“Hey, Rito, why haven’t you ever improved the tutorial for League of Legends?”

How many jokes have you heard about Ashe buying Thornmail? We’ve heard a lot.

Typically the onboarding experience in a game—the tutorial and other elements that try and teach you the basics of how to play—is one of the most important features for a game developer to get right.

League has been a really unusual case because it grew much faster than anyone anticipated, despite having a pretty lackluster onboarding experience. The typical way a lot of us learned how to play League was that our friends brought us in, told us what we needed to worry about now, and explained to us what we could safely ignore for the moment. Essentially, the community was League’s onboarding.

We want League to be a game that stands the test of time and is played around the world for many years, which means getting new players into the game has to be a part of the equation. We are grateful that the community has been able to carry the load for onboarding for a long time, but it’s time that we held up our end of the bargain. In the next few patches, you’re going to start to see some changes to the entire new player experience for League.

“Are you guys changing the target audience for League?”

Nope. I want to take extra effort to reassure you that we are not interested in fundamentally redefining the audience for League of Legends.

It’s you guys.

League has thrived because of a dedicated community that loves the game as much as we do, and we absolutely do not take you for granted. We aren’t interested in sacrificing the depth and replayability of League in order to make it more accessible, and we aren’t trying to broaden our audience or make League “more casual.” We just want to make it easier for players who we think will enjoy the game to discover it.

“Okay, so what’s different this time?”

I want to start by explaining our philosophy so that hopefully when you see the changes, they’ll make some sense to you all.

We think the games with the best tutorials do a clever job of hiding the fact that you’re learning the game, and instead focus on the fun.