League of Legends: New Players

Last night Robb convinced Sceadeau to give League of Legends a try. It was an interesting experience and brought with it a reminder about how brutal the metagame actually is when you're forcing the game to put someone at level 1 and someone at level 30 in the same game. The teams ended up being 30-30-30-30-1 vs 30-30-30-20-20 in the first game and 30-20-17-17-2 vs 24-17-15-12-5 in the second game. If it was just experience levels at play those might be balanced games but since levels bring actual in-game power along with them it's not the case at all. In the second game I played support and my level really didn't matter. Supports don't really scale with stats so having a bunch of free stats didn't help all that much. In the first game Robb got way ahead, possibly by farming one of the low level guys, and was a wrecking ball. It certainly helped that the enemy team kept focusing our level 1 guy in team fights!

But I was thinking about it today on the bus from work... How big a deal was it, actually? If I'm a level 30 Twitch with full runes/masteries and Sceadeau is a level 1 Twitch with no runes or masteries how big an advantage do I have?

Well, at in-game level 1 Sceadeau would have 469 health, 14 armour, 59 damage, and attack .679 times per second assuming he buys a doran's blade with his starting money. I would have 475 health, 29 armour, 75 damage, and attack .706 times per second (+4%). I would also have 17 flat armour penetration and 8% armour penetration. I would do 2% more damage all the time and an extra 5% damage when he falls under half life. I would also have access to the ignite and flash summoner spells while he would only have heal and ghost.

When he attacks me he'd do 46 damage per shot. When I hit him I'd do 77 damage per shot until he fell below half health when I'd do 80 damage instead. This is assuming I can't knock him into negative armour; I'm not clear on whether runes/masteries can do that or not. I may be doing more than that. So he'd kill me in  11 attacks, which would take over 16 seconds. I would kill him in 7 attacks, which would take 10 seconds. This ignores summoner spells and the healing of doran's blade, both of which would swing the fight more in my favour.

I'd say that's a huge deal. He's probably looking at needing to earn 3000 gold to make the fight even. A full black cleaver might turn it into an even fight! Couple the huge stat advantage with the significantly better early game and the general gameplay experience which makes earning money easier and it seems pretty inconceivable that he'd ever come close to me in power if we faced off against each other.

This seems like a big problem. I like the League of Legends metagame system, and I think having the restricted pool of champions when you start, and the lower overall power level of characters are good things. But for those things to exist you can't be teaming up with a max level player. Otherwise you'll be playing with many people who just have huge statistical advantages and a bigger pool of available champions.

But what is the solution? It seems like there are a few options...

• Don't play together at all.
• Start a new account myself (and thus be forced to split my IP gains between accounts).
• Suck it up and have terribly unbalanced games. (Possibly by having the low level character focus on playing support since they don't scale with stats as much as other people?)

None of these seem particularly great, and I'm open to other suggestions. I wish LoL had a 'level matching' system like some MMORPGs do. I'd gladly play without runes and masteries on my main account as long as I could keep earning IP to buy new champions.