The new player experience has always been a problem for League of Legends. The nature of the game means it’s a complicated beast to learn casually and an even more impossible task to master. A new tutorial system was added to the game in Patch 8.12 in an attempt to improve that at least a little bit, and while it’s certainly better than the old tutorials and training, it has some serious kinks to work out.
When you kick up the game for the first time, you’re flooded with over 140 champions, each with their own sets of abilities to remember, the rune system, several game modes, and on top of all of that, you have to figure out what the hell farming, sieging, and fighting entail. For those of us who have been around for years, it’s easy to learn new information, because we know exactly what we need to learn and what to base that knowledge off of.
For new players, however, it’s a game of cat-and-mouse to figure out what you need to learn to begin with, and that’s what these tutorials are designed to do. They teach you the extreme basics—moving, attacking, gold, experience, minions, champions, and eventually, the Nexus. For the most part, they hit all of those checkboxes, but it’s a very strange journey to get there.
Tutorial No. 1
The first tutorial is, by far, the best of the three, in our opinion. It soft-introduces the player to the map on this single-lane Summoner’s Rift that blocks you out of the river and jungle. That’s great, because if this really is the first experience the new player would have in the game, they certainly don’t need to worry about the river or jungle yet.
This lane is filled with minions on both teams, towers, you, and one enemy champion who pretty much engages on you every time they get the chance. The purpose of this tutorial is to learn movement, attacking, and it allows you to try out a handful of champions by clicking on an orb with their portrait off to the side of the lane. The enemy champion changes, too, so you can see a good portion of different champions.
After you’ve grappled with the enemy champion a couple times on a few different champions and you’ve dealt damage to some turrets, it drops four allies around you, and then tells you to advance with your new team and take down the Nexus at the center of the base. It doesn’t actually explain what the towers are or what they do exactly, but it doesn’t need to at this point. It’s just you, your team, the enemy, and their Nexus.
This is all very basic, very simple, and works very well. You and your allies are significantly more powerful than the enemies, so it’s hard to run into any real resistance, but it still feels rewarding to kill them, and that’s important.
Eventually, you take the Nexus, and it’s onto the second tutorial, and this is where things get weird very quickly.
Tutorial No. 2
The goal of this tutorial is learning how to level up and spend ability points on your abilities, and this one is on the real, three-lane Summoner’s Rift. We have some small complaints about this tutorial in particular, such as the fact that we wish more emphasis was brought to the abilities and spending the points, such as glowing icons, larger indicators of where to look and click on the abilities. The big issue, however, is far more confusing.
The in-game quests of this game are all focused around soaking experience, leveling up, and spending your points. It communicates these things well, aside from the small previously-mentioned issues, but then—nothing. Since that’s the entire purpose of the tutorial, it would make sense for it to end here. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. That wouldn’t be such a big deal aside from the fact that it doesn’t actually teach you anything else.
It will briefly mention recalling if you get too low on health, without explaining in detail how to do it and what that actually means, and it’ll yell at you if you take a shot from a tower. Apart from those very small hints, you get essentially nothing else, and the tutorial doesn’t end until you take the Nexus. Keep in mind that while it did teach you how to soak experience by standing near dying minions, it doesn’t actually teach you what killing them nets you, what gold means, how to spend it, or even that there’s a shop to begin with.
So, in other words, it takes you about five minutes (tops) to learn everything this tutorial has to offer. Then, without being taught how to farm, what gold is, what gold can be spent on, what killing champions gets you, how to siege turrets, or that you can even bounce from lane to lane—you now have to win a game full of bots that have seemingly been dumbed down even further than they were in the first tutorial.
So, there are two worst case scenarios here. Either the player gets frustrated and tries to figure out how to leave, or they stay, sitting near minions without knowing what that means to its full extent, waiting for the game to end. Eventually, they’d hopefully end up in the enemy base, resulting in a very, very boring 15 minutes against five champions that may as well be big minions, and they probably assumed leveling up was all they’d need to end the game.
This tutorial is the epitome of the phrase “hung out to dry,” and it gets even weirder.
Tutorial No. 3
This tutorial teaches you the basics of gold, killing turrets, killing champions, recalling, and the importance of all these functions. That’s great, except for the fact that in order to beat the excruciating second tutorial, you probably had to figure most of that out on your own. We’re going to rephrase that, just so you can fully appreciate how backwards this is—the third tutorial teaches you all of the things you needed to beat the game in the second tutorial.
