Boards›Player Behavior

How do we improve new player experience?

Mama Soraka·1/11/2016, 3:19:21 PM·11 votes·1,309 views

I made a new account to diagnose a problem my PC was having that only cropped up reliably in LoL and found my experience so far has been the opposite of what people here on the boards are saying. A lot of the toxicity at low levels is actually coming from the new players themselves rather than smurf accounts. I know there is no "secret handshake" or anything but having played as many matches as I have since this game came out, its not hard to guess when somebody has played the game more than a level 3 account should have. I took notice of other smurfs and them of me, and the only ones flaming were the new players calling other new players smurfs or repeating things they'd heard in professional LoL videos without any understanding.

One of the biggest points of contention among the new players was who SHOULD be getting kills. Often I see a player complaining the aren't winning lane because their lane partner is taking all the kills. A smurf wouldn't care about that, us veterans actually know how to farm, so kills aren't our only income, but to a new player a kill can mean 5 minutes less farming to get an item because of how poorly they farm.

In conclusion: "Smurfs" are for all appearances just a low-level players boogieman: Something to blame the loss on so they don't have to grow. A lot of new players have strange conceptions of how the game is played and butt heads with other new players over it, when in reality there is no way the game SHOULD be played. There isn't enough focus on just fun and experimentation. Locking PVP until level 3 is a pretty good idea that wasn't present when I first leveled my acct, but as many people have pointed out, the game doesn't do ENOUGH to educate players on the basic concepts of a MOBA to expect them to have fun through the initial slog of leveling an account. The "tutorials" on offer including intro bots are not enough, or in the case of the thornmail Ashe tutorial, actually building bad habits.

Suggestion: A more in-depth single player tutorial and removal of the Thornmail Ashe tutorial. The ground covered in this tutorial would be staying out of tower range, moving your champion, and the importance of CSing. Advanced courses could include the difference between AD and AP champs at a basic level. I recall seeing some players buying AP items on anyone with scaling because they didn't understand how Auto-attack champions work. (Imagine Cait rushing a needless)

26 Comments

Serevas1/11/2016, 3:45:22 PM5 votes

I second this one big time.

League was my first MOBA and it took me a very long time to become what I'd consider an okay player in my elo.

All the jokes about ghosting to get to lane faster, I actually did that shit.

I had no real idea for the value of summoner spells for combat purposes, no idea when to take what for a very long time. I used to run ignite on Xerath for god's sake.

Furthermore the recommended items at the time were a complete mess, very few champions built even half of what was in the recommended items tab.

The concept of warding was so foreign to me that I didn't even take my trinket in half of the games, yes the free trinket with it's own dedicated item slot, that you lose nothing for picking up.

I built purely damage on basically every champion in the game.

I build the highest AP value items in the game on every champion in succession, which at the time ended up being Deathcap, Zhonyas, Deathfire Grasp, etc. I had no idea what a real item build even looked like. The only thing that was salvageable about these builds was that at least Void Staff was on of the higher AP items so I was accidentally building magic penetration. I didn't build boots in a lot of these games either because I'd have less damage. Duplicating items seemed like a good idea, unique passives be damned.

The tutorials pretty much said, here's the basic functions of the game, go do the rest yourself. The equivalency of "Hey in order to swim move your legs and arms in the water." Then throwing you into the deep end of the pool and hoping you don't sink.

LF Annie1/11/2016, 3:48:27 PM5 votes

i'm sure after all the times that i've taken the player survey and said i don't bring my friends into league because it's too hard to teach them with the tools at hand, that they are aware, and prob have a small team working on it, but it's probably_** soonTM**_ rather than anywhere in the near future.

Vorhaut1/11/2016, 4:24:20 PM3 votes

As a new player myself I've been paired with a ton of these smurfs. They rage or laugh at the rest of us and spend most of the game telling us how terrible we are and that we should just uninstall the game right now. Then I tab at 20 to see stats and they're at 40 cs and feeding like crazy as Zed in midlane. But don't worry, they're only feeding because the rest of us are terrible. They're actually diamond smurfs who are only creating a new account because their main account was sabotaged in their placements and they got put in Bronze 5 due to everyone on their team being scrubs and always being matched against TSM. gg rito amirite?

The AP and AD item thing was mildly confusing to me at first, I'll admit. I was one of those scrubs who figured that AP affected my abilities and AD affected my auto damage. Maybe for champions that don't really benefit from a stat (like AP on Garen) have the irrelevant stat greyed out when mousing over the item?

