I’m the kind of player who doesn’t have all the time in the day to play league - I only play a few roles/champs so I can just queue the ones I play and get into game which is a great. A mode like this was overdue and it’s ideal for one tricks and busy people.

With that being said, it’s now even more obvious than before how poor of a job the Tutorial/bot games do at teaching new players the game. I’m sure many of you are like me, and had a friend teach you the game, meta strategies, the overall structure of the game, etc., so the time I spent struggling in the game was rather short.

Quickplay is nearly unplayable in its current state simply for how lost newer players are. People will say I should just play a different mode, or deal with it or something, but I think this is a fair criticism because this is clearly not how this mode was intended to work.

For the record, I’m perfectly fine with people taking weird summoner spells, building weird items, dying a lot, this is all part of the game and I am entirely accepting of that.

On a game-to-game basis, however, I may have any of the following players on my team, or the enemy team, completely ruining the experience and leading to (if I’m lucky) a 15-minute FF:

1. A jungler with no smite (who doesn’t even realize you need smite to jungle) - keep in mind, in Quickplay, this means they chose jungle for at least one of their roles.
2. Someone who doesn’t realize you need to pick a role, who just goes where they want like a free-for-all
3. A player who doesn’t understand that you need to purchase items, kill minions, etc. I’ve had multiple games that involve a teammate just kind of aimlessly running around the jungle not killing monsters or anything for up to 20 minutes.

I want to stress that none of this is the fault of these players. The game needs more tools to help new people understand it, even if it’s just the client linking to Riot-made videos on youtube explaining current common strategies, general up-to-date meta champ pools for each role, etc. Maybe it could be required for new players to watch a short video explaining the general responsibilities of each role. What I know for sure is that new players definitely need more help before they are tossed into a game with experienced players who will 0/10/0 them in lane. This only leads to people quitting and frankly, it’s unfun for the experienced players as well.

In closing, I’m going to quote Riot’s initial announcement of Quickplay:

Players who are newer to the game have an even harder time with this [old blind pick] setup. They have limited champion pools and narrow positional flexibility. If they get forced into jungle because their teammates lock in everything else, we can’t be too surprised when they end up in lane because they don’t know where to go.

We are discovering that new players often know less than Riot even thought they did. Hopefully there can be more attention paid to new player education in the future. I’m curious what everybody thinks about this.