@ XAVIRNE :
Sniper is a terrible character, lol.
And, fun fact, I started the game with Drow because of her being an "easy" character. I flat out sucked with her; I still suck with her. In fact, I have a lot of irrational hatred for her because of all the games I threw. Yes, I threw those games. I was actually going to stop playing because things were so terrible and I wasn't really making any progress. Well, things really changed for me when I drafted Viper and, from there, I usually just played whoever tickled my fancy.
What I'm trying to say is: play whoever you want to play. You'll eventually need to learn more than a handful of characters anyway and what was/is easy for someone else is not necessarily going to be true for you. For instance, your play style may be different or you might just, for no reason at all, sync better with a different character.
Plus, as a beginner, you'll mostly be learning basics (e.g. map awareness, farming, etc). You'll die a lot and that's perfectly fine because you're still learning the game. Nobody starts off destroying everything.
I think there are around one hundred characters, but I'm not sure. I just know that there are a lot. Also, the reason you might not see the characters I listed is because the game's meta changes every so often and certain characters fall out of favor or rotation. For example, Viper is a terrible carry and very few people will play him (he has a lot of early game strength, but levels off awkwardly and, eventually, becomes sort of crappy support).
But, yeah, if you want to learn a new character, you should just pick them. I'm not sure how you play, but if you only want to play pretty characters, you could always try Lina. She's a fairly easy character to understand, but the timing on her stun can be tricky and she doesn't really have a good escape mechanism. Vengeful Spirit is also a really easy character to pick up; you don't even have to play support with her if you don't want to (in pubs, I used to turn VS into an off-carry). If you're playing with friends, you should definitely take advantage of the reduced chances for raging and just go with whoever!
@ COWS GO MOO :
I mainly played League with my brother and friends; I rarely duo and almost always just ran five man teams. I have noticed that, at higher levels, the unnecessary amount of anger and insults are greatly reduced. Like, at Plat/Diamond, the quality of the players are not only better, but less aggravating on the whole. I mean, sure, there is probably that one person who will chew my head off for the slightest of things, but, in general, that happens far less than it did in the lower brackets.
Of course, to get that far into the game, most people would have endured more crap than they should have, lol.
One of my friends is actually dating one of the players on CLG and my brother has met/played with him before (same circle of friends) and he was really, really nice. But, then again, I also believe that it is the anonymous feature of the internet that draws out the worst in people and, with streamers, the anonymous factor is taken away. If they're a jerk, the whole world is well aware of who he or she is, you know?
One of the main reasons I stopped playing League was because of a friend's friend, actually. We were in a 4-man team and the person I wasn't familiar with in our group would not stop cussing me out. Even though he knew that I was good friends with the other two, he would not let up. The random player even chimed in for him to shut the hell up, but he was such an ass he couldn't stop and just started to go off on the kid.
I have never been treated so rudely before and the fact that he wasn't a random stranger was really upsetting.