Again, there are some things that seemed a little unintuitive in this tutorial, too, but for the most part, the message of each quest was simple enough to figure out eventually. We’d like to see a little more attention and emphasis placed on some things, like more than just an arrow floating above the shop indicating there’s a place to spend your gold, but those are all minor complaints.
There are two big issues with this one. First, some of the quests are buggy. That’s sort of expected, since these tutorials are a brand-new feature. When a brand new player sees a bug in the tool designed to teach them about the game, however, it’s going to have a larger impact than if a two-year veteran finds a bug on a new champion.
The biggest bug that we found was on the quest that popped up after amassing enough gold from killing champions, directing you to spend it at the shop. First, the tutorial explains that you need to kill minions to get gold and then asks you to kill 12 minions. After that, it asks you to earn 3,500 gold by killing champions. When we completed both, it told us to recall and spend the gold, followed by a little indicator down on the recall icon to show us that was what we needed to click. We clicked it, recalled, and that’s when it broke.
When we arrived in the base, the quest was marked as completed and then disappeared off the screen, and a big arrow appeared above the shop. After a few seconds, we opened it up, bought an item, and walked back to lane. About 10 full seconds later, a new quest and loud voice told us that now we were in base, we could open the shop and buy an item. The quest then told us to spend our gold. Not only had we already done that, but we weren’t even in the base anymore, so we walked back.
We stood in the fountain for a while again, and then the quest resolved itself, indicating that it finally realized we had already bought an item. For the most part, any bug we encountered was a lot like this one. Quests seemed a little slow, and it would often take them a minute to realize they had been fulfilled, which got a little annoying to us—and we imagine it’d be even more irritating to someone trying to use them to learn.
After that, we received a quest to take out all of the turrets in one lane with the goal of eventually taking the inhibitor. As a new player, we expect hearing the word inhibitor here for the first time ever would confuse you a little bit, but it sounded like you’d hear more about it after taking out the lane turrets, so you’d probably shrug it off, just like we did.
You can probably guess where this is going.
After destroying all three towers in a lane leading up to an inhibitor, the quest resolves, and then… nothing. And there lies the second big problem of the third tutorial—you are once again hung out to dry.
Luckily, this time it’s easier to figure out what to do on your own. You now finally know what gold is and what it does, as well as what experience is and how to recall. So after you’ve killed all of the turrets in a lane, there’s really only one thing to do: Keep moving forward and destroying stuff. You’ll take out the inhibitor, but you won’t be told what that means, and eventually you’ll take the Nexus and end the game, and that’s the end of the new tutorial system.
What needs to happen next?
All in all, we’re fans of the new tutorial system. It explains things that the old tutorials failed to explain in clean and simple ways. It’s a needed step for the messy and convoluted new player experience in League, and it’s a good direction to take for Riot. Now, though, some things need to be honed, and some fat needs to be trimmed.
For starters, the order that directions and explanations arrive in front of the player need to be re-evaluated and then distributed back to them. For instance, if Riot wants to only teach about abilities and levels in the second tutorial, it should probably end after the player figures that part out. Otherwise, some directions from the third tutorial should be added to the end of the second tutorial so the order in which you learn new information makes more sense.
Secondly, more attention needs to be brought to certain aspects of the learning process so the player can realize what is the most important, and hopefully remember where it is and how to access it in the future. Little arrows just aren’t going to cut it. There needs to be glowing, maybe some more noises, and clear paths that the new player can take to access them. Call attention to the big stuff like ability points and the shop, because it’s worth it for the new player to remember those things when they need them.
After the tutorial system is trimmed up and made to be a little sleeker and healthier, Riot should move onto bigger and better things, namely a challenge system. Challenges that reward players for learning how to last-hit, how to Flash over walls, where to place wards, how to approach lanes to gank, what order to farm camps, and more could go a long way.
Not only would a challenge system make learning this monster of a game more rewarding, but they’d do something even more important. They’d provide a clear roadmap to the player outlining what exactly they have yet to learn, replacing the guesswork and YouTube tutorial rabbit holes that we have now.
New tutorials should only just be the beginning, because there’s a lot of potential here to improve the game for the new players who desperately need it.
Published: Jun 16, 2018 10:22 am