that last part was a great point, but i HAVE shown him the complicated metagame behind melee. He's coming around, but he's contending that melee is an easy game to pick up, whereas lol can't be picked up straight away.
Which everyone who plays competitive melee and league will tell you is 100% wrong. I mean you can just direct him to this thread, this is an entire thread of people who play league of legends and smash (most on a competitive level) and for some reason most of us prefer melee. If you're getting him to come around, then this is pretty much the place to prove that melee is difficult.
the comparison is a stretch, but i don't think i'm necessarily wrong in saying melee is a much harder game than lol. as smashers, if you guys can explain the how you felt picking up lol versus picking up melee, then that's something i can convey to my friend.
To be perfectly honest, depends on what you mean by "difficulty", I think in this case defining your terms will help you come to a better understand of what exactly you disagree on.
Personally, I see "difficulty" as a skill floor thing which comprises of 2 main aspects: burden of knowledge and execution.
Burden of knowledge is the amount of information you are expect to know in order to figure out how to make decisions, thing like skillshot range, speed, ability attributes, how much of a healthbar equates to what HP, etc. To it's credit riot tends to try to make skills easy to understand, for example having defined colors for which skills can have certain effects (no coincidence that sona's healing song and ahri ball when she has her passive up are the same color).
Execution is pure technical skill required to make your character do what you want, things like jumping over a wall with flash or last hitting minions. To be perfectly honest, league's execution ceiling is very low.
So, as I define it, league isn't "difficult".
At the same time, a lot of people use difficulty to include skill ceiling, which is where I think he's coming from, and skill ceiling comes from team-based decision-making.
Say in a teamfight, you need to recognize you're enemy's damage output, be able to estimate exactly how long it would it would take to escape over that time period so you can decide exactly when to disengage using all the knowledge I talked about before. Then you have to decide whether what you can accomplish if you let yourself die and whether it's worth it. In league, there are a million tiny points of calculation and decisionmaking in order to optimize your teamfighting and that's not even half the areas where this complexity comes into play.
So league, low skill floor, high skill ceiling.
As far as how I felt picking them up:
Melee: When I compared myself to pro players I felt like I couldn't execute anything, like we weren't even playing the same game. That's still ther even now, but not to the same degree because I spent so much time practicing and suddenly it's not so much that I can't execute what they're doing, I'm just doing the wrong things.
League: I never felt like I couldn't do what the pro players did with the exception of last hitting and some really fancy things with lee sin for example and that sort of think take that long to learn. Instead I felt like I was constantly making the wrong decisions, too close or too far, didn't properly estimate my damage output and my opponents'. I got better as I internalized that information and learned how to apply it properly.
I've been failing at it hard.
