Ranking Ladder Structure: Why I prefer Starcraft to League of Legends

Today we are looking at the average gamer who wants to have some fun at climbing the competitive ladder.

The chart hereunder presents the repartition of the players in the different leagues for League of Legend (Europe West Server), Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty and Starcraft 2 Heart of the Swarm. I did not include Challenger leagues, as they represent less than 0.05% of the players in both games. The results are striking: There is a much more even split in Starcraft. How does that impact the players?

Starcraft ladder is built for a regular progression

Real-time strategy, like Starcraft imply good and quick decision making while performing a lot of varied tasks (fighting, producing, building, scouting). Quite logically, it takes a great deal of time to become a decent player. However this investment is rewarded in Starcraft with frequent progressions in league.

Recognizing that you learn a lot in your first 50 games, Blizzard even thought that the Bronze league was too disparate. Some players are complete beginners while others have already a good grasp of the game. In Heart of the Swarm, they reduced the size of the Bronze league so that players that trained a bit, are quickly rewarded with a new league.

All in all, the average Starcraft 2 player is in Gold, and will get 2.26 promotions in his career (assuming never going backwards!). On top of that, he has good reasons to hope as Platinum is not far from reach. 

League of Legends ladder is built for the elite

In League of Legends, there are less mechanics than in Starcraft but definitely much more champions and spells to discover. Therefore it takes a lot of experience to have a good understanding of the game. The issue is that a lot of players have the impression to be stuck in “Elo Hell”. The concept is that you play with unskilled players, therefore cannot win, therefore cannot escape those unskilled players and are therefore condemned to stay in Bronze or Silver.

When you look at the ladder structure, you realize that almost everybody but the most skilled are in ”Elo Hell”. 82% of the players are in Bronze/Silver. Sure you can do better in theory with training and dedication, but statistically, you won’t.

All in all, the average League of Legend player is in Silver, and will get 0.85 promotions in his career. Yes you read it correctly, on average, LoL players have the pleasure of having less than 1 promotion in their whole LoL career. And on the contrary to his Starcraft counterpart, the average Lol player has no real hope to reach the Gold League!

Even if you assume that the bottom 20% of the players are beginners and should not be counted in statistics of the probable final league of an average player, the answer does not change. You are still in Silver, thank you very much for coming.

Riot’s Business Model: One reason for the Elo Hell?

In my completely naive opinion, player satisfaction should be the key element in the design of a feature. However I realize that frustration might be at the core of Riot business model. Given the time dedicated to the game, rankings have a lot of impact on the player self-esteem. They all thrive to get better and given the difficulty of the ladder, they need to play much more. And probably to spend much more. Better runes and better heroes often come at a price (see this article). If you can reach Platinum in 6 months, you would be tempted to stop, believing that you explored the game quite well. By staying in Bronze/Silver, you are under the impression that you are far worse than the majority of players and therefore need to better yourself to prove your worth. I’m not saying that Bronze players are “good”, far from it. They deserve their relative ranking but I think they also deserve to have some satisfaction in term of league progression.

Clearly I would advocate a slight change of LoL leagues. Something like 25% Bronze 25% Silver, so that the average player has at least Gold in sight. Maybe they need to create an additional league (the famous “plastic league”), in order to maintain selectiveness but still reward their customer base with league progression.

For the people that may think that I might be biased by my own experience, the answer is yes. I was Platinum in Starcraft WoL (obtained in 7/8 months) and I am still Bronze in League of Legend (In something like a full year).

Links:

An interesting article on Cloth5 on the necessity to make it hard for player to progress

My review of League of Legend Business Model

Would you support a change in League of Legends rankings, or do you prefer the challenge that is currently offered? 

EuroExark

League of Legends: Should you pay for a free to play?

In League of Legends, everything is obtainable for free except esthetics changes to your champions. While there is no in game disadvantage of not having invested a single penny, Riot the game producer is able to prosper on its large player base. Why?

The urge to get the better champions

There are 115 Champions in the game, all with a specific gameplay. Players like to change, looking for a set of skills that better match their style, but most of all they look for the most powerful champions. Professional games often set trends and players want to be able to emulate them. The issue is that you don’t have all champions available. To “buy” the latest champion you need 6300 influence points (IP) or 975 Rior points (RP).