Myrmiron1/11/2016, 3:29:09 PM3 votes

I have another suggestion. Why not hand out puppies with every new account once per player?

xReadyPlayerOnex1/11/2016, 3:36:35 PM3 votes

The single biggest problem with the "New Player Experience" is their complete lack of understanding of the game.

There's no RIOT tutorials on how to CS, how to trade, why gold and xp matters more than kills. How your deaths matter and why giving up 300 gold every minute to the enemy team is impossible to recover from.. When to dragon, how to tower dive and how to counter dives. There's nothing to show them the proper execution of a jungle path. On top of that half the "suggested" builds are absolutely terrible. Most junglers have the wrong jungle item by default. There are sites like mobafire that help with all of this but newcomers won't know about them.

Mostly, they need to learn and they need to learn that raging isn't effective and isn't tolerated. I find that most raging and toxicity is a matter of being unable to quickly and adequately communicate frustration. There's things we can do to limit it and police it but it's not going to be eliminated. The most effective way to help limit this is to teach them the game and how to get better.

League of Potato1/12/2016, 2:03:32 AM2 votes

From what I've gathered from most of the posts about this subject and rito's opinion on it, most if not all rioters know that the new player experience is shit (especially the damn tutorials) but they have no idea if/when it will ever be "upgraded." I already know a bunch of things they could implement to make it better overall:

  • Fix the damn tutorials. Let's not teach new players to build thornmail on ashe please
  • Give tutorials on builds for different roles/champion types i.e. adcs, mages, ad assassins, ap assassins, tanks, etc
  • Make a video for in-client (for new players) that thoroughly describes each item in the game so they know what it does, maybe show examples with champions
  • Since this isn't closed beta anymore and there actually is a meta to the game, have tutorials for each role (explain basic mechanics/strategies for

adcs: last-hitting, kiting, leashes, WARDING (yes adcs get free wards too) etc

Supports: not farming during lane phase, leashes, warding, warding, WARDING (seriously new players usually have no idea what warding is especially if they're not getting outside help from a friend), poke/positioning

Mid lane: strategies and basic champions they can use that will give them success, 1v1 tactics, leashes, WARDING

Jungle: take them through every camp, tell them what each buff does, take them through smite and its item compatibilities, importance of leashes, ganks

Top lane: meta top laners, farming techniques/last hitting, leashing, WARDING

  • put the champion spotlights in the client when viewing champions, (the videos of their abilities only go so far)
  • Explain turrets and their targeting mechanics
  • Maybe have a queue in bots where new players can be matched up with one or two lvl 30 accounts so they can help teach them the basics of the game (inb4 "but no one would ever want to do that," I can honestly say if this were a thing I'd play it frequently, it's actually kind of fun teaching new players once you learn to have patience for their lvl 1 tower dives and horrible mechanics)
  • describe the different gamemodes: pvp, bots, custom matches, twisted treeline, summoners rift, howling abyss, crystal scar
  • Put the summoners code somewhere decently visible in the client maybe make a tl;dr version of it so players actually read it (possibly prevent future toxicity)
  • put notes in the client or pop ups after a defeat telling players it's a video game, and you won't win every game. EVERYONE has bad games (yes even the pros)
  • Explain the different runes/masteries in detail and why it's beneficial to use them (there are current players at level 30 in ranked that don't even have runes and that just reflects onto riot's clarity on this issue
  • explain the shop, refunds, rp vs ip, etc

These are just off the top of my head, I could probably go on for a while. The thing is Riot already has a lot of these things on their main website, all it would take is to transfer it to the in-game client (it may seem pointless but I can almost guarantee that most players, especially new players, spend more time in the game client than they do on your website. (I know this would take a lot of time, but if they want to claim that they actually care about new players, they should be implementing this).

WykiLoki1/11/2016, 4:37:42 PM2 votes

For me, I started off bot lane and intuitively got the ad/ap scaling things by looking up random guides online (was lucky cuz I played tristana, who could go both ap and ad back then).

I started understanding the csing meta-mechanic by learning supp (since nobody wanted that position) as well as warding.

I'd love it if they had tutorials on build path, supporting, and maybe one on clearing jungle; they never, ever mention what a "gank" is in any of the tutorials, and I had to google it to understand it.

With that said, they do have a section on csing in the basic tutorial on the abyss. However, it's clearly not emphasized enough. Warding could also be taught on the first battle on the rift, but there's really no need there with the AI being what it is.

Who Fed Ahri1/11/2016, 3:25:27 PM2 votes

ashe running a thornmail? I've never watched the tutorial but wtf?