The Worst Community of All Time

The worst part about this LoL pullquote is that this is the nicest thing somebody has said to me in League of Legends.

I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve been playing more and more League of Legends, and thus I’ve been exposed more to the utterly terrible community. Until I started burning downtime at work with the LoL Tribunal, I wouldn’t have even believed a community could exist with this amount of hatred. There will always be bigots and racists and assholes, but it still shocks me that the vast majority of my League games include multiple dickwads. Where the hell do these people come from?

My continuing familarity with this genre has helped me find out. This terrible community isn’t a League of Legends specific problem. In general, the larger the community, the worse it is. League has some 30+ million players, so it certainly hits that mark. But there is more to this than size. Other similar games (Defense of the Ancients, Heroes of Newerth, etc) have atrocious communities too, despite being much smaller. A horrid community seems endemic to this genre.

What is it about MOBAs that makes the communities so shit?

First, let’s rename the genre. ‘MOBA’ is terrible, and I can’t bring myself to use it. Multiplayer-online-battle-arena isn’t descriptive, it’s a bunch of Barnum words. I think a much better genre for League of Legends is “multiplayer base defense fighting game”. The base idea of the game has you defending your base, but the actual gameplay interactions are more like a fighting game. I’d have called it tower defense, but that brings to mind a completely different genre. Tactics used in League of Legends are similar to what you might see in fighting games - zoning, area control, counter picks, baiting, mind games, ability combos, etc. The fact that you level up and buy items doesn’t make this game an RPG - nobody plays a role, there’s no story, etc. They’re just implementation details of this fighting game. 

This helps highlight exactly why the game gets so competitive. You spend nearly an hour directly fighting someone - each time you hit them is a victory of you over them, each time they kill a minion is a small triumph over you. It’s really quite personal.

But this isn’t terribly different from other games, at least, not yet. The real reason why League’s community is so impossibly bad is because League makes you compete with your own teammates.

Team of Rivals

You compete with your own team in two main ways. First of all, if you screw up, you really harm your team. In Halo, death means a 5-15 second break and respawning with full ammo and a Battle Rifle. Death in League means that the enemy who killed you gets a sizeable gold and experience bonus, and while you aren’t there, he can farm minions and make even more money. Or he can leave his lane and go bully your team. Death really, really sucks, so that’s why the #1 advice I give to new players is to be a huge coward and not die.

In Halo, one stray grenade or sniper bullet can kill someone. Death comes very easily, so being down one team member for a fight isn’t that huge of a deal: a lucky shot or melee attack can turn a fight in your favour. In League, a 1 player difference is devastating. Plus, as you continue die a second and third time, you’re making that same opponent even more powerful. Each death is taking a slippery slope and making it even slipperier. This effect is very strong: I’d rather play 4v5 (being a member of the team with four players), than 5v5 with one truly bad or trolling teammate.

Furthermore, a player on your team who starts bad never gets enough of a bonus to “catch up”, so bullying him becomes smarter and smarter for the enemy team. They get the same cash bonus for killing him, and he gets easier and easier to kill, so a good enemy team will completely bully a weak player. That weak player will bring down his entire team.

League players are trained to hate and distrust their own team because their teammates can games so much more difficult for them. The only person you can trust is yourself.

You also compete with your own team for the limited resources on each map. Again, this is no difficult from Halo, except that these resources are often permanent. If you steal a kill from a member of your team, in his eyes, you just made him weaker, even though the two of you collaborated in the destruction of your mutual enemy. In most games, kill-stealing isn’t a big deal, since comparative kill scores are just for comparison post game - whichever team kills more matters, rather than who gets those kills. In League, some people absolutely fly off the handle when you steal their kill, even if you didn’t intend to steal it. Limited resources include minions to kill (that’s why one player in bottom lane often picks a healer champion and doesn’t farm gold, so another player gets it all), buffs on the map, and even enemy champions. Individual players often feel that they individually can make the best use of each resource, so if you take a buff another player feels entitled to, he feels that you made him weaker. And if the resource you want is missing? It’s clearly because of your own team who let it get stolen. Again, they’re making you weaker! 

