Riot Phreak slams LoL community for playing on autopilot: ‘Players don’t read’

League of Legends patches come once every two weeks, and while they vary in size, most have brought major changes to the game’s champions, systems, and items—and while it makes sense to adapt to them, it turns out that a large part of the player base doesn’t even stop to read through item descriptions. 

While previewing Patch 13.17 on Aug. 23 and commenting on what Riot Games is exactly trying to achieve with the changes, David “Riot Phreak” Turley revealed an interesting statistic—most League players don’t read. 

For this, he used an example of Zeri and Patch 13.12, which has entirely removed her interaction with Sheen and Spellblade. But, on the day the patch was released, more than half of the players were still Trinity Force on this snappy champion. 

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“We saw from Zeri that on day one [that] more than half of Zeri players build Trinity Force as first item. So, we know players don’t read. A lot of them do—the behavior shifted over time,” said the Rioter.

Right before revealing this intriguing piece of information about League fans, Riot Phreak was commenting on the Hecariim changes in the upcoming patch—mana reshaping and AD ratio triple-scaling nerf. After these changes go live, Hecarim’s win rate should actually increase if players switch up their builds, especially if they start building Spear of Shojin. 

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The players immediately responded to this in a post on League’s subreddit from Aug. 23, saying that champions like Zeri can change drastically from patch to patch and it’s hard to adapt so quickly: 

“I think Riot needs to consider that a champ like Zeri, in particular, has seen so many drastic changes, completely altering her scaling and adding a different wall of text that needs an hour of study to figure out, that most players don’t have a fucking clue what she does these days and how she does it,” explained one player.

Riot August joined the discussion, commenting how, when designing a champion, they always have to take into consideration the fact that many players don’t read tooltips.

“If a champ has a mechanic that can only be learned by reading a tooltip, it is likely that a good chunk of players will not know it exists,” elaborated another Riot employee. 

The overall sentiment here is that half of the community dives into patch notes, and the other half just brushes over the changes or doesn’t read them at all. Some players read patch notes partially, only going through the changes that concern them and their role—a bad habit, especially because you need any advantage you could possibly get in League. The patch notes hold many secrets, and reading them is the number one step you can take to understand the game.