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New Player Impressions: League is a Deeply Flawed Game

UristDwarfbeard·7/3/2018, 2:58:23 PM·2 votes·980 views

Okay, so a while back I got into LoL with my tabletop RPG group becasue they always seemed to be playing it when I hopped into our Teamspeak. They have all been playing for years and have hundreds of games each under their belts, and I had decently experienced guidance when i took my first steps. I was not big on MOBAs but at first it seemed fairly accessible with having a huge roster of champions with only four abilities and two summoner spells to worry about learning. But the more games I played, the more I saw how broken it was. There are a number of things that are just terrible game design and are needlessly frustrating to deal with.

1. Snowballing This is by far the _worst _ mechanical bungle the game has and the primary source of every player's frustration. Once the enemy team gets ahead in levels and gold, the odds are that they will only continue to get ahead and the chances that your team can come back from it drops exponentially with each passing minute, becasue at a certain threshold of gold and XP, killing your enemy before they kill you is nigh impossible even when you outnumber them and certainly not in a full teamfight becasue some characters can just delete players without them being able to react. So your options are to continue fighting, dying and further feeding them, or hide under your towers never engaging and letting them get free minion farm. Either way they continue to get ahead. The outcome of the game is basically decided when one team gets so far ahead, and it's only a matter of how long you want to drag that particular game out before your inevitable defeat. I'm not saying comebacks can't happen, but in the dozens of games I've played even with experienced players on my team it has not happened once.

This mechanic basically invalidates a player's skill. Doesn't matter if you can pull your team together and coordinate, doesn't matter how good you are at skillshots, doesn't matter if you know what items to build for a situation, doesn't matter if you know all your enemies' ability sets, all of that gets beaten out by raw numerical advantage and it is _infuriating _ to experience.

2. The Player's Vision The user interface for the player's vision of the field needlessly limited. Players can only see so much of the field at a time, and often fights between players span so much space that it's impossible to see what the hell is going on just beyond the limits of your screen. I cannot play with the camera unlocked, as moving the mouse to the edge of the screen trying to pan where I want to see requires too much micromanagement and is incredibly unintuitive and clunky. I play with the camera locked on me and half of the game I am fighting someone I can only see as an icon on the map and is _just _ beyond my actual vision. Being able to zoom out much farther would be a great quality of life improvement for people who don't want to use that archaic system.

3. Overpowered Champions Simply put, there are too many of them, and the games become centralized on them when they get picked becasue even with 10 possible champions banned in a game of Draft pick, there are still more broken champs to pick from. And many champs are just objectively superior to others and it's basically a game of rock - paper - assassin. I prefer to play midlane mages myself, and more often than not I'm up against an assassin character that can deal all of my health in damage in the span of a few seconds, which starts the aforementioned snowball rolling and I'm faced with the choice of hide under my tower and give him free farm (which doesn't work many times becasue he can still tower dive and kill me anyway because his TTK is hilariously low), die repeatedly trying to farm and keep up with him, or beg my jungler to take his attention off of other lanes and gank my lane every time he shows up.

4. Tilting All of these problems culminate into a game that feels like it's practically designed to make you angry, and all of the fun you could be having is sucked into a black hole. The nature of the game is pure frustration as being on the losing side feels like hitting your head against a brick wall expecting it to come crashing down any time now. And it being so team based inevitably devolved your team into blaming eachother for letting their lane snowball. I've counted many times where I've seen players in chat say "report (player), they're feeding", even though the feeding is not intentional and the players are just having rough game.

And before people make the arguments that will inevitably crop up, let me address them.

"This isn't a problem in (Ladder Ranking)." High-level ranked players are in the top percentile of League players and are a minority of the playerbase. Their experience is not representative of masses people who play unranked at all.

"(Thing) is just part of League, get used to it." This is the one I've gotten from my veteran friends whenever I brought those points up to them. But I say that games can change, games can be rebalanced and reworked for the better. I suspect that the larger fanbase of this game very much dislikes meaningful change because they are too used to the way things are. Maybe I'm wrong about my own circle of players representing the majority, but I don't think I am.