This game design is seen in the League of Legends, Defense of the Ancients 2, Heroes of Newerth and more. It boils down to the game design making you want to hate your team. In League, interacting with your team is of such high importance that having a few bad teams sours the whole experience. And unfortunately, because of the vast popularity of League of Legends, the average skill spread is a chasm. Any given team is likely to have one average player, two above average players, and two below average players. Those two below average players can literally ruin the game - they have a much stronger impact than the two above average players.

Finally, a poster on the Team Liquid forums found that if a team is 10% ahead in gold earned by the 12 minute mark, they win 95% of games. Think about that for a second. 10% is not much; a bad player in top lane will cause that. And while that’s only one data set, in my experience it holds true. League of Legends is all about momentum, so if one player halts your momentum, you hate them because they’re likely costing you the game.

Inevitable

Sadly, I think that this terrible community is inevitable because of the way League of Legends is designed. There’s really nothing Riot can to improve the community without dramatically modifying the game. Months ago, I suggested that they could implement diminishing returns on killing bad players. This means that a bad player would not impact his team as strongly, but it would represent a massive change to team strategy, which can have unintended side effects on the game.

Riot has a “quit protection” method I absolutely despise. If a player leaves a game, he can’t play any games until the game he left finishes. I like this idea, but it does incentivize the player to end a game quickly rather than just quit if he wants to leave the game (say his friend comes online). As I said above, I’d rather play 4v5 than have a bad player on my team, but this quit protection incentivizes the player to suicide against the enemy team and feed them to end the game quickly, rather than just quitting. If you quit, you should be able to play again, but Riot should simply crush quitters algorithmically. Quit 3 games every 20 games? Temporary ban. (These numbers are just examples, I’d need more data on quitters to know what numbers to pick).

But in the end, I really don’t think there is anything Riot can do. They have an enormous community, far too big to feel tight-knit, and their game is incredibly competitive, both between teams and within them. Short of implementing a co-op campaign mode and removing player vs player, I don’t think they can really do anything about their shitty community other than to survive it.

PS: Riot states that they have systems to prevent players from only punishing those they see in the Tribunal, the 80+ cases I’ve judged have been overwhelmingly “punish” verdicts. I’ve only pardoned three or four times, and in most cases, I see enough foul language in the chat log to be ready to punish before the 20 second timer has finished. 

Some folk on Reddit wrote things like “Well, some players aren’t that bad, so I let one racist remark slide”. I don’t think we should lower our standards as judges simply because the community is terrible in general.

Good Choices

I listen to the podcast ‘Build & Analyze’, and something Marco Arment said has stuck with me until now. He develops an offline reading app for iOS called ‘Instapaper’. He had recently purchased/licensed several top-notch fonts for his app, and was discussing why users can’t select from the 30-odd fonts built-in to iOS.

He said something along the lines of “I don’t want to give my users bad choices”. This is such a great mindset.
See, most of the fonts on iOS are poor for long-form reading. So rather than letting people select from every font, he restricted user choice to fonts he thought appropriate. Each font picked is a fantastic font - you can’t pick wrong - but it is more restricted.

Diablo 3 is a lot like this. Yes, you have less choices than you do in Diablo 2. But most of the choices in Diablo 2 were terrible choices! You could make a poor choice (or even a mistake) with your attributes and be permanently screwed. On top of that, half of your choices are all incremental choices (i.e. if you’re going to stack Vitality, you only really choose that once - upgrading Vitality each time you level up is simply a reinforcement of that choice). Realistically there aren’t that many choices in Diablo 2. And certainly not many good, interesting choices. A good player will pick their build when they create the character, and simply stock skill points until you can sink points into it.

Diablo 3 provides players with good choices. You get six skills to pick (+ 3 passives). Each of those skills is useful, and each of those skills can be further modified with a Rune to dramatically change it. You have to work on creating a good build, and if you make a mistake, that’s okay. You change your skills. You don’t have to worry about the nitty-gritty of picking dull attributes that you can’t change - all of your modifiable stats are changed through gear.

I think this is where games are moving right now, and a lot of people are pissed off about it. I think that’s really shortsighted - I don’t think most people consider the quality of chooses, but rather the quantity. What a shame.

