Why League of Legends is Dying?

·??Reason Number one:?It’s not for everyone

The fact that MOBA games are not for everyone is the main reason for league death; the MOBA genre was never built for casual gamers; the Fun factor in MOBA games comes from teamwork, strategies, Communication, and the fact that how good you know the game and all of these skills need time to master. I have to be honest with you it’s not easy to learn all of them, not everyone can learn all the 155 champions; there is a lot of things that a league of legend player needs to learn to play the game perfectly, things such as:

???????????You need to learn everything about every champion

???????????You need to learn how to play your own champion perfectly

???????????communication with four other players

???????????counter playing five other champions

???????????building the right items

???????????choosing the right runes

???????????farming

???????????teamwork

???????????understanding the map and the objectives

???????????how to freeze a lane

???????????when to push a lane

???????????learning and understanding the job of every role

???????????and many other things

The most important thing is that players need to calculate and do all these things at the same time, and that's why not every human being on earth can play this genre. And Only a tiny portion of league players can play the game in the right way. Now you may ask why this is reason for league of legends death, well it all comes back to Riot games policies, all these years Riots games been trying to Advertise the league as a semi-competitive game that even casual players can play it while every decision that Riot made in the last 10 years was Against their own advertising, they deleted every fun and casual map in the game and every new champion or all the new reworks require a high level of skill to play. So now, after 10 years of wrong policies, league of legends is a fully competitive online game filled with casual players. But why? Why league is filled with casual players if it’s a competitive Esport game? why don’t players just delete the game if its hard to play? Well because of 2 reasons, first of all because

·??Reason Number Two:?It’s not new user friendly

The entire MOBA genre has one of the most significant game design bugs of all time, and that’s the fact this genre is not new user-friendly at all. As I said before, for playing a MOBA game such as league, you need to learn a lot of things, and you need to learn and use them all together at the same time, and that’s just not possible. So most of the new users leave or delete the game after their first few games, but you may ask why this is happening now?

I'm going to try to explain this simply. A New player first needs to learn a champion to start playing the game; each time a new player plays a match, he will be playing against 5 other champions, now this new player needs to learn these champions to play against them, plus he needs to learn 4 of his own teammate's champions to play with them in a team. Now here comes the tricky part, each time this new player starts a new match, there is a high chance to see new champions, so basically, the first 100 hours of every new player in the League is just learning new things. Now you may say it's okay because new players will be playing against new players, so basically, no one knows anything anyway. To this, I have to say you are wrong; there will always be smurfs or players that have someone teaching them the game, so right now, in season 11, one of the rarest things you can find on earth is a game filled with 10 newbie players playing against each other. But some MOBA games found a few ways to fix this problem, and I have to say League is not one of those games.

League of Legends has one of the worst tutorials I have ever seen in a video game. A new player only can learn basic things from league tutorials, things such as:

·??????????????????Every champion have 5 unique spell

·??????????????????killing minions, towers, and champions give you gold

·??????????????????you can use the golds to buy new items to make your champion stronger

·??????????????????you have to destroy enemy towers and Nexus to win the game

and that’s all you can learn from the leagues tutorial. Riots don’t teach you anything about roles, jungle, warding, objectives, Ganking, pushing, Items, spells, runes, or even Communication, and after that basic tutorial, a new player will face a much more different and complicated game. now a new player only have 3 options

·??????????????????learn the game from other players inside the game

·??????????????????search for tutorials online

·??????????????????or delete the game and never play it again

and that’s why after 11 years of having a bad tutorial, Riot is facing negative growth in their players. That means League is losing more players than gaining, so eventually, there will be a day that players need to wait an hour to get inside a game.?

·??Reason Number Three:?Gameplay is not fun anymore

In season four, Riot decided that League needs to become a fully competitive game, so they started reworking the old champions, and every new champion they added needed some skill to play. They changed most of the targetable spells to skill shots and removed most of the easy builds from the game; they deleted the casual maps so everyone could focus on summoners rift, and if I’m being honest, it wasn’t such a bad Decision; these changes helped the game a lot, leagues Esport grow a lot because of these changes, and it became a fun game to watch, but it didn’t make the game fun to play, Because as I said before, not everyone has the skills to play with these new changes. Soul Dragons, Map changes, new Baron buff, new runes, new tactics, role changes, all of these gameplay updates made the game so complicated that it’s just unplayable for casual gamers. Do not misunderstand me; all of these updates were amazing, and they really did make the game better, but it doesn't feel like playing league anymore; it feels like going on an 8 hours dead-end job every time you enter a match. You can hardly make any creative play or build anymore because if you don't do what the game is telling you to do, you will lose the game, there is no space for making mistakes in league anymore, if you build the wrong items, you will lose, if you don't push or freeze the lane in the right way, you will lose, if you don't understand the enemy jungle pathing, you will lose, if you don't ward the map in the right way, you will lose. If you don't help other lanes, you will lose, if you don't get dragons, you will lose, and many other mistakes can make you lose, ?These are all the reason why league is not fun anymore because it feels like a job, not a game; you can’t just go on your own lane farm, kill the enemy champion a few times, and expect to win the game because solo carrying is hardly happening anymore, without good teamwork and communication, it's really hard to win a game, and that’s why most of the leagues player rather play with friends not alone because they can easily talk to each other and decide what to do and what not to do but in solo ques and normal games this is hardly can be done.

