With potential comes flaws...
If you enjoy RTS's and RPG's, then you would likely fall in love with a game that combines the two genres into a beautiful intermediate. League of Legends, unfortunately, possesses too many flaws to be a recommended title in the genre we mentioned. And these flaws center around one thing.
Matchmaking
You see, in the FPS genre, players of varying skills can be paired together and still have fun. Take Team Deathmatch for example; This game type pairs a mixture of veterans and noobs into large groups that apply a very loose strategy of "kill the other person". Strategy, you see, is not key here (unless you are a serious gamer in a serious clan) and the number of people on each team is large enough to equally match the other.
League of Legends is in a different genre though. Strategy is important and the number of players is small. Each match pertains to a goal where five champions must utilize teamwork to destroy the other teams base and claim victory.
It is for this reason that an effective matchmaking system is absolutely vital. But after playing 300+ games, the truth is only about 1 in every 5 matches is ever fair.
The other 4 matches you will find yourself playing a very one-sided game. Whether you are steamrolling your foes or are the one being steamrolled, its never fun. In these situations inexperienced players ruin things by being improperly matched and often are the times when you will find yourself playing on, or against, a team that is missing a person. (sometimes it can become a 3v5 even!)
Though playing 300+ games appears to counter my point (why play it so much then if its bad?) the truth is I wanted to be fair to League of Legends. I was new to the genre, and so I believed that, overtime, the matchmaking system would come to understand me and begin pairing me appropriately. But sadly this only rarely happened.
The same goes for if you form a premade team. You face the same "steamroll or be steamrolled" scenario.
So in conclusion, I can't really reccommend League of Legends to anyone. While the game is free, the matches arent really fair and thus are only fun 1 out of every 5 games. Given that each match lasts typically for 30 minutes, thats saying you will only receive 30 minutes of amusement during the course of 2 and a half hours of gameplay.
*Hindsight wonders if it was too much for the developers to lower the time for the surrender vote (25 minutes) when 2 of 5 people on your team leave at the start of a match.