Never Read This Again

Absolutely in love with the new SSX game (except perhaps the Descents, but I've only tried one so far; can't pass judgment). There's a lot of neat ideas in effect, but I'm low on time. One thing I am impressed with was the Restart Drop dialog box. Your options are Don't Restart, Restart, and Restart (Don't Show Me This Again). This is a great, great option. When I hit Restart Drop, I want to restart the drop. I don't want to have to navigate to 'Yes'. This is a tiny, tiny little timesaver, but I'm eternally grateful for it.

Surrender At 20

One element of League of Legends that continues to baffle me is the surrender timer. When your team is losing and you just want to call the game, you can type /surrender to bring up a surrender vote. If 4 players (out of a team of 5) or two players (out of 3) agree, your team surrenders, you lose immediately, and the other team wins. Oh, there’s one caveat: this only works after 20 minutes (15 for a 3v3).

This is a huge, huge pain in the ass, and it makes absolutely no sense to me.

In most online games, you can simply press start, choose Quit, and you’re done. You’re out. Various games have various ways of penalizing you for doing this because you’re directly screwing over your team, especially if it was an otherwise winnable situation (i.e. nobody wants you to quit if you miss a trophy/achievement attempt). League of Legends has a great way of solving this problem: you can’t join new games until the game you were in ends.

But back to surrendering. It’s a great idea: when your team has basically given up, why spend another 50 minutes slogging against a slow moving team? Why let them farm your team for kills (earning them bonus IP when they win)?

Surrendering is a great option for both sides. It gets you into a new, possibly winnable game, much faster. And the winning team gets all the bonuses they would from a regular win, and they get to hop into a new game, eager to carry on their streak. So why the 20 minute timer?

It’s the surrender timer that makes me angry. See, there’s a lot of legitimate reasons to surrender before the 20 minute mark is called. Sometimes team members disconnect and don’t come back. Sometimes you’re matched with somebody who really, really shouldn’t be in your level bracket and he makes it virtually impossible for your team to win. Sometimes you’re just so, so clearly outmatched.

Cruising the abomination that is the League of Legends forums, I see one primary argument for the timer: to prevent people from quitting too early, because the game can swing. I think this is an idiotic argument. If 4/5 team members feel a game is lost, it’s highly unlikely they’ll be playing at their best, eager and ready for a comeback. If there’s only me and one other guy in my team, I really, really don’t see why we have to spend 20 minutes waiting for the other team to steamroll us. And if I have teammates who really, really want to stop playing but don’t want to quit (repeated quitting can result in being banned), they can just not play and go watch TV for the duration of the timer.

Again, the surrender timer makes no sense to me. I feel that it is in place for foolish reasons, and removing it would save me a decent amount of time when I’m trying to play and we’re just being steamrolled.

Linked List: The Curse of Cow Clicker

Jason Tanz, writing for Wired Game|Life:

Bogost writes that Cow Clicker—and, by extension, games like FarmVille—are akin to the Nigerian prison, trapping players in a barren environment. The fact that people are able to exercise creativity despite the cruel limitations of the game—to craft crayons out of shit—is a sign of the indomitable human spirit but no reflection whatsoever on the merits of Cow Clicker. 

A scarcely-believable story about a farce gone wrong. Make sure to read if you know someone who got sucked into FarmVille, Tiny Tower, Sims Social, or a similar “social game”.

Infodumps

I hate infodumps.

One of the major complaints about Skyward Sword (and most Zelda games) is how long it takes to get going. While that’s absolutely true, there are far worse things in the world: I think that’s a much better solution than a giant infodump. Let me explain. (Gameplay spoilers for the first 3 hours of Skyward Sword in the next paragraph!)

In Skyward Sword, Link begins only able to run, jump, and pick up barrels. You practice this for a while by fetching a cat and running all around Skyloft. Then he gets hooked up with a sword, and fights bats and ooze for a while. Next he mounts his Crimson Chocobo, and gets to fly around for a bit. Then he gets his Skyward Sword, and can start using Skyward Strikes. Then he gets a shield. Finally, after all that, you’re finally given the freedom to explore a forest and to put all his skills to use. And once you practice integrate all your skills, you’re given a Slingshot. This progression is stretched across roughly two hours.

