I’m surprised they ever had new players stay with how toxic that game’s community is.
I tried it when it was still pretty newish, hopped onto the fucking tutorial servers where you’re playing with real people on your team, but against bots and there’s literally no stakes.
The level of vitriol I got for not immediately knowing the meta was enough to make me uninstall and just never bother with it again. I tried DOTA2 after and had the same experience, which turned me off to the entire genre.
LoL is some or the worst for sure. All gaming has gotten more toxic. I don’t enjoy any multiplayer now, there are many reasons but one of the worst is just how terrible people are.
Early 2000s people weren’t great, racist and homophobic jokes were rampant, but the saving grace was that for the most part it was ribbing. Bad taste, but everyone was there to have fun. Trolls sure, but it was so cool to hang out, meet someone from the other side of the world, and game with them all night.
Now it’s just immediate griefing. Constant attack, if you miss one shot your entire team will come down on you. If you are only there to have fun and not make a career then why are you there
The issue is that the design of the MOBA genre inherently encourages players to be toxic
Definitely. It was also massively exacerbated by the fact that there was no voice chat, surrender mechanics were extremely frustrating, there was essentially no punishment for inting, etc.
You’re not wrong that there is some baseline level of toxicity due to the genre, but I feel it was made infinitely worse by Riot’s failures in implementation.
For instance, the ability to forfeit a match immediately when one of your teammates had never connected. They literally wouldn’t even let you start a vote to forfeit until 15 minutes into the game, even if your whole team was afk. Even the other team was bored, but you all just had to go through the motions for 15-20+ minutes because of Riot’s infinite wisdom. And if you went AFK in that match, you got automatically flagged and put in leaver queue. Fuck sake I’m getting triggered all over again just explaining it.
It’s not a game you go in alone. Usually you go in with a bunch of friends to play with people. And udualyl the toxocotybis beareable when it’s 3 or 4 buddies vs 1 dumbass. Once you get some experience, you are not a newbie anymore.
How do you even keep returning players? I used to enjoy checking out League every once in a while, but it seemed like it wasn’t possible to keep up with all the changes that way. Every time I went back to it, I felt like I was learning how champions and items worked from scratch, because they kept changing. Eventually after every champ I liked to play had been reworked (some of them more than once) I just gave up.
It’s funny, I stopped playing just before the first ever rework. Before that, it was all balance changes. Little numbers tweaks here and there. Now everytime I talk to someone who still plays league it’s like literally everything has changed. Who benefits from that kind of development cycle?
Whales.
In my day, Riot got their whale milk by selling skins. How does reworking the game’s mechanics help attract whales?
It’s not for the whales, it’s for the long time players like myself who like the game to stay fresh. Big changes give me new opportunities to theory craft and try new things, so I play more when there are big changes VS when things are stale and getting boring. Might be part of the reason people have a hard time learning the game though
In my day, they added new things by introducing new items, champs, game modes, and maps. Why do they need to upend the entire game to “keep things fresh”? Doesn’t that just ruin the experience for people who like a certain thing how it is?
I mean, that’s all they really do these days too. I’ve been playing since season 2 and there are definitely ups and downs across the history of the game. These days they’ve slowed down on new champs, like 2 a year or so. They’ve maybe gone a little trigger happy with item changes, but it doesn’t bother me or my friend group too much. Like I said, gives us more opportunity to theory craft and less time for boring stale metas to set in. Game modes got boring for a while, but they’re doing better these past couple years (Arena 2v2s is one of the best modes they’ve ever released)
As far as ruining it for people who like it how it is, I don’t know anyone who fits that, but it’s definitely possible people are getting alienated by changes. But I think it’s okay alienating that small minority to keep the game alive and fresh for the vast majority
Certainly not by trying to install kernel level malware into a fucking game.
Uninstalled that shit faster than anything and am clean since.
Yeah… imagine being a new player. Having to learn 4 abilities and how they work. For over 150 characters.
That’s 600+ abilities you need to know what they do.
Not even including passive abilities.
By the time you are able to be somewhat competitive in any given game. You’ll probably already have moved on from the game after being trashed and stomped on non stop by smurfs leveling their new accounts after being banned for toxicity
Anybody watch LCK? I would kill to have a marginally active space for discussing professional LoL on Lemmy. But given how dead the mainstream sports communities are, it feels like an impossible goal.
Stopped playing many years ago but I’ve been a die hard fan of kt Rolster ever since the 2017 super team of Smeb/Score/Pawn/Deft/Mata. That was shortly after I revoked my fandom of North American LoL teams as a result of them being complete garbage.
But as someone with a lot of expertise when it comes to this particular game, I think this article and some of the takes in this thread are just slightly off the mark. This may get long-winded 😅
It’s absolutely true that the pace of patches, new champions, new items, etc is so fast that it becomes exhausting to catch up if you stop playing for any period. And of course, this plays right into the ballooning scale of the game, with the total burden of knowledge steadily increasing over time. But this is not an inevitability of the genre. As @fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works correctly observed, this development cycle is designed to extract the most money from a small number of whales.
It’s quite possible to massively reduce the rate and scale of patching, or indeed to streamline certain aspects of the game. Indeed, Riot has eliminated and streamlined numerous mechanics over the years such as old Runes/rune pages, various micromechanical techniques that have been automated, or the addition of automatic timers for buffs. However, they have typically replaced the removed mechanics with brand new, more complex mechanics.
Essentially, Riot has mismanaged their own game to extent that it’s nearly impossible for new players to get into, largely because they have been chasing quarterly profits and not considering the long term implications. Or I guess you could argue that they have managed it well, given that it’s probably the highest grossing video game of all time.
But I don’t think this is an inevitable outcome for MOBAs. I think with fighting games like Smash, thinning out the roster is much more important, because each character has exponentially more moves and matchups than LoL champions. The 5v5, semi-RTS nature of MOBAs means that having an intimate knowledge of matchups and ability ranges/timings is much less important for casuals. There is also effectively only one map that changes very rarely.
I believe that it’s possible to create a MOBA that would stand the test of time and be feasible and interesting for people to play casually or competitively for decades, and yet still be welcoming to new players. Imagine if something like that existed and fathers could teach their sons how to play the same esports game they played as kids 😂. That’d be awesome.
It’s more or less the same situation as Reddit/Lemmy. Reddit/Riot fucked up their golden geese, so there is an opportunity for someone else to iterate on their model and replace them. Unfortunately, the financial investment required to build a MOBA game like LoL is much higher than the cost of a link aggreggator like reddit. Nonetheless, I won’t stop dreaming of a community-built competitive MOBA that could attain some type of permanency. My best experiences on LoL were few and far between, but I really do believe that the MOBA formula is incredibly fun, entertaining, and can stand the test of time if done right. I ascribe nearly all of the frustrating aspects to Riot’s overriding profit incentive and incompetence. /rant over
@nanoUFO This situation was always going to happen with any character-based competitive game. Eventually, there’s too many character matchups for new players to want to learn. Nobody would want to get into a game that requires hundreds of hours of homework before they can finally start to become good at the game.
This is a big reason why sequels exist. You have to reset the roster at some point, otherwise things become bloated and impossible to balance. Smash Ultimate has +80 characters, and it’s a miracle that that game only has 5 insanely powerful characters.
I am almost certain Smash bros’s competitive, online players is a tiny sliver of its user base. The rest doesn’t care much where their favourite characters are in the current meta.
For casual to average players, almost any character is viable. Only at high level do a few characters dominate the whole game.
