New Player Experience - An Anecdotal Commentary

Hi there Leddit,

I'm mostly a DOTA fan. And I'm a SMITE player. But I don't play League. I decided to give it a try.

I did almost no pre-work, but I did look up at least one build on mobafire for each of the heroes that are available for free. I also looked in game at the abilities of those free heroes. So for this story, keep in mind that I was relying on my other MOBA knowledge and a very minimal set of knowledge of League without even knowing what other non-free heroes exist or what they could do.

So far I've had a very negative experience with the game. The mechanics themselves I'm not really going to address here because I don't want to trigger the subreddit with DOTA vs. League comparisons and the mechanics actually didn't really contribute at all to my negative experience so far.

I started by playing co-op vs. bots for a couple of games. I was just trying to see what the heroes did, so the fact that no one called a role or talked or anything didn't really matter to me. The problem came when I started to play PvP unranked matches. In the lobby I'd always call a role and select a hero, but I wouldn't lock in until after everyone else. Then the game would start and people would be yelling that I should have selected some other hero. Last night I had made enough blue essence to buy Janna and decided to play her. I called support. When the game started I was called a lot of pretty hefty foul names because "Don't you know that [X] is only a support? We didn't need you to be a support." As I pointed out, a) no, I didn't know that and b) I was literally the only person to call support in the lobby chat. Still spend the whole game getting shit on and trolled. Even now, about a dozenish games in, I find people call roles sporadically and then flame other people for not filling a vacant role even if they took a role that was called or called no role at all.

Something else that happened after my first 4ish games was that I ran into what are clearly players much better than I am. Most players I end up dumpstering because they are new to MOBAs and I'm not. But then I find people that obviously are experienced with League and they seem to be dedicated to making the experience as awful as possible for new players. I've found people win the game hard and then refuse to destroy the throne, just farming kills for a very long time. People seem reluctant to GG out of a game, whether genuinely or trolling, but I've had games go for 10+ minutes of my team just getting farmed in fountain.

Another problem I seem to run into is rune pages - how to experienced players manage them? I seem to only have two pages and it seems like each hero needs their own rune setup, sometimes more than one for different roles. Is there something I'm missing?

Thanks for listening to anecdotal rambling. Do things improve? And also, is there a better way to obtain heroes? It seems like it would take a solid month of playing to unlock a single hero and just getting enough to even have a couple for each role seems like it would take a year.