
    • Alternatively introducing a “talent” system could also resolve this by including additional dichotomous choices to change the effect of existing abilities.
• Interface
  • Minimap interface is from an archaic time and should be discarded.
    • Since there are so few important characters on the map (9 other than yourself at most), screen edge icons should effectively tell you the relative positioning of all units, and a single button press should show you a high-level zoomed view at a glance. This would drastically free up screen space for a game that depends on it so heavily.
  • Zooming out instead of having a minimap should at least be an option for players with more powerful video cards, if not enforced. It may tax weaker video cards, but the benefits would outweigh the loss by making the screen less constricted and reducing eye travel.
• Barriers to entry
  • Conceptual Confusion
    • In many cases Champions do not behave as their appearance would suggest. Examples:
      • Riven - Baby-faced waif carrying an enormous sword, can somehow both deal and absorb a huge amount of damage
      • Mordekaiser - Giant covered in full-plate armor but generally squishy early (Juggernaut changed this only a little)
      • In fact this is basically an issue with all tanks; until they get items, they generally cannot fulfill their role. This is distressing to first encounter but even later never “feels” right
      • Anivia/Corki - Very slow/immobile flying units
      • Brand - Made of fire, but the last thing he wants is to get close to an enemy (why doesn’t he burn things near him? Or people who attack him? Isn’t he made of fire?)
      • Virtually any Champ with tiny knives - Is incredibly mobile with magic dashes and does huge damage
      • Shen - Giant, tanky, self-shielding, non-stealthy… ninja?
      • Irelia - Unmuscled teenage Princess Leia who could apparently wreck Darth Vader and Darth Sidious at once
    • Furthermore, item builds allow a Champion to have even greater “invisible power”. You can argue that a player can easily see what another Champ is building, but in most cases the Champ in-game model does not change at all. This will confuse and frustrate new players at the least, but also adds to general lack of clarity and consistency around what the game intends to visually portray.
  • Difficulty Confusion
    • Riot seems to confuse the difference between the age of their game and the amount of time the average player has already spent playing it. New champs and reworks tend to be needlessly complex and highly rewarding only to seasoned players.
    • Difficulty should not be a gatekeeper at the Champion level; it should reside at the Ability level. Every champ should have abilities or interactions of various difficulty levels, allowing them to be accessible and satisfying, but also offering greater risk/reward for those who choose it. Otherwise there will always be tiers of champs that are impossible to balance for competitive play without breaking them, and champs that cannot make any meaningful contribution in the hands of less skilled players.
  • Complete lack of “try before buy”
    • Free Champ week is not an effective solution as it does not even allow a 10% sample across an entire week, or use of any other products.
    • Need a test mode where players can use anything available for purchase, but against only one bot or a training dummy. This could be run locally at the client to avoid taxing servers, if feasible.
  • Lack of options
    • Need dueling mode where players can choose a level and gold amount at which to spawn and can meet repeatedly without gaining experience or gold (in other words, let us duel each other WITHOUT needing to recreate an entire game; think like a “Street Fighter” rounds mode).
    • Need more maps, even if they use the same assets already available.
• Corruption of the foundation
  • To keep the game updated to meet modern expectations will require Riot to constantly modify what gamers have come to know and love in existing champs and gameplay.
    • This will be a slow process, based on Riot’s current and past rate of motion, which threatens to leave LoL behind other offerings.
    • Despite the slowness, there is a real risk here of alienation growing rampant and forcing an exodus en masse at some future point due to disillusionment from perceived unrequested/unneeded changes.
  • Elimination of the “Summoner” idea has completely changed the face of the game.
    • Requires significant change effort burden in time and money.
    • High number of champions who were rendered obsolete or thematically unstable.
    • Loss of fun and inconsequential atmosphere that was the perfect explanation for existing and future champions of virtually any possible theme. Now Riot designers are hamstrung, even down to the ability and conceptual level.
• Toxic community
  • As it’s often been said, LoL has one of the most toxic communities in online gaming. I propose that this is only the logical result of the fact that expertise in LoL is won through hardship, which encourages elitism. LoL punishes players who expect things to be understandable, rather than rewarding those with greater skill. New players don’t know that a tiny Yordle or a stealthy ninja can be a tank, that orb-walking is even possible, how far the range of XP gain from minion death is (I don’t even know that exactly), or that last-hitting is as critical as it is. They don’t know that towers gain mysterious buffs under certain circumstances or what the current “meta” is. There is almost no hand-holding, and even if there was, appearances would still be very deceiving. Players are not given an opportunity for intuition to play an accurate role in learning the game and only progress after suffering abusive behavior from others for their ignorance. Riot will never resolve this by adding small amounts of content, because this is a global issue with the game’s design.
