Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by andechs | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

andechs

The median spend might be zero $ per year.

View on HN

Also might be more.

And with a game like Lol, where it is literally pay to win, I wouldn't be surprised if it were more.

What aspect is pay to win?

You need to pay for champions, they are not unlocked for free.

You do not have to pay for champions, you can unlock them for free using easily-obtainable Blue Essence. Paying to unlock champions is pay-to-progress, because it gets you caught up to everyone else faster, but doesn't give you a competitive advantage.

You say progress, but it’s kind of both an endless treadmill and you’re weaker usually by lack of options;

When I used to play LoL, like 5-7 years ago, I was playing a rate of like 3-4 hours daily, which barely scraped by the amount of essence needed to buy the next releases champion, let alone the runes system they had introduced at the time (don’t know if it’s still around) which had a fairly dramatic impact on the early game especially for specific characters.

That is, while technically the game could be played purely on free tier and eliminate any competitive advantage… it requires a lot of effort to keep up. Not nearly as bad things like FarmVille used to pull, but definitely enough to say that ponying up cash is eventually needed.

And having more options available to you (both characters and runesets or whatever they do now) is definitely an advantage, and a significant one at that

You don't need options. It's best to play around 3 champions for your main position, and 1 or 2 for the other 4 positions. That means you want around 11 champions in your pool. More than that is too difficult to improve with. Let's round that up to 16 champions and give a bit more flexibility and experimentation. This is all you really need, and you will get it very quickly. By the time the meta changes, or you've played it enough to consider changing direction, you'll have more champions unlocked.

You can get some for free. You certainly might be attached to a particular one and want to buy it, but the game is balanced enough that you can easily win with a champion that is easy to get.

I had a lot of luck with Sona, for instance, who I got for free right away.

(Sometimes I think it would be fun to play League again but I can't stand the thought of being tied up for 45 minutes)

Take my advice and stay away, easily the most toxic online gaming community I've ever seen mostly because of the 45 minute time sink.

The best champions for new players are the ones you start with though. By the time you're ready for the other ones you've earned enough in game money to buy them.

There are plenty of pay-to-win games, but LoL is not one of them. LoL has cosmetics, and pay-to-progress, but there's nothing you can buy that will give you an advantage in-game over people who play for free.

Unlocking new characters with RMT is not pay-to-win, because all the characters are obtainable for free without requiring unreasonable effort. You're not forced to get them from random lootboxes like Gacha games, and having every character doesn't give you an appreciable advantage except at perhaps the highest level of play.

You and I clearly have a different definition of pay to win. If I start the game on a new account, and don't have access to the same champions as my enemy from game 1 unless I spend money, then the game is pay to win. Period. The fact that I could pay money, in that moment, to win, means the game is pay to win.

Edit: Further, here is an article[1] breaking down how long it would take to unlock all champions without paying money. 9.5 years playing 1 game/day. It's absurd to pretend that isn't "pay to win". By that definition, Clash of Clans isn't pay to win either, because technically you could grind the game for 100 years without paying for anything and get really far.

[1] https://www.dexerto.com/league-of-legends/lol-fan-works-out-...

I would heavily disagree. LoL now practically throws champions and skins at you now with some of their currency systems. I think the other thing is that you don't need all the champions unlocked to be good. You would probably do better by choosing a set couple of champs and getting good at those. Yes, meta's change, but that is on top of good mechanics. LoL is a lot of things, but I would strongly argue against pay to win.

But you're not paying to win. You're just paying to have a different experience. In fact, when you start your best shot at winning is with the champions they give you, since they're the easiest. League is better described as pay to lose if anything.

LoL is a game that rewards learning deep, not wide. You won't win just because you have access to many champions. You will lose, because you don't know how to play those champions, and will never learn how, because you are always starting over with a new one. Counterpicking and tier lists are lies that scrubs tell themselves to feel better about their lack of basic skills. You need 1 champion you can play perfectly without error, and a couple backups in case you don't get to play that 1 champion.

At 1 game a day, it will take you far longer than 9.5 years to learn to play every champion in the game, so it is irrelevant how long it would take to get all of them. You could play more than 300 hours on a single character before it would benefit you to add a second one.

League doesn't feel pay to win at all to me, yeah you do have to play or pay to unlock champions but they are not necessarily better champions in most cases (for new players at least).

Lol is not a pay to win game. Saying otherwise tell me you never played the game.

Best players in the world start new accounts with no champions and are still able to climb to the top of the ladder.

Also, since a few years the game literally give you tons of content such as champion and cosmetics for free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com