"You're just bad at the game, git gud." Yes, I am not as experienced as others, but it does not make me "bad". I've played a lot of games spanning a lot of genres, and I can tell bad game design from good. Just becasue others can play around bad mechanics doesn't mean those mechanics aren't still bad.

Anyway, that's my impressions from a few dozen games of League of Legends. Take it as you will, but it's merely my opinion as a new player.

8 Comments

DJColdCutz7/3/2018, 3:10:50 PM3 votes

Snowballing: Doesn't matter. Your team is garbage, so is theirs. Half the games my team snowballs, they start playing like idiots because they have a lead to play with and end up throwing it away.

Player's Vision: When I first started playing, I refused to take flash because I thought it was too complicated to use/could never remember to use it. Moving the camera is something you need to learn to use.

Voldymort7/3/2018, 4:14:58 PM2 votes

Snowballing

I've won plenty of games where the score was in the enemy's favour. The difference between dota2 snowballing and league snowballing is that in league you actually have a shot at winning the game...

  1. The Player's Vision

This paragraph is basically "i've only ever played point&click games. Playing anything that requires me to actually make an effort to press more than 2or 3keys is something I can't handle"

No comment

  1. Overpowered Champions

All champions have at least a weakness. You either don't know it or, like above, can't be bothered to try.

Tilting

False reports are ignored.

"This isn't a problem in (Ladder Ranking)." High-level ranked players are in the top percentile of League players and are a minority of the playerbase.

And they were once as inexperienced on dealing with hardships as you are

Their experience is not representative of masses people who play unranked at all.

Because you said so?

"(Thing) is just part of League, get used to it." This is the one I've gotten from my veteran friends whenever I brought those points up to them. But I say that games can change, games can be rebalanced and reworked for the better. I suspect that the larger fanbase of this game very much dislikes meaningful change because they are too used to the way things are. Maybe I'm wrong about my own circle of players representing the majority, but I don't think I am.

" I am right because I said so and everyone who actually understands the game is not"

I'm surprised you have any friends...

"You're just bad at the game, git gud." Yes, I am not as experienced as others, but it does not make me "bad". I've played a lot of games spanning a lot of genres, and I can tell bad game design from good. Just becasue others can play around bad mechanics doesn't mean those mechanics aren't still bad.

More of the same...

Vekkna7/3/2018, 5:05:12 PM2 votes

The user interface for the player's vision of the field needlessly limited. Players can only see so much of the field at a time, and often fights between players span so much space that it's impossible to see what the hell is going on just beyond the limits of your screen. I cannot play with the camera unlocked, as moving the mouse to the edge of the screen trying to pan where I want to see requires too much micromanagement and is incredibly unintuitive and clunky.

This is 100% correct. I do not understand why there isn't an option to edge-scroll the camera and lock it in that position. The per-side offset setting is marginally helpful, but there's no rational reason why I can't choose my own offset and lock the camera there.

It's particularly frustrating when playing a long range mage support on red side in bot lane. With unlocked camera, I can't afford to lose sight of my own champ when so many junglers can appear over/through the walls, then re-center the camera on my champ only to lose sight of enemy laners.

And in unlocked mode, why is there no option to "lock on cursor?" In other words, your cursor always stays in the middle of the screen, and moving the mouse pans the field of vision instead of moving the cursor in a static field of vision. That way you could scroll along with an enemy's movement and scroll FoV while targeting instead of having to pan left edge, top edge (repeat as needed) and then target the cursor.

It's legitimately terrible design. Congrats to those who can master it, I guess? Sort of like congratulating someone for mastering the abacus.

UristDwarfbeard7/3/2018, 4:45:05 PM1 votes

The difference between dota2 snowballing and league snowballing is that in league you actually have a shot at winning the game...

Just because another game is worse about it doesn't mean it's not a problem. Because really, why does it even need to exist in the first place?