  • The best analogy I can give is the card game of Poker. New players know there is a secret, and everyone thinks they can learn the secret and be better than everyone else. But the actual game is not played the way players would expect it to play; they read up on the rules and even memorize the statistical outcome of hands, but the power of good players is invisible and learned on the fly against every individual opponent, and most will never realize it. What you have in LoL is a huge majority of suffering players and a few who benefit from the rest, but as with any form of high-stakes gambling, that huge majority keeps dreaming of the big win, and so continue punishing themselves.
• Age
  • League of Legends is approaching saturation to a point where most gamers are either active players or were once active players. The fight to gain and retain players is only uphill from here.
  • Statistically League of Legends is at the same age where World of Warcraft began losing its player base, which continues to decline. No game will be popular forever.
  • Again, the technological base for the client and game systems is still badly in need of updating, and logically there must be sections of code which would be nearly impossible to do without rewriting the foundation.
• Conclusion
  • By continuing to commit to old technology and old ideals, League of Legends is not a maintainable platform beyond the short term. Rather than competing in the mobile field with old and slow-moving technology, and alienating players by constantly changing major elements of the game, Riot should seize the opportunity to introduce their player base to a sequel. This new game would retain the old champions (reworked) while incorporating other suggestions listed here, including entirely modern tech from the ground up (using all the prior lessons learned), and would effectively on-board players into one sweeping reworked version of the original game.
  • In the meantime, I would suggest the following incremental changes to the game to slowly usher in new healthier patterns (however I stress that these are only stopgap measures):
    • Only allow a subset of items to be purchasable for any particular champ, and restrict these to the visual and intended theme of the champ. This will help migrate players incrementally to a champion-specific talent system.
      • I would also use this as a chance to prevent certain champs from being perpetually broken by certain items by preventing their purchase (ala Jax and Rageblade; just don’t let him build it. Imagine how much easier he would be to balance)
    • Remove Champion statistics that only add confusion to the game, or befuddle the value of itemization. For instance, Victor’s AP bonuses on his Core are completely superfluous when he already has percentage ratios on his abilities and his gold income and build patterns are predictable. Hitting 800 total AP is not an understandable representation of strength when every Champ and ability has different ratios, and in someone like Galio or Viktor’s case this only makes the power boost from certain items that much more obscure. Extra tuning levers for their own sake are not worth the added flavor, and AP should be as clear a power level as AD (i.e., just worry about the math of enemy resistances).
    • Add a new selectable “beginner” mode for last hitting that provides 50% gold for all minions killed near the player (or damaged recently by him), but only 25% extra gold for last-hits (tune ratios as desired). This way beginners can aspire to do better, veterans will feel their success, and anyone who wants a casual game can avoid having to play this mini-game.
    • Further reduce the stat growth per level of champions, not to reduce personal contribution, but to improve opportunities for counterplay.
    • Continue touching champs for thematic purposes. For instance, I know you are working on mages:
      • Brand (one of my all-time favorites), who is literally made of fire, should be scary to get close to. Because FIRE. Give him a burning aura that does more damage the closer you are to him, or change Conflagration to be a tethered burning that stays centered on him (like Karma) and remains until it is broken, whatever works to make him a short-range threat. Right now all he has is a very unreliable single-target line stun (a poor man’s version of Xerath’s E), and then he’s screwed. I could live with his laundry list of other weaknesses (cooldowns, mana needs, immobility, squishiness, poor ratios, reliance on combos, unreliable ult) if this were somehow tackled.
      • Vlad should have some CC if he can drain anyone’s blood and energy, and should be able to manipulate others like marionettes. If he has control over blood, this is a no-brainer (think Bloodbenders from the Avatar series). His current ult is definitely cool but not very thematic; I haven’t seen many teams take good advantage of the damage steroid it gives even if they understand it. I suggest:
        • Change R to be able to command an enemy champion for a few seconds while he laughs evilly.
        • Change Tides of Blood to be some kind of dilapidating effect on one or more targets.
        • Change his Pool to be more about escape than slow and damage. Or alternatively, keep it basically the same but make it root him and enemies it hits for a shorter duration.
      • Malzahar is thematically correct I think, but is definitely a problem for you because he cannot last-hit effectively and his passive is very unreliable. This means to keep him relevant you generally also keep him overpowered for more skilled players who can farm better. His E is required usage to keep his mana up but it marginalizes his CS, especially when combined with a Voidling being out. I suggest having the Voidling remain at a small size and live for a short while, but grow in size and strength and renew its life timer every time a new spell is cast. Or to make it even more unique, make the Voidling shrink in size and power as it takes hits, but never be destroyed. Either way, this would make its power more obvious and predictable. I would also change his E so that if it is on a minion and the minion dies, he gets the automatic last-hit; then you can tone down his other power levels to compensate for more reliable gold income.