This constant introduction, practice, and integration of skills provides an addictive progression to games like Zelda, Metroid, and Castlevania. By the end of these games, your character is a veritable army of unique skills & spells. Introducing all of these at the beginning of the game leads to the dark side: Arkham City.

The major difference is that Arkham City’s items are introduced poorly. Arkham City begins with most of the Arkham Asylum gear already unlocked, and it starts running. By my count, Batman enters Arkham City with Explosive Gel, the Batclaw, Batarangs (including remote control Batarangs), a Cryptographic Sequencer, Smoke Bombs, his grappling hook, and his detective vision. Batman begins able to attack, counter, jump over enemies, climb, running slide, glide, glide kick, and grappling. Furthermore, gameplay concepts (freeflow combat & stealth) are introduced, as are controls for Quickfire Batarangs, Quickfire Batclaws, and Quickfire Gel. This is all introduced within the first hour, and a good chunk of that hour is an extremely guided sequence.

Arkham City is a huge infodump. While I do think Nintendo probably goes too far, I think it’s much preferable to the Batman way.

Missed Opportunities

One last thing about Assassin's Creed Recollections: while the game is played "in real time", that's hardly accurate. As far as I can tell (I don't own all the cards, nor have I actually timed anything), every card in the game takes half a "day" to play, and has half a "day" cool down. The only exception to this is the "Surprise" class of cards, which are effectively instantaneous.

In other words, it may be real time, but no cards take advantage of this. If you're fast with playing them and don't dally, the game basically becomes turn-based. It's a missed opportunity, really; why not have some fast attack cards? Some slow ones? That's the big advantage of a digital, real-time game, isn't it?

Commitment to Chunking

“Chunking” is my preferred method of playing games. And no, it’s not sitting down for epic 14+ hour stints and crushing a huge amount of gameplay into a small space (although the rare time I can do that is pretty awesome). It’s actually taking a longer, epic game, and breaking it down into easily digestible chunks. This makes it insanely easy to maintain a commitment to a long game.

Admittedly, I repurposed the psychological theory of “chunking” for this post. Chunking allows our minds to remember long strings of information by squeezing them into related “chunks”. So if my password to log into LvlofDetail is ‘dndmtgwowlbp’, I can chunk it into ‘dnd-mtg-wow-lbp’, four acronyms that are well known to me. Thus, I’m only really remembering four chunks, rather than 12, making this password string easy to remember. Final Fantasy XIII isn’t a fifty hour game: it’s actually fifty hour-long games.

A chunkable game can stretch over weeks or months. Asynchronous online games are built on this idea. Chunking is the only reasonable way to play most games.

What got me writing about chunking is that you can’t easily chunk board games. Sure, you can leave your game of Risk on the table and come back to it after lunch, but it’s really hard to come back to it after a long wait, and even harder to keep the entire table pristine. With digital versions of board games, it’s quite easy to chunk them.

I think that this is why my “Summer of Board Games” didn’t quite pan out. Frankly, many board games simply require serious commitment, and can’t be chunked. I whipped out Agricola at a board game night a week ago, but the reception was lukewarm. Not just because an individual game of Agricola would take a long time, but also because we weren’t sure what would happen in the next two hours. If somebody were to arrive, what would we do? It’s not like we could save and continue tomorrow. Instead, most of my friends preferred to play several games of Magic the Gathering, and how could I blame them? The next game I really want to try is Arkham Horror, but with a suggested playing time of 240 minutes according to BoardGameGeek, that’s a big risk to take right after the $70 Agricola failure.

I’ve sort of digressed here, and I actually cut a chunk out for a future post. Rather than letting this diverge from my original idea even further, I’m instead going to continue a week-long Civilization V game; Genghis Khan has to finish crushing Egypt.

Why I Hate League of Legends: Part II

My first post about League of Legends was titled “Why I Hate League of Legends”. There’s no space for a Part II in the title, but I alluded to it (“So why do I hate League of Legends? There’s actually a huge number of reasons”), so here we go!

Game Length

Games of League of Legends are long. Quite long. Nothing like Civilization multi-hour epics, but it’s still long. And they feel long. You spend a lot of time standing behind your minions, watching your enemy stand behind their minions. While there’s a lot of mindgames and sniping involved, there’s a lot of waiting around, especially if you die. It’s quite painful.

