League of Legends 3.7 doesn’t exactly skimp on the balance changes - it features tweaks to more than 20 champions, most notably to Rumble, Twisted Fate and Nunu. But there’s something even more significant going on here - Custom Item Sets. They‘ll spell an end to manually browsing for your favourite items when assembling a build mid-game.
This week's playlist has death, intrigue, and cuddly little villagers. Rob's returned to League of Legends where he finds the reward for training hard and honing your skills. Jeremy taken to the streets and rooftops of Dunwall to enact his voyeuristic desires. Matt's discovering the problems of injecting the 80s into a tactical island shooter. And Julian plays the puppet master in indie god game Reus. He also has a problem with his stoats.
The list of League of Legends champions grows ever longer, and the latest addition is one for those with a love for demonic hell fire. Aatrox, the Darkin Blade is a Balrog-like melee brawler powered by his own blood who casts dirty dark spells. Or in more user-friendly terms: he sacrifices health points to cast spells.
Patch 3.6 brought with it visual updates to Trundle and Sejuani and also a new hero, Lissandra of the Freljord. She’s a powerful mage who has a number of stun abilities and a passive that turns hits into free spell casts.
It would be well worth learning her ropes.
Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
Everybody has bad days. Some like to blow off steam with a round of golf or a drink with friends. Others like to direct that steam into the eyes and ears of inferior MOBA players. What they really need is a friend to take them aside and say: “This isn’t like you. Go and have a bath.”
Through the Behavioural Alerts system destined for a future patch, Riot aim to be that friend.
As League of Legends’ growth shows no sign of slowing, Riot increasingly find themselves in Games Workshop's boltgun metal shoes - freshening up each of their champions in turn in a continuous cycle of aesthetic and design updates. In patch 3.6, it’s the turn of Trundle of Sejuani - as well as the Proving Grounds, now relocated up north and infused with lore in its new guise, The Howling Abyss.
On Saturday, an earthquake measuring 6.6 on the Richter scale ripped through rural South-Western China, killing at least 160 and injuring more than 5,700. Regular MOBA heroes Invictus Gaming have since decided to donate their latest prize to the Sichuan relief effort - cash won in the finals of the Chinese Gigabyte StarsWar League two days ago.
The first stage of the League of Legends Championship Series has concluded, and this weekend 12 of the LCS’ s 16 teams will compete in the Spring Playoffs for a share of a $100,000 prize pool ($50,000 for first place) and, for eight of these teams, a last-chance to avoid relegation.
The European division playoffs begin Friday the 26th at 2 PM UK / 9 AM Eastern, while the North Americans begin play at 11 PM UK / 6 PM Eastern. As usual, you can watch the streams live at the LCS website.
Voting is over, and the votes have been tallied. Riot have chosen their players to represent both North America and Europe in the League of Legends Championship: All-Star Week, which will take place at the Shanghai Grand Stage in China. There they will face team and individual events to sort out who are the best of the best and which region is the most dominant in all of League of Legends.
Every competitive game is in an eternal war of keeping balance. In League of Legends the scale is in constant motion, when new items and champions are introduced. Coupled with players thinking of new builds and strategies, more often than not someone's favourite champion will fall victim to the “nerf bat”.
Lead Content Designer “Morello” from Riot Games has come forward to justify the most recent heavy nerfs that have graced League of Legends.
Yesterday, industry research firm DFC Intelligence released a fascinating report. Via a variety of sources they’d discovered that, in the first part of 2013, Dota 2 had overtaken League of Legends to become the most-played “core” PC game in the Western world. Amazing, yes?
No, say Riot Games, pointing to their own statistics. Party hats off. “You can see how we would have some issues with the accuracy of this report," said a spokesperson for the LoL developers.
A League of Legends fan has put forward several designs for Lego minifigs and models based around the game, because... well, why shouldn't we be able to enjoy a League of Lego? The designs has been submitted to Lego Cuusoo, the site where the Lego community can vote on user-generated submissions, and they've now received more than 5,000 votes from other fans. If that vote count reaches 10,000, Lego will give them an official review and consider whether they should enter the production stage.
That’s not the Wild West but most of the Western world. In the first quarter of 2013, Dota 2 overtook League of Legends as the most played “core” Western PC game, according to a report from industry research firm DFC Intelligence.
Update: DFC cite Xfire as one of their key sources, but Xfire's very own public stats paint a rather different picture. Their top ten credits League of Legends with a whopping 83,009 hours per day at time of writing, while Dota 2 sits at the lower end of the chart with 6,685. Original story follows.
The perpetual cycle of balancing and rebalancing can be frustrating, but these days is simply a part of living. Why, just this morning I awoke to find my ‘Luscious Locks’ had been nerfed, replaced with a ‘Lopsided ‘Fro’ in the interests of hair-fairness. But I grin and bear it, because I know it’ll keep my from spamming hair-flicks to get my way.
A similar sort of thing is about to happen in League of Legends. An incoming patch sees the abilities of a number of champions switched up to ensure that all characters remain competitive.
As Riot Games continue to roll through their roster of heroes giving each a visual update as well as tweaking their abilities to balance them with all the new heroes that have released since their entry into the game, they’ve detailed the changes coming to Sejuani, the Winter’s Wrath.
This includes more clothing and a bigger wolf/tusk/bear thing.
If you’ve been following Riot Games at all, you’ll know that a favourite phrase of theirs is “toxic behaviour”. The term is useful. It encapsulates the very real extent to which antisocial language and actions threaten LoL's culture and growth as an eSport. Perhaps less usefully, it also suggests that “toxic” players are irredeemable - corrupted souls waiting to be extracted with a long pair of ban-tweezers. And that’s not so, say Riot. The developers have said at PAX East that they find that most cases are reformable, and that they “don’t actually have any evidence that the community is overwhelmingly full of jerks”.
Riot have published verdicts for two Terms of Use violations by pro League of Legends players this morning. In one, the developers issued a “first and final” warning to Good Game University general manager Sam ‘Hexo’ Bouchard for threatening an opponent with DoS attacks, and for allegedly making good on his word. In the other, Riot suspended seven North American pros, including members of CLG and Curse, for boosting the Elo ratings of lesser players.
Get yer patch notes, yer notes de patch, yer notas del parche, yer Elise power shifts and yer Jarvan nerfs. Them’s all here. But beyond that, there’s a fascinating new measure in force to encourage good behaviour. A new in-game chat restriction will be clamped around the accounts of truly rotten players, as identified by LoL’s Tribunal or Player Support, with limitations to be lifted only once they play nice.
Every time a news story is written about Zac, he becomes a little less secret. Still, this is important: a rundown of the putty-like champion’s abilities, and a few pointers from Riot on how to handle his unique regen mechanic.
Riot have revealed that there are regularly more than 5 million people playing League of Legends concurrently online. Holy crumble, that’s a lot of players. That’s more than Dota 2, which recently became Steam’s most played game of all time, with a comparatively piddling 300,000 concurrent players.
That’s truly a ridiculous figure and that’s before you take into account how much that number has grown since October last year.
