My VERY first game, there were only free week champions. At this point I had played a couple games of HoN, and never really grasped that. I was switching to LoL because it was supposedly more fun and easier to pick up (I agree with both points, although maybe I never gave HoN a fair run). I was trying to decide which champion to pick, and so I took Shen. I figured "he's a ninja, he can probably kill people really fast"
I also (for that entire game) did not understand why a taunt would be useful. I was like "why would I want people to attack me"?