Burden of Knowledge League of Legends
By Ryan Scott | Sep 5, 2012
Constantly adding new champions is building a bigger barrier to entry.
These days, it seems like everyone's trying to get in on the multiplayer online battle arena (or MOBA) action. Originally popularized by the Defense of the Ancients mod for Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (and StarCraft's Aeon of Strife map before that), this team-versus-team real-time strategy subgenre is quite the hot item in PC gaming. In this regular column, GameSpy writer and MOBA junkie Ryan Scott offers up his insight into this ever-growing field of competitive (and largely free-to-play!) multiplayer PC gaming.
When League of Legends launched in October 2009, it featured 40 champions. Three years later, we're up to a staggering 103.
Whenever I talk someone into dipping their toes into the MOBA waters for the first time, they tend to express a single universal hesitance: "This sure is a lot of stuff to take in. Man, I'm terrified and/or intimidated." They're not wrong: the genre has an issue of sheer, nigh-unmanageable quantity, and it's getting bigger all the time. When League of Legends launched in October 2009, it featured 40 champions. Three years later, we're up to a staggering 103. For comparison's sake, Heroes of Newerth has LoL beat (for now, anyway) with 109 heroes -- and the still-in-beta Dota 2's roster sits at 90 (out of a planned 108).
That's a lot of stuff. And this doesn't even take all of the skills, items, map-related particulars, or nitty-gritty tactical considerations into account.
LoL Design Director Tom "Zileas" Cadwell has an old -- but still very active -- thread on Riot's official forums titled "Zileas' List of Game Design Anti-Patterns," where he discusses various good and bad competitive game design criteria, and how these apply to LoL. One is something he terms "Burden of Knowledge," which basically means "complex/esoteric mechanics that are difficult to intuitively grasp" (or, put more bluntly, "poor mechanical implementation").
LoL's got more champs than Disney's got dalmatians.
It's like having to learn about a few new StarCraft 2 units every time you play.
It's a thread worth reading, but the real reason I bring it up because I'm tagging that definition: "Burden of Knowledge" is a term that directly applies to the sheer amount of information a competent MOBA player needs to learn and retain. In LoL and every other MOBA that's worth a damn, every new match is its own microcosm of unfamiliar mechanics; it's like having to learn about, say, a few new StarCraft 2 units every time you play... only you're learning them forever, because something new is always around the corner. It's no wonder that every prospective new player I speak to feels intimidated.
Various MOBAs roll out new characters at their own rates; LoL runs on an aggressive two-week cycle, while HoN's pool expands a little less frequently. Dota 2's still in the process of hitting its 108-hero promise, though any plan beyond that is still up for speculation. Even if these developers shut off the character faucet now and held steady, it'd still be a lot to take in for a new player.
As it is, its not just the new players that have to learn. Every additional character triggers a new ripple effect in the ecosystem, creating an effectively unsolvable balancing problem. An ability that was fine one week might suddenly become game-breaking in tandem with a just-introduced character or item; an effort to patch that is likely to create an issue elsewhere, ad nauseam. The interminably enormous size and scope of a popular MOBA means that every Band-Aid is going to yield a new, unforeseen laceration elsewhere.
Only 90 heroes, Dota 2? It's like you're not even trying!
Competitive players are forced to adapt to the developers' mathematical (and sometimes knee-jerk) whims.
Compare this to games like StarCraft 2 or even Super Street Fighter 4, which (barring occasional large expansions) have an absolutely finite number of playable units and characters. Balance patches happen rarely; those games' developers take a rather light hand, and let the community direct the ensuing metagame via a natural process of discovery, iteration, and trickle-down tactics from high-end players. A steady flow of new content makes this impossible; any given character's patch-to-patch continuity is potentially fleeting, perhaps most concretely demonstrated by Reign of Gaming's volatile LoL tier lists. Competitive players are forced to adapt to the developers' mathematical (and sometimes knee-jerk) whims, instead of adapting purely to their own collective tactical evolution. And the more stuff that creeps in, the worse it's going to get.
The really central issue surrounding all of this is the current genre-standard free-to-play business model's endemic conflict of interests. Put simply, releasing and selling new champions equals steady revenue and more opportunities for lucrative cosmetic options (and thus, more revenue). Valve, though, has bucked the trend with Dota 2, announcing unrestricted champion access and relegating in-game microtransactions to cosmetic items. S2 Games followed suit with HoN in late July, leaving LoL's Riot Games as the only major MOBA developer with a per-character purchasing plan.
The current champion of champion counts: Heroes of Newerth, with 109!
In any case, it's my opinion that frequent character additions serve the business model at the games' expense. In a perfect world, I'd love to see all of these developers impose an immediate moratorium on new character development, strive to achieve some sort of satisfactory balance point, and exercise shrewd decision-making for subsequent (and less-frequent) patches. Sure, whip up some new skins for suckers like me -- but let these games find some sort of stable foundation, and ease up on the burdensome learning curve. It's already too much as-is; I'd rather not see how far these games can push it before the whole house collapses, and the quality MOBAs devolve into an impenetrable pros-only playing field. More is not always better.
Ryan Scott managed GameSpy's day-to-day editorial operations, until a bout of temporary insanity took him away. Nowadays -- when he's not yelling at someone for forgetting to call mid lane MIA, that is -- you can listen to his weekly ramblings on various podcasts over at Geekbox.net. And if you've never given these MOBA thingamajiggers a try, he thinks League of Legends is an excellent place to start.
This goes counter to my "more is better" philosophy. I say you can never have too many MOBA champions, too many tacos, or too many chromosomes! What do you think -- is an ever-expanding list of characters too much of a good thing?
Burden of Knowledge League of Legends
Source: http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/122/1225979p1.html