Veteran League of Legends players rejoiced today after Riot announced plans to revamp the way new players learn the game. Intro Bots will help players learn the game in a fun and learnable environment that should ease the difficulty of learning a MOBA game for the first time.
Welcome to another developer blog entry! Today we’re talking about something different: our approach to teaching new League of Legends players. If you’ve ever tried to teach friends or family how to play, you might know what a challenge (or pain in the ass) it can be, and many of you have given us great feedback about improvements you’d like to see. Today, we’ll dive into the principles we use to think about how to improve onboarding for new players, and give you a glimpse into an upcoming mode that aims to add a hand-hold onto the MOBA learning cliff.
The guys at Riot are always researching something it seems. As it turns out, they’ve been paying attention behind the scenes to figure out exactly how hard learning LoL is.
Previously, we’ve erred on the side of a steep challenge. In fact, a non-trivial number of our new players end up losing Battle Training, which is intended to be a tutorial. We’ve observed some of those same players go on to become Gold-tier ranked players, so this isn’t a problem with the players – it’s a problem with how we teach them.
With Intro Bots, we’re aiming for a more approachable difficulty that gives all new players a manageable first experience. At the same time, we’ve designed many features to be dynamic based on a player’s performance so the mode isn’t a pushover – players quickly performing appropriate actions and behaving like an advanced player will see fewer helpful features and lightly amped-up difficulty. Novice players should be able to enjoy several games of Intro Bots and steadily learn the basics, while more advanced ones will quickly grasp the essentials and move on to greater challenges in other modes.
Players looking to check out the Intro Bots before they go live will be able to do so on the PBE very soon. You can read the entire article at http://euw.leagueoflegends.com/node/18580