Senior Riot devs say the League of Legends playerbase is getting older, with fewer newbies jumping in: 'Candidly, it's not the same situation it was 10 years ago'
Senior Riot devs say the League of Legends playerbase is getting older, with fewer newbies jumping in: 'Candidly, it's not the same situation it was 10 years ago'
It's a common problem in long running live service games: how do you onboard new players into something this complex?
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Anybody watch LCK? I would kill to have a marginally active space for discussing professional LoL on Lemmy. But given how dead the mainstream sports communities are, it feels like an impossible goal.
Stopped playing many years ago but I've been a die hard fan of kt Rolster ever since the 2017 super team of Smeb/Score/Pawn/Deft/Mata. That was shortly after I revoked my fandom of North American LoL teams as a result of them being complete garbage.
But as someone with a lot of expertise when it comes to this particular game, I think this article and some of the takes in this thread are just slightly off the mark. This may get long-winded 😅
It's absolutely true that the pace of patches, new champions, new items, etc is so fast that it becomes exhausting to catch up if you stop playing for any period. And of course, this plays right into the ballooning scale of the game, with the total burden of knowledge steadily increasing over time. But this is not an inevitability of the genre. As @fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works correctly observed, this development cycle is designed to extract the most money from a small number of whales.
It's quite possible to massively reduce the rate and scale of patching, or indeed to streamline certain aspects of the game. Indeed, Riot has eliminated and streamlined numerous mechanics over the years such as old Runes/rune pages, various micromechanical techniques that have been automated, or the addition of automatic timers for buffs. However, they have typically replaced the removed mechanics with brand new, more complex mechanics.
Essentially, Riot has mismanaged their own game to extent that it's nearly impossible for new players to get into, largely because they have been chasing quarterly profits and not considering the long term implications. Or I guess you could argue that they have managed it well, given that it's probably the highest grossing video game of all time.
But I don't think this is an inevitable outcome for MOBAs. I think with fighting games like Smash, thinning out the roster is much more important, because each character has exponentially more moves and matchups than LoL champions. The 5v5, semi-RTS nature of MOBAs means that having an intimate knowledge of matchups and ability ranges/timings is much less important for casuals. There is also effectively only one map that changes very rarely.
I believe that it's possible to create a MOBA that would stand the test of time and be feasible and interesting for people to play casually or competitively for decades, and yet still be welcoming to new players. Imagine if something like that existed and fathers could teach their sons how to play the same esports game they played as kids 😂. That'd be awesome.
It's more or less the same situation as Reddit/Lemmy. Reddit/Riot fucked up their golden geese, so there is an opportunity for someone else to iterate on their model and replace them. Unfortunately, the financial investment required to build a MOBA game like LoL is much higher than the cost of a link aggreggator like reddit. Nonetheless, I won't stop dreaming of a community-built competitive MOBA that could attain some type of permanency. My best experiences on LoL were few and far between, but I really do believe that the MOBA formula is incredibly fun, entertaining, and can stand the test of time if done right. I ascribe nearly all of the frustrating aspects to Riot's overriding profit incentive and incompetence. /rant over
I believe that it's possible to create a MOBA that would stand the test of time and be feasible and interesting for people to play casually or competitively for decades, and yet still be welcoming to new players.
League of Legends was enticing and built an audience out of regularly adding new stuff to it. I can't think of an analogue for this in any other competitive game or sport, but live service games always wane when new content slows down, because that new content was juicing the numbers. Likewise, every new champ they added, especially beyond around 100, is going to make it more daunting to start playing if you weren't already. So unless they had a roster of a few dozen champs at most, at launch, and never changed them, I don't see how you build one of these to last decades. I mean, people do still play Third Strike 25 years later, but that's a tiny fraction of the player base you're talking about, and Riot would sooner wipe LoL off the face of the earth than allow it to be playable for a population the size of Third Strike's right now.
Yeah I hear you, but they could have been far more judicious. LoL has lasted 15 years while being horribly mismanaged, so I don't think 30 years is really that crazy. They have continued to add like 4-5 champions every single year, plus reworks and constant, incessant, unecessary rebalancing. I think you could easily slow all of that shit down by a factor of 5 and the game would still remain fresh enough for all but the most hard-core players. And those guys should probably spend less time playing anyway.
If you started with a roster of 70, added 5 per year for the first 5 years, 3/yr for the next 5, and 2/yr for the next 20, you'd end up at 150, which is totally manageable. LoL is currently at 167.
