This is how League of Legends competitors take advantage of psychology to defeat Riot

Any video game with the longevity and success of League of Legends has to see how so many others intend to copy their innovations or improve them. It is a natural process that Riot Games herself benefited in her day and that, except in case flagrants, does not usually lead to complaints or legal actions by the developers. However, silence does not avoid that very interesting phenomena can be observed in which it is obvious how a title tries to benefit from another much more powerful. Something that, of course, also affects Moba and does so in a very curious way.

• The importance of rankeds in League of Legends
• Psychology as a weapon against Riot Games

The importance of rankeds in League of Legends

The League of Legends qualifying system is the most demanding we have known so far. Uploading a range has been playing at a good level for several hours and adding the five highest divisions we only find 13.27% of the players. Riot Games is brutally honest with its systems and wants that when you raise divisions it is because you deserve it. It is not that they care that you can piss you along the way or that 60% of the players who do not reach gold are left without their prize at the end of the season. The perspective is the opposite: the developer wants to preserve at all costs the feeling of achievement that involves ascending leagues.

League of Legends was the first great game to add rankeds. It was not a great discovery, but rather an evolution and it is normal for dozens of titles that arrived in the subsequent years-and that are launched into the middle of 2022-they would copy the system. That is not what we mean by taking advantage of Riot Games to compete against her. What we intend to refer to is that try to benefit, sometimes blatantly, of the reference that has put on the table: those difficult ranges to achieve with names that sound phenomenal and that indicate a great level of ability.

Psychology as a weapon against Riot Games

The truly important thing about qualifying items is the offer of a competitive environment in which people must take the video game more seriously, an pairing system that offers fair games and the proposal of a long-term objective. However, Rankeds have also become synonymous with status . Getting the highest levels of MMR is something that many players propose and that few get. A situation that, strictly in terms of the video game, makes us superior to others. However, this same satisfactory effect can become the motivation of great frustrations.

Riot Games has the courage to tell his player who is iron. This is something that you will not see in almost any video game outside the company. You probably do not find many people who are in bronze and not even money. For example, Rocket League only accumulates 2.29% of the players in their two worst leagues , while overcoming that scale in League of Legends implies being better than 21% of the community. This is not the most exaggerated case, since the title now managed by Epic Games does not have a particularly friendly qualifying system.

However, pulling more comparisons we can demonstrate that most video games have dread to place players in their lowest ranges , being limited to the members of the community who just started. It is something particularly normal in mobile video games, where simply playing games we can escape the ‘well’. However, it also happened in Apex Legends or Rainbow Six Siege. They may not even do it directly, but using an inflation MMR system (it is the one that tends to increase) that makes players quickly ascend to a minimum level.

This practice is due to two reasons. On the one hand, most developers are afraid that their players frustrate, making the necessary skill to achieve a range that can be considered satisfactory is lower than it might seem. In addition, they can use the League of Legends reference by putting similar names (bronze, silver, platinum...) and ** waiting for players easier to achieve. Psychological tricks that, ultimately, serve to avoid frustration.

Finally, another paradigmatic example must also be noted. In this case we are going to Mobile Legends, a game that Riot Games accused of plagiarism, which uses an interesting technique: to put names to the ranges that indicate a higher level. The lowest third in this video game is called a teacher, which is the seventh we reach in League of Legends. It is not something that we point out, neither in this case nor in the previous ones, to criticize it. However, it seems to us An extremely interesting phenomenon and a first-class psychological trick.