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We've all experienced it, on PCs and more recently on consoles: the unbearable time it takes to install a game. Our patience for waiting on the game to download off of some digital distribution service or that long ride home from the game store is reward by yet another barrier preventing us from playing the game. Do developers even want us to experience the years worth of hard work they put into producing such a great game?
Recently the latest iteration on the Dota game type League of Legends has been released to the general public for FREE. That's nothing to scoff at. It's hard to complain about a game's short comings when its free and being constantly updated to eliminate bugs and add new features. But when a casual user, like myself, is being greeted by a mandatory 20 minute long updating process each time they start the game for their daily play session, all the praise that would normally be given to the developer for doing their best to make a better game is lost.
To most dedicated players this will never seem like a problem. A 20 minute long wait, although annoying, doesn't even compare to the hours of gameplay they're going to experience. It's easy enough to go make a sandwich or watch tv while the game is updating, but for me it's just another excuse not to play at all. When I only play 2-3 rounds (which equates to 20-30 minutes of gameplay), that 20 minute update is equal to the total time I'm going to spend playing the game.
League of Legends is not going to be a game that I'm going to play for hours and hours and lose myself in. It's a filler. Something that adds variety in between each game I play, or kills some time on a slow day. Usually I decide to play the game at random, selecting it from a big list of games I casually play. Maybe I'm the wrong audience for the game. Considering its heritage from Dota, which is an extremely hardcore game, it could be that the causal player's experience from loading the game up to turning it off isn't considered.
The game is still in beta and these are all problems that are most likely to be remedied once the game has most of its features in place. Right now though, I'm not interested in playing it. There are too many new releases and games in my back log to worry about spending half my playtime waiting for the game to update.
Has anyone experienced problems installing, updating, or even uninstalling a game before or am I just being grumpy?
I just want to clear up a few things about League of Legends. League of Legends is in pre-season. Essentially a time after beta but before ranked play begins. Personally I try to squeeze in as much time on League of Legends as I can. Even though I was never really into DotA this game is far more accessible. Also the game doesn't update anywhere close to daily it's every week at the most and even the patches aren't too big imo 30-50 MB.
As for the rest of your post when I go through the trouble of getting a game I've usually invested time looking it up and garnering interest. So I'll go through quite a bit in order to get it up and running. It's usually the gameplay or in-game bugs that put me off a game.
Nice post by the way, this is something I've wondered as well. Many people miss out on some good games just because of a few troubles in getting it started/running.