In League of Legends, Teemo is a champion that is incredibly divisive. Hating Teemo has become a cornerstone of League‘s community culture, we all bond over our mutual hate of Teemo, but I think that Teemo’s design is actually problematic.
Oh Teemo, He’s So Cute! What Could Go Wrong?
Here’s what a new player will think when they choose Teemo and start to play him for the first time:
“Oh, this little guy looks cute! Oh boy, he sounds so adorable too! He’s so innocent he couldn’t harm a fly, and I bet everybody loves him.”
… if you’ve played League for a while, you might be chuckling from the irony.
The brunt of my issues with Teemo’s design comes from the mismatch in his visual and audio design vs his gameplay design. Teemo is a character that has a lot of appeal to new players, and especially (in my experience) with female players. New players can be forgiven for thinking that by playing this cute character, they’re going to have an innocent time, free of toxicity. Instead, they’ve unknowingly opted into encouraging a lot of toxicity thrown their way. Even if a lot of that toxicity is tongue-in-cheek (“Fuck that little spawn of satan!” after stepping on a trap, etc), they can still be easily turned off because it wasn’t what they were looking for.
Compare this to Shaco, a character who has a lot in common with Teemo: they both have traps, invisibility mechanics, and they’re both annoying as fuck to play against. However, in Shaco’s case his audio and visual design set the right expectations.
When you play Shaco and your opponents tell you they hate you so much they hope your mother contracts a new painful type of cancer, you giggle in perverted glee. That is exactly what you were hoping for when you picked Shaco and you opted into that toxicity, even if this is the first time you’re playing him.
If you’re an experienced League of Legends player, you’re probably opting into the exact same thing when you pick Teemo, but new players don’t know all the cultural perception surrounding Teemo. There’s a serious risk of their resulting experience putting them off the game. My concerns with Teemo are primarily about new player retention.
Why Is Teemo Known To Be So Frustrating?
Teemo is infamous for how frustrating he is, both to opponents, but also to his own teammates. Why is that?
First let’s talk about why he’s frustrating to play against. Now in some way, every champion is frustrating to play against, but there’s two main abilties that make Teemo famously frustrating: his Noxious Traps and his Blinding Dart.
I think when most people think about how frustrating Teemo is, the first think of his traps, and that’s fair. They’re frustrating as hell to play against. The feeling that you have when you’ve barely escaped a battle alive and think you’re safe, only to step on a trap and die, is unforgettable. However, under the assumption that Teemo is intended to be as sadistic as his abilities make him to, I can’t really fault their design.
His Blinding Dart, however, I have a lot of issue with. Specifically, it doesn’t communicate to the victim well what’s going on. There’s a subtle graphic that indicates that your auto attacks are going to miss, but in the middle of a fight it’s very easy to overlook it. Even the fact that your auto attack didn’t connect is easy to overlook. However, even if Riot made these graphics much larger and obvious, there would still be a serious problem with the blind ability. The ability is designed so that the burden of knowledge is on the victim: if the victim doesn’t already know what Teemo does then they won’t understand what happened.
As League gains an ever growing roster of champions, this concept of the burden of knowledge becomes increasingly important for the champion designers. Past a point, it’s just not reasonable to expect players to know what every single champion does. Of course, experienced players who take the game very serious will eventually learn every single one, but for the sake of everybody else every ability needs to communicate what’s happening as intuitively as possible.
Compare Teemo’s blind to Quinn’s. Quinn’s blind ability communicates the concept of being blinded far better: your vision range is simply dramatically reduced. Like being blind, it doesn’t actually prevent you from doing anything, but it robs you of knowledge. When you’re blinded by Quinn, you immediately have a good idea of what’s happening, and you actually feel like you’re blind. People may argue that Quinn’s blind is even more frustrating than Teemo’s, but Quinn’s blind communicates the idea of being blinded much more effectively, and I would change Teemo’s blind mechanic over if I could.
Communicating Intent To His Allies
Teemo is also somewhat infamous for being “useless” when on your team, and thus subject to toxicity from your own team, which is the worst type of toxicity. There’s a couple of factors for this. A major one is that Teemo is considered to be strongest in top lane, but League of Legends culture places expectations on top laners to pick tanky characters to act as their team’s front line, which Teemo isn’t. This is a problem with all characters that are viable in the top lane but aren’t tanks and bruisers however, so I think that’s more a larger problem with League of Legends as a whole rather than Teemo.