The Community

I can’t sugarcoat this: League of Legends has perhaps the worst community I’ve ever experienced.

I’ve tried the self-hating Halo community (“Every Halo is better than this one”), the delusional Wii community (“Wii games look just as good as their 360 counterparts”), the hypocritical World of Warcraft community (“Riding skill is too expensive … WTF riding skill shouldn’t be cheap, what a noob game!”), but no community is this bad. I have not played a single game of the League without at least one of my team members being a complete jackass, and this is because the League has no defence against trollish players in the early matchmaking queues.

At higher ranks, naturally players will not want to be banned and lose their carefully accumulated champion list, runes, and experience points, but in the random players queue, anything goes. It’s free and fast to create a new account, so players can act like whatever they want. If they get banned, they can just create a new account and be playing in minutes. Furthermore, there is zero way of actually punishing a troll during a game. So somebody who decides to be a jerk and do nothing (or even somebody who disconnects, never to return) will have a huge impact on your team for the next hour, and there is nothing you can do about it. I don’t know what the best solution to this would be; a vote system could allow groups of players to “banish” new or bad players, preventing them from ever playing. While a disconnected teammate is a typical danger of playing online, the pain is again compounded by both the average match length, as well as the number of teammates. From what I can tell, the preferred mode of play is 5v5, meaning you have four teammates at any given time, all of whom could disconnect if they wanted.

New Player Experience / Matchmaking

The new player experience is a bad one. New players are put into games with a poor tutorial, and very little advice that actually counts. If they play with a friend of theirs who knows the game, they get matched with higher level players who will chew them out and curse at them and make them not want to play. And the new players are inherently weaker than their enemies. Concepts like “feeding an enemy” discourage new players for even trying, because every time they try, the enemy team gets more and more powerful, and they have to wait for longer and longer.

So a new player is faced with poor choices. He can either play alone and be thrown to the hordes (some of which are jackasses who recreate accounts), or play with friends and be demolished by pros. Playing with friends gives you the benefit of advice; playing without them gives you the chance of playing somebody your skill level. There’s a third option: have his pro friends make new (free) accounts so they’ll be matched against lower level players. Best of both worlds, right? Except for those poor players.

Furthermore, the game system itself punishes bad play. Whenever a player dies, the person who killed him earns a lot of gold and experience. Good teams will prey on weaker players, repeatedly killing them over and over. Thus, not only will the bad player simply not be contributing, he will be making the opposing team much, much stronger, making the fight tougher for his teammates.

The game that steps around this the best is Starcraft 2. Even if you ignore the campaign, the game features a series of single player Challenges, which put you in situations to teach you specific skills (unit counters, worker micro, etc). Furthermore, the game is divided into five leagues (Bronze, Silver, etc). But on top of that, there’s a hidden player rating that underlies the whole system. Thus, if I’m a superpro player and I try to play 3v3 (I normally play 4v4), I’ll be matched against other superpros.

Now, according to two or three of my friends, most of this goes away when you start playing Ranked games, or are just in the high ranks. People are attached to their characters, their rank, and possibly the money they’ve spent, so are less likely to let the Internet Dickwad Theory take over. But that’s many games away from where most players are at, such as myself.

My Proposals

Honestly, my suggested fix for League of Legends is an uninstall, but so many of my real friends play it (and only it), I must consider alternatives. So, I propose some fixes for the League. Riot Games should:

