Senior Riot devs say the League of Legends playerbase is getting older, with fewer newbies jumping in: 'Candidly, it's not the same situation it was 10 years ago'

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.

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.

I'm in a small minority, but their ring0 anticheat isn't helping with that.

I have multiple thousand hours on DotA but I feel like the problems here might be the same. These games have bloated themselves to the extent that it becomes impossible for a new player to be able to pick up the game because it is near impossible to create and maintain an in game tutorial. With hundreds of heroes/champions it's like a thousand different mechanical interactions and expecting new users to be willing to put up to that is asking for too much.

@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.

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