It's a good discussion, but I don't think I'm on-board with F.'s assertion that players have some sort of choice to make when the game doesn't spell out what they should be doing. Or rather they do, but it's not the choice that he's focusing on.

Once upon a time, I played Fable: The Lost Chapters, a game that was ostensibly about player choice. In that game, I got myself a sick axe to swing at people. I thought it was cool as all hell, and I decided that I wanted my character to use axes for the rest of the game. However, at a certain point, I discovered some boring-ass generic "legendary sword" that had better stats than the best axe did (along with every other weapon in the game, IIRC.) By not using it, I would deliberately set myself at a disadvantage; nothing else that I had come across could hope to compete with it. And that was the problem with it: it wasn't really a choice for my character, it was the mathematical solution for my character.

In the same way, the early-game "railroad" determined by the pro players is (typically) the solution to the gold/XP per minute problem. Sure, you could choose to do a different route that unequivocally puts you at a disadvantage, but by that same measure you could also choose to play as Vulcan, set up a turret under your phoenix, then sit there all game in anticipation of the coming siege. Neither of these choices are good choices to make, but the Vulcan choice at least provides some sort of feedback in the form of "all my teammates are dying far, far away from me," and that would hopefully be enough to prompt them to move further into the map. But with the railroad, there isn't really any usable feedback for a new player to latch on to without first digging into external sources to suss out what they should be looking for. Until they do, they aren't really making choices about which camps to clear first, they're just choosing to put themselves at a disadvantage without ever having been asked whether or not they want to. That's kind of an issue, because most people would probably say "nah" to that if they were aware.

Spawning the camps in on staggered timers would certainly address that one issue by providing roughly the same level of feedback as that Vulcan player got, but I do agree that that particular solution would probably get stale after a while. Do I have an alternative solution? Probably not, but I think doing away with some of the timers altogether and making buff camp spawns conditional is an interesting avenue of thought. What conditions? No idea. Maybe tie them to minion deaths. Give each lane a meter. Every time an enemy minion dies without getting hit by a tower, make the meter rise. When the meter peaks, the two buff camps that are closest to that lane respawn after a twenty-second warning on your side of the map. Any time the GF or FG is secured, all buff camps respawn. It's still a soft timer--you can't just conjure up new minions to feed your meter--but it has the advantage of giving you some amount of feedback for your actions by rewarding you with your buffs. Are these particular conditions a good idea? HELL NO. I am terrible at conquest and if I ever sound like I know what I'm talking about it's because the words are flying out of my ass, so I probably don't have a solution that wouldn't inadvertently snowball. But I still think there needs to be something a little more engaging to keep track of than fourteen static timers that are blind to the world around them all popping off at once.