Stupidly Simple Fixes: League of Legends edition

Wow, I’ve done a few of these stupidly simple articles, but all of them have been about Team Fortress so far. And most of them were pretty simple ideas, although later on I was kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel. But League of Legends on the other hand is a game completely swamped with problems, many of which aren’t actually really that game-based. It’s the outside bits and pieces that piss people off and make them angry. So I’m going to pass this over to Vel’Koz to explain these thoughts, since Garen’s still busy rocking the high win rate.

Or not. Alright, fine, I’ll write about this stuff. Anyway…

Thing the first: ARAM is one of the more fun game modes, but every time I play, I swear someone gets pissed off and disbands the match because they got a champion they hate. Alright, I get pissed off at ARAM but that’s because I generally suck or have to carry games with champions I’ve only played once *cough*Xerath*cough*Anivia*cough*. But most people leave because the randomness of it all is, well, not random. Currently, your champion is chosen out of all the champions you own, plus the 10 free week champions (some of which you may already own). People take advantage of that by creating ARAM-only accounts that consist of only the champions that are good in ARAM. Not very fair, right? Many solutions suggest to just make all champions available in ARAM, but Riot won’t do this because they make money from them. My solutions? Either up the free week champions to 40 for ARAM only or, even better, your champion is chosen from all the champions owned by everyone on your team, not just your own pool. Also get rid of rerolls. Play the champion you’re given, you coward!

Thing the second: Remove the ability to duo-queue in ranked. Right now, if you want to play ranked matchmaking, you have several options: ranked 3v3 teams on the Twisted Treeline, ranked 5v5 teams on Summoners Rift or Solo  Queue, where you are matched with randoms. But in Solo Queue, you have the option to invite one friend along to play with you. This makes no sense. It means that a team of 5 strangers could end up with a team of 1 and two pairs of people on an external communication program. Duos screw everything up. They’re harder to match-make because they automatically have better comms, their skill levels may vary considerably and they can so easily fuck up games by trolling. Want to surrender? The duo can just vote no and end the surrender, since you need 4/5 to give up. And having two people throwing the game is harder to deal with than just one.

Thing the third: There’s different tiers in League of Legends – Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Challenger. Each rank is split into 5 divisions, with 1 being the best and 5 being the worst. Every match you win, you gain points, every match you lose, you lose points. Get 100 points and you have a chance of being promoted – the promotion series. Thing is, this makes sense if you’re going from, say, Silver to Gold or Platinum to Diamond, you have to win 3 out of 5 of your next matches. But you ALSO have to play a promotion series if you want to up a division, e.g. Silver 3 to Silver 2. And these are even stricter, you need to win 2 out of 3 of your next games. Including the 2-3 games it took to get you to 100 points, you need to win a good 75% of the time to be able to climb and reach your true rank. Promotion series pile on so much extra pressure that many people simply snap. Not to mention that the whole thing is convoluted as fuck. My solution? Remove the division promotions and just make it so you need 500 points to do a promotion for the next rank. Simple!

The next section combines a bunch of simple ideas in one place. Riot goes on and on about how games can be incredibly ‘toxic’ (that’s the buzz word lately) but they don’t seem to realise that this anger and hatred and toxicity start in Champion Select. People get incredibly pissed off if things don’t go their way. Examples include:

• A player not getting a role they want.
• A player not getting a role they want because others didn’t communicate.
• A player not banning the right champions.
• A player banning the champions someone else wants to play as.
• A player being ‘counter-picked’ (i.e. since each team takes it in turns to pick a champion, someone can pick a champion that counters an already chosen one).
• A player saying they will have to leave in X time, even if the match will last longer than that.
• A player deliberately saying they will throw the game.

Nasty, eh? Well, this can all be fixed with, well, stupidly simple fixes. Currently, one player chooses to ban 3 champions that no player can pick in that match. But there’s 125+ characters now, and often way more than 6 problematic champions, and your team might want to play some of the currently quick-to-ban champions. So why not up the number of bans to 5 per team, and give each player one ban each, while also giving teams more time to discuss tactics and say hi to one another. That way, everyone is happy!

But what about people who make life hell right from the start? Votekicks. All players of a team should be able to both report people who act like douchebags and be able to vote to disband the match. If 3 out of 5 players wish to disband, then the game ends and everyone’s returned to the matchmaking queue. Simple.

It might also be worth doing a couple of things once the game has started. In Dota 2, if a player never connects to the game, after 5 minutes, other players on the same team are free to leave. Fighting a 4v5 game is never very fun, so it’s good to be able to get out early. Of course, the game will still count as a loss, but you’re not forced to fight a needlessly hard battle. And, even more of course, the person who never connected would be punished in some way, with first time offenders being treated much more nicely than die-hard AFKers. This should also extend to players who never leave the base and just sit there taunting their teams, because that’s just a douchebag thing to do.

Another unrelated problem is that you get a lot of people who are already ranked creating new accounts to play again. But that means grinding your way to level 30 alongside genuine newbies, often treating the newbies like shit in the process. This has also caused a black market on which people use bots to grind accounts to 30 then sell the accounts on for profit. If Riot sold a back in the RP store that enabled a player to jump level 30 and unlock a couple of champions, this would make things better for everyone. Put the price at $10-15 and watch the money roll in. Meanwhile, newbies can learn the game properly alongside other newbies.

Finally, fix your tutorial and add that damn sandbox. The League of Legends tutorial isn’t THAT bad, but it could be better. Unfortunately, no matter how nice your community is, people don’t have time to type out articles on how to help newbies mid-game, nor can they post good resources on how to improve while they’re busy dodging lasers and other crazy things flying at them. People get less angry if they don’t have to worry about explaining everything to newbies because the game doesn’t give enough resources for players to learn for themselves. Also, stop telling people to build Thornmail on Ashe.

Of course, you can’t fix everything and you can’t suddenly force everyone to be nice, but come on, these are simple ideas that should have happened a long time ago.