League of Legends - Cater to The Newbies?

BloodBlain··1 votes·466 views

TLDR: Problem: The game is difficult to learn, takes time and dedication. Deters newer players from even attempting to learn this game. The players who currently play may stop playing for one reason or another and with no new players the player base and community will dwindle. Proposed solution: Create a system of teaching newer players HOW to play the game. What is "creep score,", why is it important? Etc. Teach them how to build, what does armor do? What does it counter? I propose doing this by a type of "campaign", tutors, and being able to solo test all champs.

Let me just start by saying this thread is purely my opinion and only one possible solution to a proposed problem, I shall include no statistics to support my proposition as a "absolute problem" because I have none :D Although I agree that League of Legends is a fantastic game (I've played since season 1 or 2) I fear that its momentum as a ever growing community/player base has somewhat slowed down and worry that it may continue that trend. I may be completely wrong, and I have no evidence to support this claim. Rioters and their employees, artists, programmers, etc have done a great job changing the game over time; in my opinion it has kept the game fresh throughout the years. However, their focus is almost always focused on the end-game players, the players who have been level 30 for some time. They're introducing new champions, new masteries, changing items or existing champions or even strictly to change the "meta-strategy" of games to make them exciting (rip laneswaps). I have yet to see many updates focused on drawing new players to the game, teaching them some basic mechanics of the game, or even helping them meet people who can tutor them. So what do I mean by a campaign? I mean simply a series of "levels" a player can choose to beat and pass for a series of rewards, the rewards increasing as the mechanical/conceptual difficulty increases. Maybe IP, IP boosts, exp boosts, whatever the riot community decides. It can be co-op if that could be seen as beneficial. The early levels of the campaign would focus on basic mechanics (lets go back to creep score). Let's say (as an example) that one of the first few levels of this campaign would require an individual to reach x amount of gold by x minutes by last hitting minions. I would not require that they have LCS level last hitting skills, but simply requiring that they complete this task would at least ensure that they UNDERSTAND what its about. When I first started I had no idea what gave me gold, I just got it and was happy. There are many things we take as common sense simply because we are veteran players but if we think back - wasn't this game a struggle to learn? All the champions, what they do, what the items are and their names and their stats and what is good where - it got overwhelming. I only continued to play the game because I had a large group of friends to do so with, and after a while I was happy that I did. But what about the solo players? Do we really expect them to "hit the books" and start researching all there is to learn about what is now such a MASSIVELY complex game? To be fair, if you were a new player, all by yourself, would you invest that kind of time without even knowing if you LIKE the game?

Let me give a bit of an outline to a few things I personally would like to see introduced to the game - please keep in mind that I have only mulled this over for a day or two so of course there will be plenty of holes and things I haven't considered. In addition I realize what a daunting task such a potentially large scale update would be. But anyways here goes;

Campaign - Basic mechanics - last hitting, killing towers (and why), how tower aggro works, what the jungle buffs do (and yes even the smite buffs), what the neutral objectives do, what are inhibitors and what do they do, what are runes and how do i equip them, how to set up my masteries, and many more. I have not thought too in depth about what every level could be about, nor have I considered how many levels there could/should be (or reasonably CAN be depending how much time each takes to create).

Tutors - Summoners can sign up to be tutors? When a new player creates an account they could be asked "would you like an in game tutor" or something similar. That would then be linked to a tutor who would be notified of their new "trainee" if you will and will then be able to contact them (online or offline) through league client. This messaging system would be the same exact chat but would act kind of like a mailbox so they don't HAVE to be online at the same time every time to talk. Just in case. The tutor will then play with their trainee, or go through some levels of the campaign with them, just as a trainer would do for a trainee who was newly employed. The tutor would be rewarded through a system based on how much exp the trainee received while playing with the tutor, perhaps in IP, RP, icons, etc and the trainee would receive small IP rewards, early game runes, or other silly things. In addition the trainee benefits for obvious reasons and hopefully has made a friend or two throughout their "tutor time" and has an increased incentive to try to learn the game in more depth.

Champion "Quick Plays" - League of Legends has well over 100 champions now - when I started there were probably less than 50? I can't really remember. I propose that each champion should be unlocked in the Howling Abyss/Summoners Rift as a single player option only. This allows players to see what a champion does without having to die to it 10 or 11 times to figure out "oh... when I see an exclamation mark Rengars about to kill me." (That might be a bad example because I don't believe Rengar himself would see the exclamation mark playing alone but you get my point). In addition this also gives players a chance to see if they LIKE a champion before they spend a few days getting the IP to buy a 6300 champion and then be disappointed because they already used all their refunds. Who knows? Maybe they'll like a champion so much they'll just buy some RP to get it. I would suggest that helpful walkthroughs should be included for each champion such as to what the champion does and what potential combos each champ can do but that might be a lot of wasted time.

1 Comments

Fududles1 votes

Quite the rant couldnt read the first 3 lines .... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Trollface.png

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