Greg Street, the lead game designer at League of Legends studio Riot Games, recently spent some time answering questions over at Ask.FM about such things as game design, the nature of Amumu, what kind of music he's listening to, and why LoL has such a bad tutorial.
It covers a lot of ground, as AMAs tend to, but the bit about the tutorial is particularly illuminating. Street acknowledged that the current tutorial isn't very good in response to a question which cited Dota 2 and Heroes of the Storm as offering easier ways in, but said that improving it “is not as high a priority as many of the other things we need to improve in the game.”
“We don't want to shift resources to features mostly aimed at attracting new players when we could be adding or improving features for existing players,” he wrote. “That's probably not the strategy a brand new game would choose, because new games really need to focus on building up an audience. We have a good-sized audience, and our highest priority is meeting their needs.”
Improving the tutorial is on the “things to do list,” because “we know it makes it that much harder to convince friends to try League.” But, he added, “We think improving the 1-30 experience outside of tutorials is a higher priority for us, specifically the length of the grind, the underwhelming celebration of milestones, and the power discrepancy for runes and masteries.”
Street added that he was, at that moment, listening to the Assassin's Creed soundtrack.