• Crack down on foul language. Put a strong, strong word filter in place, warn players who use foul language. On the second cursing attempt, remove their chat privileges for five games, including whispers and out-of-game chat channels. A small icon could be shown next to this player’s name so people will be aware they are muted if a friend tries to contact them.
  • Consider the “broken windows theory”. In short, the idea is that maintaining things in good condition keep conditions good. In short, people act like jackasses in the League because people act like jackasses. People play and experience this horrible community, and feel that it is okay to brutally curse out new players, creating a community bred from this type of behaviour. Clamping down on it will make the new player experience a million times better, because at the very least they won’t be cursed at a bazillion times.
  • Theoretically, Riot could loosen the restrictions as players increase in level. I don’t like double-standards, but this could be more like “You’ve proven yourself responsible this long, now you can use a bit more language before getting banned”, so a great player won’t be banned for accidentally dropping some foul language.
• Halve match time. Honestly, I don’t have many good suggestions on how to do this without totally throwing the game out of whack and rebalancing every character, but there is no reason games need to go on as long as they do. Perhaps a hard-cap timer? Or let both teams Nexuses lose health, forcing more aggressive play? Furthermore, League games feel slow. Riot could cut the pre-game 60 second timer down to 10 seconds (more than enough time to buy your item(s)).
• No minimum Surrender timer. In a 5v5 game, your team cannot Surrender no matter how bad it gets until at least 20 minutes have passed. This is an idiotic restriction, and I cannot find any logical reason for it to be in place. The game of League of Legends I played today was an obvious loss from the start as the other team had a ten kill lead by ten minutes, and one of our teammates had disconnected; why make me waste 20 minutes of my life waiting for the Surrender timer to appear? May as well give the winners their points and let the losers go home early.
• Implement diminishing returns on killing bad players. “Bad” could be defined as a lower level, or a player who is doing extremely poor that game. Simply put, a single bad player shouldn’t be a nearly unlimited source of gold and experience, so he won’t drag down his entire team quite as much.

Good Ideas

The worst part, to me, is that there’s a lot of great ideas in League of Legends. The bits near the end of a 3v3 game are pretty good, when it’s basically a straight up PvP game with minions and turrets acting as minor hazards. A lot of push & pull is involved, and there are a lot of strategic choices to make, which I enjoy. The first ~45 minutes are brutal, but the last 10 are usually pretty good unless it’s a one-sided battle, at which point it’s a total waste of time (see above). There’s an extremely wide variety of characters to play, so most play styles are somehow represented.

But in the end, I just hate playing League of Legends. The worst part is the community, because fixing that would take care of a number of other issues socially. Games would be more enjoyable, experienced players would mentor newer players more, and everything would be better. But alas, the community is the only thing that isn't in Riot Games's direct control.

Post Publish Addendum: the legendary Tycho partially agrees with me. In fact, the most recent Penny Arcade comic is all about intentional griefing, but the money quote comes from Tycho's news post: "The communities of DOTA, HoN, and LoL are notorious, even among gamer communities, for being noxious hellholes". I love those guys. Now, they like League of Legends quite a bit more than I do, but at least I'm not alone in seeing it's flaws.

Why I Hate League of Legends

I despise unfair competitive games. I wish I had the guts to refuse to play them, but I get drawn back every now and then. I’m going to counter this by ranting, then referring myself to this rant every time somebody asks me to play League of Legends.  

Now, by unfair, I don’t mean asymmetric, so allow me to clarify. An asymmetric game is where players have different options at the start, such as the ability to pick Zerg, Protoss, or Terran. Asymmetric design can go further than that: do I attempt a 4-Gate rush? Stalker rush? Cannon rush? Wall off and go for Carriers? Another player can still be Protoss, yet have a completely different strategy than me. Maps can also be asymmetric as well. I’m down with asymmetric.

Maps can be massively asymmetric (Lockout, left) or nearly symmetrical (Blood Gulch, right). Images taken from Halo Nation wiki, click for link.

Now, Sirlin defines fairness as “Players of equal skill have an equal chance at winning even though they might start the game with different sets of options / moves / characters / resources / etc.”, which seems pretty solid to me. I like that.

What I despise are unfair games where players have different sets of starting options due to seniority/time invested/money spent, with League of Legends being a prime example.

My friend’s characters are more powerful than mine, simply due to his number of wins. Right at the start of the game, before we’ve even moved, he might generate more money, move faster, be tougher, and faster. I hate playing League of Legends with him, because the game auto-matches me against foes of his calibre. Thus, even if I’m secretly a League of Legends master (I’m not), I’m still at a huge disadvantage simply because all five members of the opposing team are permanently more powerful than me, no matter how well I do. I don’t mind them being more skilled: I play Starcraft with him all the time and play more difficult enemies because of it. I do mind them moving faster, even if we pick the same character.

I foresee the atrocious League of Legends community rushing over here and mocking me mercilessly for whining over a 5% Movement Speed difference, so let me preface this by stating that this is mostly a matter of principle; I don’t truly think I lose due to a bunch of 5% differences adding up.

