Riot Games recently announced that WASD controls are coming to League of Legends as an alternative control scheme to traditional mouse-movement-based controls.
To the uninitiated, this may seem like an insignificant change. It’s not like adding an alternate control scheme could change a whole game, right? Wrong. The introduction of WASD controls has the potential to completely change how we play League of Legends.
Consider this: You’re playing a marksman (attack damage carry) character and you find yourself kiting an enemy, i.e. weaving attack inputs in between movement inputs to maintain distance while dealing damage.
With the mouse, this is a relatively mechanically intensive endeavour, and one misclick could spell your doom. With WASD? You can simply hover your cursor over the approaching enemy while holding a key to move backwards. It makes this aspect of the game easier and removes some of that skill expression.
This also extends to dodging skillshots. Micro-movements that take players just out of the path of an oncoming skillshot are a sight to behold, especially in the middle of a hectic teamfight. With WASD, these dodges can be as simple as a key press, which, once again, lowers the skill floor of League. This has the potential to be especially punishing for skillshot-reliant champions like Syndra and Nidalee, who may now find it harder to land their key abilities.
WASD Controls Lower League’s Skill Floor
If WASD controls make aspects of League more consistent, then everyone will be forced to switch to this control scheme so they won’t be at an inherent disadvantage. If I had a decade of muscle memory playing League on traditional controls, which I do, I wouldn’t necessarily want to relearn my ‘comfort game’ to stay competitive.
Don’t get me wrong, WASD controls also have downsides. 8-directional movement in combination with League’s asymmetric map will mean you’ll often move in a zig-zag, which is less effective than mouse clicks. The effectiveness of these controls will depend on how much animation cancelling Riot will allow with key presses.
Riot has made clear that the reason it’s adding WASD controls to League is to try and retain new players who are put off by the traditional MOBA controls. I find it hard to believe this is a large cohort of players, but Riot presumably has data to justify this position, or else what would be the point?
However, Riot really shouldn’t be adding convoluted features to improve the new player experience without first fixing the most important resource for new players: the tutorial.
Atrocious New Player Experience
League of Legends’ tutorial is (and always has been) infamously bad. It’s come a long way from the ‘Thornmail Ashe’ days, but even the current iteration of the tutorial teaches you almost nothing you need to know to play a game of League of Legends.
League’s older tutorial had you build tank items on carry characters and featured some blatantly bad practices like running under the enemy tower to attack enemies.
You’re dropped into a game of Summoner’s Rift with bots and given very limited direction. You’re taught that champions exist, they have abilities, and you can use those abilities to kill enemy champions and minions. That sums up the first of three tutorials.
The other two are very similar, except in the third one, you’re taught that you can buy items from the shop. You’re not told why you should buy these items, how components are built into full items, or what the numbers you’re getting from these items even do.
It’s comical how little information you’re provided; the tutorial doesn’t even address how two of the game’s roles, support and jungle, work. Supports aren’t supposed to farm, and junglers farm jungle camps, but there’s no way for new players to learn that without access to external information.
A non-exhaustive list of concepts that are not addressed in the tutorial: summoner spells, jungling, neutral objectives, teamfights, roaming, ganking (or getting ganked), bounties, experience, runes, lane assignments.
These aren’t advanced concepts; these are things that every beginner needs to know to participate in and fully enjoy a game of League of Legends, even in the early levels. You need to be wary of information overload, but a tutorial that’s designed to drip-feed information to new players would be much better than the vague iteration we currently have.
The Controls Aren’t The Problem
Are new players abandoning League because the control scheme is a bit strange, or are they leaving because the tutorial taught them nothing of value, and their first game is made up of bots and ban-evading players leveling their second (tenth) accounts and flaming them?
Riot is finally cracking down on commercial botting and smurfing, two practices that have plagued new player lobbies for years.
League began as a sort of hardcore, community-fuelled, grassroots multiplayer game. There was sense back then in letting the community and external sites educate players, but Riot is now one of the most successful game studios out there, and the old approach is no longer good enough.
It’s beyond time for the company to dedicate resources to creating a comprehensive set of tutorials for new players. With bespoke set pieces that actually illustrate the concepts you’re trying to teach, not a glorified bot game with text in the corner offering vague guidance.
So, instead of adding additional features that are more likely to rankle the existing player base than bring in new players, why doesn’t Riot start with fixing the tutorial?
League of Legends
- Released
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October 27, 2009
- ESRB
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T for Teen: Blood, Fantasy Violence, Mild Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco
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