This paragraph is basically "i've only ever played point&click games. Playing anything that requires me to actually make an effort to press more than 2or 3keys is something I can't handle"

Allright, so you're going to be an asshole. Copy that. None of what you said actually pertained to any of my points, it's just a silly strawman argument. Explain to me why it has to be so clunky and why it doesn't need improvement.

All champions have at least a weakness. You either don't know it or, like above, can't be bothered to try.

Okay, but where is your room to exploit that weakness on champions who can one hit kill or just CC you into oblivion?

False reports are ignored.

It was merely an example to to show how angry people get in this game. I have played a number of games with a ranked meta and and esports presence and none of them have had such a horribly salty community as LoL.

" I am right because I said so and everyone who actually understands the game is not"

At no point did I assert I was objectively right. This is my opinion, and in my opinion this game has bad mechanics that could be improved, but as I suspect people like you are just too adverse to change to even consider the possibility of it.

I'm surprised you have any friends...

Nice projection you have there.

More of the same...

And again, you do not provide any legitimate counter-arguments for my points.

Quiet Dude7/3/2018, 4:51:58 PM1 votes

This topic is like an IGN review:

OP: “league of legends has too much water”

Kai Guy7/3/2018, 6:22:20 PM1 votes

  1. Snowball, Playing from behind is difficult, many players don't have the game knowlage to pull it off. When they cant that person when behind is a liability to their team in any game they go even or lose lane. Not much to be done about it besides try to communicate with them and hope they listen to reasonable advice.

  2. Your going to want to unlock camera, and to use the minimap to control your vision. Tapping Spacebar centers the camera, holding space bar down locks camera on you. Rather then mouse to edge of screen for all vision your much better off using the minimap, left click on it and you can drag your vision around rapidly. Most the time you don't really need to see what your teammates are doing, just look at mini map.

  3. The game balance is not built around all champs being on the same scale of power. its more like MTG where there is power curves with some things being stronger in a meta and others weaker. for the most part the higher skill cap the higher the power in the kit, the games balance comes from every player having the same ability to pick and play anything, as well as the fact that every thing even when strong still has counters and matchups that negatively impact them. As a player you have options to solve any problem that gets thrown at you. Any meta that sucks for your playstyle will rotate out over the season so you will become viable again even if your a OTP. Its entirely on a player to learn, adapt, and adjust to a constantly changing game state. Or don't, if that's how you want to play. Now this upsets folks, I WANT BALANCED GAMES KAI GUY WTFWAFFLES BBQ. Hey if this was a 1v1 game then that might be more of an option. But you got to understand the game is defined by champions kits. You cant have everybody on the same exact power or Skill expression becomes meaningless, if you want high skill cap champions to be strong and reward skill then they have to be stronger then low skill cap. Make it all same scale and then your meta once established never changes. Imbalance creates the shifting gameplay, keeps styles in and out of meta, champions in and out of meta, and different types of players in and out of meta. This is how the game is designed, its not a mistake or a flaw.

  4. Massive online games where some one can decide your teams fate have toxic community's? Whoda thunk it. Riot trys to improve player behavior and eh its a bit better then in my wc3 days. But there will be awful teammates, toxic players. Not much you can do besides try to make yourself tilt proof and communicate w teammates politly and deescalate situations when they pop up.

Elo argument.

Yep, I constantly am harping on the boards the player experience varys across MMRS, whats weak in bronze might be overwhealmingly good in diamond, what destroys silver might be trash in masters. _ Its just the game. _ The only consistent thing about league your gonna find is that destroying a nexus wins the game, and that it will have a constant fluctuation in the game play experience as metas come and go. Core Mechanics, usually the same. Csing, map awareness, vision control, good aim on skill shots, how to kite. The player base how ever is going to see significant changes, usually a minimum of 2 per year with preseason and midseason.

Your just bad at the game git gud. New players are bad when they try a moba out for the first time. There is a lot of mechanics that need to be learned. Boatloads of game knowledge that has to be acquired and memorized.