Some games straddle this line pretty well. Team Fortress 2 has rewards both for playing often & spending money. However, most of these items are sidegrades from a class’s standard weaponry: they may be slower and more powerful, or have a new effect but be weaker, or be totally different. While a pro TF2 player might have more options than me, they aren’t inherently better, which is about the best compromise you can come up with. 

(Cover My Ass note: this is assuming all options are balanced. I’m not nearly pro enough to tell whether one of the Scout’s guns is just definitely better, they all seem to have pros & cons).

My Karthus (left) vs. Other Team’s Karthus (right)

If this hasn’t become apparent yet, I much prefer the Starcraft model to either the Team Fortress 2 (sidegrade) model or League of Legends (upgrade) model. Pro players receive recognition (and the possibility to become truly professional), high leaderboard ranking, and the knowledge that they’re pro. But they have no ingame advantage over another player. The upgrade model just rubs me the wrong way, even if it’s a relatively minor difference. I prefer fair games. They may have uneven situations, and imperfect matchups, but at least my opponent doesn’t deal 4% extra damage and move 5% faster just because he’s played six hundred more games than I have (see appendix).

So, why do I hate League of Legends? There’s actually a huge number of reasons, but unfair gameplay is the number one reason. Every time I lose, I always wonder if it would have been different were we equal. When we win, I wonder how many members of the other team had weak Summoners like me. I don’t think that levels or out-of-match growth should have any place within a multiplayer environment. Somebody who has played more should be better than me due to her own experience and knowledge, not just because I start with weaker armour.

Appendix: League of Legends Runes & Masteries

If you don’t care for specifics, move on. I’m going to look at a League of Legends Summoner to see what sort of difference can exist between a level 1 Summoner and a level 30 Summoner, aside from skill. This is not meant to be LoL theorycrafting, and is most likely a terrible build. 

A Summoner’s growth is divided into two areas: Runes & Masteries. I’ll briefly look at each of these in turn. 

Runes are like gem slots in Diablo or Torchlight, only they apply to your character. You receive Rune Slots every level or so, which can be filled with a variety of Runes. Furthermore, you can only have up to 9 Runes of a certain type. A level 30 Summoner has 30 Rune Slots. A very simplistic, easy math example might involve a level 30 Summoner with 9 Critical Hit Runes (total 8.37% to Critical Chance), 9 Dodge Runes (total 6.75% Dodge), 9 Cooldown Runes (total 5.85% cooldown reduction), and 3 Movement Quintessences (total of 4.5% movement speed).

Masteries are basically like World of Warcraft style talent trees, save for the fact that the trees are not class specific. A level 30 Summoner has 30 Mastery points, which can be spent among the three trees as desired. Let’s burn some points, shall we? I can increase my critical strike percentage by 2% with three points, increase ability power by 0.6/level for three points, reduce ability cooldowns by 3% with four points, ignore 6 armor per attack with three more points, increase attack speed by 4% for four points, increase critical strike damage by 10% with 3 points, and spend another point to increase all damage by 4%. Moving out of the Offense tree and into Utility, I can increase health & mana regeneration by 4% with three points, greatly improve one of my spells with another point, increase my mana by 5% for four points, increase my mana regeneration by 3 for three points, increase movement speed by 3% for three points, increase experience earned by 3.5% for three points, and finally, reduce ability cooldowns by 6% for three points.

So, to summarize, my level 30 Champion has the following bonuses:

• 10.37% Critical Chance
• 10% Critical Damage
• 4% Extra Damage
• 6 Armor Per Attack Ignored
• 4% Attack Speed
• 4% Health & Mana Regeneration
• Improved Ghost or Teleport spell
• 5% Max Mana
• 3 Per 5 Seconds Mana Regen
• 6.75% Dodge Chance
• 14.85% Cooldown Reduction
• 7.5% Movement Speed
• 0.6/level increased Ability Power
• 3.5% Experience Earned

So, it’s not like a level 30 World of Warcraft character versus a level 1, but those bonuses are fairly significant. Add in the fact that a typical League of Legends match runs over half an hour, and even small percentages start to add up. This is mostly a matter of principle; this sort of difference shouldn’t exist.