However, what we can blame on Teemo is that his character doesn’t communicate what his role on a team is. It actually took me a long time to realize it myself: he is a lane bully who uses that lane dominance to set up a strong split push. His Noxious Trap defends his split push against collapses by slowing enemies, and his Move Quick ability allows him to escape. His passive allows him to hide in a bush and trick the enemy team into thinking that he’s left, allowing him to resume his split push.
When I was told this, my reaction was “ooooooh, so that’s what Teemo is supposed to do!” The problem is, nobody seems to realize it! (Especially my teammates.) I think a large part of the problem is that Teemo’s design doesn’t communicate these things.
I have a little side story. I used to suck at playing assassin characters, until I played Talon. Talon’s visual and audio design however, do a good job to communicate how he should be played. Everything about his visual design tells you that he’s an assassin that waits for the perfect opportunity to jump in, kill a single target as fast as possible, and then gets the hell out of there (you know, like an assassin would fight). This is the proper way to play Talon too. Back then, when I played Zed who should be played the same way, I would jump into a fight as soon as it started and stay in there (and die instantly and be useless). Zed’s visual design didn’t clue me in to how to play him, because he looks like he’s covered in armor.
Champions like Renekton and Darius are lane bullies, and they look and sound like it. Both are big guys, dripping with confidence and hatred. Of course you’re going to be inclined to play them as a bully. Teemo is a lane bully too, but he looks tiny and cute, and sounds like a little puffball of innocence. He doesn’t look like he should be off on his own, taunting the enemy team to come at him. He looks like he should be helping his team as best as his adorable little arms could, and in some part of their minds everybody is going to think along those lines, whether it’s the Teemo player himself, or his teammates.
Teemo’s Cultural Evolution
Today, Teemo’s official lore today talks about how nice of a guy he seems, but how unsettling he is at times and how he’s often a discompassionate killer. I think it’s telling though that his original lore had nothing about that unsettling nature in it at all. He wasn’t meant to be received the way he was. Rather, the lore seems to have been updated retroactively after community reception set in.
What To Do?
“Fixing” Teemo today is pretty tricky. Teemo’s kit has an established identity, and any updated kit that doesn’t have invisibility, a blind effect, and traps is going to be seen as a betrayal of his character by fans. Unfortunately, invisibility, blind effects, and traps are all inherently frustrating game mechanics.
Furthermore, I believe Teemo is one of those “rough edges” in a game that help it come to life. I probably wouldn’t have released Teemo as he is, knowing what I do now about how he’d turn out, but what’s done is done, and now he’s a character the community bonds over. It’s always tempting as a designer to want to smooth all these rough edges out, but sometimes it’s best to just leave them alone.
So what to do, assuming we should even do anything at all? One option is to approach the problem from the other end, giving Teemo updated voice lines and animations that play up his sadistic nature. The players that are going to play Teemo blind to his true nature are going to be new players picking him in Champion Select from the free champion rotation. In that case, the tools League of Legends has to communicate a character in Champion Select is their splash art and voice line when selected. Currently Teemo’s splash makes him look super cute and happy, and he says “Hup, two, three, four!” in that happy voice of his. What if in the background of his splash art there was a pile of dead, desiccated bodies? What if his select quote was more along the lines of “Hehe, I’ll kill them all!“, in that same happy voice? I think these are the sort of changes the community could embrace, whereas changing his base mechanics the community would likely reject.
I would still hate to see him locked in by the enemy team, but as long as the player that locked him in understands that, as a designer I’m okay with Teemo.
I would still change his blind mechanic though.
What We Can Learn From Teemo
So what can we learn from this little spawn of Satan in disguise?
- Gameplay design and audio/visual design should complement each other. If they’re dissonant, players can be hoping for one experience and get another.
- Audio/visual design gives important clues to players how they should approach playing, and is a subtle but powerful teacher.
- Abilities need to have the burden of knowledge be on the player playing the character.
- Rough edges happen, sometimes it’s better to embrace them rather than to try to smooth them out.