To get 6300 IP points you will need to play a lot of games. Let’s say you win 100 points per game, plus an extra 150 every day that you play the game. It means that you need to play for half a month, 3 games per day to obtain a new champion. 45 games with a subpar champion, 45 hours of despair waiting for the new ultimate warrior! That proves to be too much waiting for most players.

The alternative solution is to buy RP. You get the new champion for USD7.5 or EUR5.81 (less if you buy a big chunk of points via Paypal, more if you use only micro transactions with mobile phone). It can be even cheaper if the champion is on sale, and there are always 3 champions on sale. Who can’t afford 3 Euros to have some fun? But be aware, that it will cost you 300 USD to have them all.

Buy to optimize your build

In League of Legend you can choose “Runes” that will apply bonus to your champion before the game starts. A set of runes is not very expensive and all players reaching level 30 (when the ranked games start) can have 2 basic sets of efficient runes. The issue is that you can only have these 2 set of runes, which is not enough to fit all roles. To simplify, you will have one for mages and one for warriors, but what about your support character, your tank, your jungler? You are forced to play with slightly suboptimal builds and while not game breaking at the lower-mid levels, can be increasingly frustrating.

To fix that you need to buy a rune page at 6300 IP or 590 RP. Farming for a champion can be boring, but farming for an empty page of rune, and then farming to fill it with runes can become excruciating. One more reason to quickly buy a page rune, or even better a “7 rune page bundle” and get rid of this issue.

Enjoying customization Skins and Icons

I do not know how much it represents in term of revenues but “Skins” i.e. changing the appearance of a champion in game and in the loading screen have proved to be a big success. Players can show the world which champion they like, take sexy skins they like or troll their opponents with ridiculous animations. Players that spam hundreds of game with the same champion appreciate the variety and can show their dedication with the most expensive skins. 

The skins and icons are only available with Riot Points, so one more reason to open your wallet. The nicest skins (that also include spell animations) cost more than the champion themselves and can reach 20 USD! It literally cost a small fortune to have them all (1905USD just for the one available in the shop that do not include special events)!

What do almost mature gamers do?

A survey was organized on a major generalist French Forum (HFR). The population is 25 year old on average, most are university trained and employed, and finally most are good players (average league Gold, with many in Diamond).

• 26% did not invest seriously in the game
• 39% payed the price of a regular game 20 to 75 euros
• 36% invested more than 75 Euros,  more than 200 Euros for 17% of them

As mentioned before, these people have an income and dedicate a major part of their free time to this game, so they might be among the biggest spenders. But still, it is amazing that so much money was invested in what is basically a free game. A common explanation among the posters that explained their choices was that it was a very small amount in regards to their budget. Many also pointed out that having played LoL for countless hours they had a very good Money over Time ratio. Finally a few also explained that it was a good way to burn money that was locked in expiring mobile phone credit.

Another factor was the seniority in the game. Players that were here since the beta had time to buy almost everything with influence points, while people that got sucked in much later invested much more to build their champion pool. However I still enjoyed it a great bit!

How I do it: I do not buy, I do not farm, I just play

I did not spend a single penny on this game and wrote this article because I was intrigued by the rational of others. The game is balanced enough so you can have great fun using the low priced champions and just expend your champion pool by playing regularly. The only issue for me is never having the new “broken” / “imbalanced” champions available, but honestly I can live without it. The only found myself at a disadvantage when trying to play in an amateur tournament, where my lack of response to certain champions was showing. I could not counter some opponents and was forced to start the game in a considerably weaker position.

As for skin and varieties, there are so many other games to test that I do not feel the need to customize this one. I would definitively buy League of Legends for 50 Euros as this would have a very high usage value. However I have a hard time buying goodies that are in no way as rich as mods that have been created for free by fans for other games! So I just play and enjoy the game.

Some facts about League of Legends and Money:

• 70 Millions Registered players
• 1 billion hours played each month
• USD 200 millions of revenues (estimate Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter)
• USD 40 millions of income before taxes (Broad estimate based on average gaming transaction value and sale of Riot to Tecent). That would indicate a very high margin.
• Sponsored professional gaming: Salary for top players (a hundred person for Europe and North America) and large cash prizes for competitions (estimate USD 8 million for Season 3, 2013) 

Are you a big spender on Free-To-Play? Please help me understand! That said, the target for next week end is to try World of Tanks, another promising Free-To-Play.

EuroExark