Riot would sooner wipe LoL off the face of the earth than allow it to be playable for a population the size of Third Strike’s right now.
I get that, but that's why I made the comparison with Lemmy. What if LoL weren't run by a company, but by the community itself, and the priority was simply to keep the game in a fair and balanced state and maybe gradually add a few new mechanics and heroes over time. That would be possible to keep going for a long time.
The game is inherently fun for the mechanical skill, strategic and tactical thinking, and teamwork/competition. You don't need all that fancy new shit once a month to keep people playing imo. I enjoyed that stuff very early on, but it quickly became annoying because it was like you had to constantly relearn the game every year because of all the changes. And I think Riot just kept leaning harder into that because it was the most profitable in the short term, without realizing how many people eventually stopped playing due the fact that the game they once loved became unrecognizable.
I think you'll find that if you go to the forums for any live service game whose popularity has visibly waned, which is nearly all of them on Steam, since Steam makes those numbers public, you'll see people attributing it to things that the developer did, balancing or otherwise, but that seems naive to me. It seems inevitable that the popularity of these things will wane over time. To end up with anything else strikes me as a stroke of luck, even if the game is a masterpiece in competitive design.
What if LoL weren’t run by a company, but by the community itself, and the priority was simply to keep the game in a fair and balanced state and maybe gradually add a few new mechanics and heroes over time. That would be possible to keep going for a long time.
We have templates for this already. Online games that predate the live service era can still be played and enjoyed in perpetuity, including the likes of Quake (this one's even open source), StarCraft, and, once again, Third Strike. You can check the Twitch numbers for each of them, and we can actually get really good numbers for how many people are playing Third Strike at any given time, give or take a few random arcade cabinets out in the wild, via FightCade. They don't sustain a playerbase the size of League of Legends, and I don't think any game ever will without a drip feed of new content. Chess hasn't had a rule change in over 100 years, to my knowledge, and despite being proven to stand up to the test of time competitively, it will never do League of Legends numbers either.
Chess hasn’t had a rule change in over 100 years, to my knowledge, and despite being proven to stand up to the test of time competitively, it will never do League of Legends numbers either.
Are you sure about that? I would assume there are many more chess players worldwide.
Most video games that have existed have followed a similar trajectory, but that doesn't make it inevitable by any means. Competitive games are typically the ones with the longest lifespans. Some people are still playing Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance online and possibly Battle for Middle Earth 2 as well.
But these models are not profitable, so game developers don't try to follow them. Perhaps the reason why popularity seems to inevitably decline is because the gaming industry is practicing planned obsolescence. They deliberately put older games out to pasture once the profit streams have dried up, but if the developers weren't so focused on profit, maybe that wouldn't always happen.
Are you sure about that? I would assume there are many more chess players worldwide.
Probably only by the most liberal definition. Chess matches aren't watched by a crowd that could fill a stadium like soccer is, and even after a surge during the pandemic, it doesn't pull numbers on Twitch like League of Legends does on a bad day. I've played chess, but I don't, present tense, play chess, you know?
I brought up the three video games I did precisely because it's impossible to force obsolescence or put them out to pasture. Quake being open source allows for a game that's proven to be competitively viable and enticing to be maintained and expanded by the community the way you described, but it doesn't stick with its audience the way any "shiny new thing" sticks. Some people are still playing these games the way some people are still playing Supreme Commander and Battle for Middle-earth, but once again, they'll always stabilize at a number way lower than a game like League of Legends with frequent new content, regardless of balance.
I’ve played chess, but I don’t, present tense, play chess, you know?
But if someone said hey, wanna play a game of chess?, you would be able to. Partially because the rules haven't changed since you last played. So that counts for me.
You might wanna check the numbers on League, although they haven't published anything official in years. Viewership is down massively compared to 5-10 years ago.
You may be right, but I have a hunch that there is fresh ground out there for the adventurous game developer willing to break it. Video games are still a very new type of media and I don't think we've seen all the forms that they can take. It's like being in the silent film era and having a discussion about the potential future of pornographic films. It's hard to know what the future has in store; never say never, as they say.
I checked the numbers on League just before that comment. They're still at about the 100k average they've been since the beginning of Twitch Tracker's history for it in 2017, with a similar bump that chess got during the pandemic. I'm all for those evergreen competitive games; I refuse to play LoL anymore, among other reasons, because it can't ever be one of those. But I'm very confident that LoL has the numbers it does because it continually introduced new things, and that always has an expiration date.