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'Support champions had a pretty abysmal retention rate to begin with, but we thought they were important to offer and introduce to new players.For players who hadn't gone through the tutorial, new players would pick based on their personal affinity for certain archetypes of characters - or at least who looked like they could dish out the most damage (bigger sword = more damage, obviously).' For players who went through the tutorial and played Ashe, Ashe would often be their #1 choice going forward. 'Early champion choices tend to be sticky, and aesthetic definitely comes into play.

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Ranged AD carries in particular fared very well for those reasons and also that their basic attacks dish out the majority of their damage, which is great for players still learning how to use abilities.'

Ranged characters force you to stand back and dish out damage from the back line instead of getting up-close and personal, which results in fewer deaths and more kicking (bot) ass.

Managing minion aggro and early-game damage turned out to be one of the most difficult things to teach gamers.

'Ranged champions are almost universally easier for a first time player.

What matters is mechanical approachability – can I do good enough with this character with very little or no experience against bots or people of similar skill? Can I get a kill by pressing buttons, even if I’m not executing at the optimal level (or even close to it)? Lissandra and Varus are good examples of champions that surprised us by being really great new player champions, and we realized that you can be successful with them (ie, do lots of damage, kill things) even though you might be unaware of the champion’s intricacies or high-level play.'

'Most surprisingly - and importantly - mechanical complexity is not the important factor.

When the feature went live the team was able to experiment with different line-ups in order to try and dig into how important these different aspects actually were. We asked a few other important questions that turned out to be quite relevant, though hard to quantify - what about champion fantasy, role, or aesthetics? How important were these for a new player deciding whether or not they thought the game was fun?' 'Like most League players, we were initially biased towards thinking that complexity was the only important component in choosing a 'good' champion for new players.

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That was enough for the team to decide to work the idea up into a full feature, but the skill requirement of a character was only one factor in what made a champion a good fit for new players. The team's suspicions were borne out in these tests: 'Some of our 'high skill' champs being chosen during a player’s first game resulted in faster departure from the game after a frustrating match where they had an abysmal KDA against our easiest opponents, Beginner Bots.'

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'We did an experiment to test the many assumptions we had about champion learnability by specially selecting ten champions for one week of our free to play rotation, based on internal assumptions about what made a champion “hard” (Vayne, Fiora) or “easy” (Sivir, Annie) for new players.' 'The starter hero lineup was one of the first things we worked on when we took a look at onboarding,' says Kacee Granke - associate product manager at Riot. I got in touch with Riot to find out how their picked their champs: The idea is to give players a bit of guidance and prime them for a more positive introductory experience to League than if they pick a character like Orianna and proceed to get utterly destroyed. If you're more familiar with Dota 2, it's similar to that game's Limited Hero pool. Instead of just plunging these baby Leaguers into whatever's on the free rotation you get to pick from a pre-selected roster of more straightforward characters like Ashe and Aatrox. League of Legends treats newcomers ever so slightly differently to veterans when it come to which champions they are allowed to play for their first few games.

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