Riot Ghostcrawler, League of Legend’s game director, released a post about the new player experience on League’s Nexus site. The post is long but the message is simple: Riot hasn’t done a great job of teaching new players, and they want to fix that.
We all remember our intro to League of Legends, and it probably wasn’t the in-game tutorial. That’s something that the team is currently working on. Ghostcrawler says that they want players to experience up to three, short tutorials that explain mechanics gradually and touch on the actual important stuff, but they also don’t want to overwhelm new players before they’re ready to invest.
Ghostcrawler spends some time talking about the successful tutorials of other games, like a 2D Mario. Players are able to find things out for themselves and are only prompted when progression is otherwise impossible. That’s the goal Riot wants to hit. In an ideal world, players will be able to learn at their pace rather than getting slammed all at once. Returning players starting a new account can jump right back in without having to grind out annoying tutorials.
More updates for new players are coming around the corner, including an auto-buy system and possibly Smite being available at earlier levels. While we don’t have much of a concrete deadline on these changes, Ghostcrawler did say that some changes will be rolling out over the next few patches. If you’ve always wanted to get your friend, parent or partner into League, the opportunity may be right around the corner.