The new player experience is so exhausting.
I just stated playing on the weekend and my gosh I have never felt more frustrated playing a new game before.
It's almost impossible to do anything against a hero that you don't know what their abilities do. You can't counterplay them if you don't know what they do, and for some reason there's no easy way to check what a hero does midgame. One of the reasons I learned Deadlock so fast is because I can check what my enemies heroes do at any point in the game just by pressing Tab, which is so convenient. Alt tabbing and going to a website isn't practical, and reading everyone's abilities beforehand isn't great either as you're bound to forget some, and if you don't read them all you're more than likely to face someone you didn't read. You just have to guess what they do based the extremely high visual clutter they put onto your screen. A recurring theme in this rant will be how much of learning League seems to be trial and error, which involves a lot of fucking yourself over and losing games which isn't fun.
The tutorial hardly teaches anything as well. It doesn't say anything about the towers taking a chunk of damage if you hit them after not hitting them for a while. It doesn't teach plates on the tower's health and how they give you gold/xp. I don't even think it teaches you about the different summoner spells (flash, ignite etc.) or fucking runes. I was just fiddling around in the menus when I found out about those. Soemthing that seems very important, I had to stumble across on accident to know about. And it also doesn't say that you have to get the last hit on the minions to actually get the XP/Gold. Which let me say, is a ridiculous mechanic. Having to get the last hit on a minion is genuinely one of the worst things I've seen in a video game. Maybe it gets better when I play more, but having to micro manage my fucking auto attacks to ensure I'm not bleeding XP/Gold on top of trying to learn everything else in the game is so overwhelming. There's only so much I can do. Having to try to get a last hit on top of trying to figure out what the enemy hero does on top of trying to look at the map for vision all at once is just impossible. If I ignore last hits I lose XP, enemy lane gets ahead and I'm losing lane. If I focus on last hits, I'm gonna fuck something up and die, enemy lane gets ahead and I'm losing lane.
And the matchmaking doesn't do any justice either. Both in Swiftplay and normal Unranked, I'm constantly put with and against experienced players who know everything about the game and it's not fun for anyone. My teammates are upset because I'm basically feeding, the enemies just get to noob stomp one hero all game and snowball that into a win, and I'm supposed to be learning the game when I spend most of my time dead. I get it. The game is extremely old so there's not many new players here. But I'd much rather wait 30 minutes in queue to get into a game with other new players then spend 30 minutes getting fucked over all game. I've been playing mid (Ahri) basically all the time, and while it's sort of fun, getting killed everytime I try to do anything is just not fun. It's exhausting. It's frustrating. It's been over a decade since the game came out, so I know new players are rare and riot don't care about them. But surely there's more they can do them shoving me into a lobby full of experienced players and saying "go figure it out yourself mate idk fuck you". They could at least update the tutorial to include more things.
The game seems very fun, and I think I'm going to enjoy it a lot more than I actually understand anything that's going on. But my gosh this sucks.