·??Reason Number Four:?Meta changes

There are many reasons why Riot makes changes in the Meta system, but the only reason that I think is messing up everything is Selling more Skins. Every champion and skin takes a lot of resources and time for Riot to create them, so when a character is not making enough money for Riot they give it a buff or some changes to sell more skin and champion of that character, And This is why every new champion in league is op for a while after they made a good amount of money of that character, they nerf it. On the other hand, some champions never get nerfed or hardly get any changes, for example, Lux. Lux is a popilaor and is always making good money for Riot. I’m sure there is a chart or some kind of Exl sheet somewhere in riot Documents that shows how much money they are making from each champion. I’m sure they have a target goal for each character, and if a character don’t reach the target goal for a while they give a buff until it reaches the target and after that they nerf it again. Sometimes they just buff a character because they are publishing a new skin for that champion, for example a few weeks ago they published a new skin for rumble and exactly in the same patch they gave a buff. These kinds of changes in the meta system break the balance completely because there will always be some champions stronger than others for no reason.

·??Reason Number Five: Counter System

I think the leagues counter system is unbalanced because counter picking have too much impact in games, and there are just some champions that destroy some other champions completely, for example, rammuse vs Master yi, there is no way a full item Yi tries to kill a full item rammuse and not die. Items or runes can’t undo a hard counter pick, they may help the player survive vs. their counters, but it won’t help them to win the fight so the only thing that can help you to win a fight vs. your counter is getting help.

Overall I think Leagues counter system should not be based on champions. It should be based on Items. In their last update for Items, Riot did make some good changes, and it does help a little bit more, but still, it has less impact than what it should have. Players should be able to pick any champion they want and counter other players with items and counter plays, at the same time, players should be able to undo a counter pick or play with other items. in future videos, I will show an example a good counter system.

·??Reason Number Six:?Match Making System

Every online game have a matchmaking system, a system that tries to find players balanced opponents; every matchmaking system have some parameters to check for creating a balanced match, there are some parameters that we are all familiar with, things such as players Elo, players account level, players winrate, Is it solo queued or a premade team, and there is another role that can brakes all other roles, Finding a match anyway. The longer you wait, the more important this priority is; in another meaning, the longer you wait for a match, it will be less balanced for you because it's going brakes other roles to find you a match. Now there is a secret role that mostly game developers know about it, and that's the role of win or lose stricks. This role applies in one condition if the player has three or more win or lose games in the row, two things can happen for creating a match, if the player has a win strick, he will get tougher opponents or lower teammates, and if the player has a loose strick, he will get lower opponents or better teammates vs the other team. These last two roles are the reasons why most of the league games are too easy or extremely hard to win, now you may ask why these roles even exist?

Well, all it comes back to Psychology. It's a little bit too hard to explain, but I'm going to try my best to do it.

Without the win or lose strick role, if you win 10 or 20 games in a row without the game getting any harder for you, you will feel bored, and eventually, you will stop playing the game. Or in the other hand, if you lose all your games in a row, you will feel the game unbalanced and stop playing it. So with this system, after 3 win or lose games in your fourth game, this role will change your feeling about the game, so Riot makes sure you don't delete the game, and you keep playing it. This role can make many other feelings that help player's mind gets Addicted to the game.

In theory, league of legends have a good match-making system, there should not be a problem, but somewhere in their system, something is not working right, because as I said before, matches are either easy or extremely hard to win, so Riot if you are seeing this, the system is good but check your code something is not right.

·??Reason Number Seven:?Toxic Community

We all know how Toxic league community is, and it’s because of all the reasons I just explained. Players are getting unbalanced matches vs. their unbalanced counter picks while trying to play their under meta favorite champion; because of these situations, we see Toxic behavior all over the community. People hardly talk to each other like human beings and because every small mistake can give a huge advantage to the enemy team if someone makes a mistake, everyone will start trash talking and flaming him. I think the only cure for toxic behavior in league is to fix everything else first; then, Riot will see a massive change in players' behavior.

·??Reason Number Eight: Report System

It does not work; we all know that Riot report system doesn't work at all. Because at the end of every game, players are reporting each for none sense reasons, and Riot don't have good Ai for their report system to find out real trollers or feeders, the only part that works in report system is Toxic behavior and racism, and that's because they just look for keywords. If it's true they give the player a chat restriction, which makes even more disaster in that player's next games because he can't communicate with his teammates. Riot right now days hardly ban anyone for any reason because they are losing players, and baning their own active players will make them lose even more, so at the end of the day, Riots report system is just a tool for anger management.

at the end I have to say most of the online games have these problems and some are even worst than league.

Thanks for reading and please share your point of view about this matter with me.

Farrokh Fakhar