In the latest Champion Spotlight video for DC Comics MOBA Infinite Crisis, Warner Bros. focus on a Clown Prince of Crime less well known. Gaslight Joker is a serial killer from the streets of Victorian Gotham, and as such comes with a range of attacks a little more gruesome than smile gas and pencils.
EA have a new studio called Waystone, and that studio is making a fantasy MOBA. ‘A fantasy MOBA?,’ sez you. ‘Well, bear with me while I send power to my auxilliary imagination generators.’ That’s quite enough snark from you, hypothetical reader. After all, you’re entirely imaginary yourself. Pot, visualise kettle.
My eyes and ears contorted in surprise just now as I watched two of Infinite Crisis champion profile videos. Not in an effort to more closely resemble Gaslight Batman, totally awesome though that would be - but rather in realisation that Turbine have ripped the familiar format of Riot Games’ excellent Champion Spotlights straight from League of Legends. And why wouldn’t they?
Chinese publishing behemoth Tencent are working on a new MOBA, set to be unveiled at their annual press-a-thon this Thursday. The game is rumoured to be the work of a team sourced from ex-EA staff and the remnants of Blizzard’s Warcraft 3 dev team. Dota think it looks a bit familiar?
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.
Chris Sigaty, StarCraft 2's production director, told Eurogamer that Blizzard were still "actively working" on Blizzard All-Stars, and that their priority now was "to pull off a game with a different business model than StarCraft 2 [because] StarCraft 2 is a box. We intend to do something different with the business model in Blizzard All-Stars, something more closely resembling the other types of games in that genre, the MOBA-style games that are out there."
Blizzard All-Stars is the company's own take on the Dota-inspired MOBA genre and this very much suggests it will follow a similar business model to League of Legends and Dota 2, making it Blizzard's first free-to-play title.
A number of times during our interview on Friday, Chris Taylor asked me if what he was saying made sense, if I “got" Wildman, his newly announced, Kickstarter-funded RTS / MOBA. Taylor talks a mile a minute and there’s always the sense that his words are trying to catch up to his brain, but more than that, Wildman is something different and harder to explain than he’s used to pitching.
In what might be the first instance of analogue news dissemination in half a decade, Guild Wars Insider has been chatting to an ArenaNet employee in a Seattle coffee shop, or something. During a discussion about industry trends, the employee reportedly admitted that the Guild Wars developers are working on a League of Legends competitor.
Blizzard All-stars is the developer’s own attempt to usurp Dota 2 and League of Legends; games built upon the success of the original Warcraft 3 Dota mod. Originally named Blizzard DOTA, its name was changed after a legal dispute with Valve over the Dota trademark.
While Valve may now hold the Dota trademark, Blizzard can still lay claim to being the inspiration for the Dota legacy, which stretches back through Warcraft 3 to the original StarCraft and a custom map known as Aeon of Strife. Here’s what we know about their game so far.
I love jungling, me. It places you in a position of anonymity, where your ganks are entirely unexpected, except by the general sense of unease that pervades whenever you’re past the river on your lane. It lets you enjoy feeling like you’re the predator, when so much of League of Legends makes you feel like the prey. Or at least, a pair of sheep knocking horns into one another. 
You sit down in your chair, roll up your sleeves, and prepare for a sit in meal upwards of forty minutes, when you play League of Legends. It’s something to take your time with, enjoy, savour. It’s a slow build to a massive crescendo. It’s French cuisine, carefully packaged and not enough to stuff your face with, but rather force you to take your time over it. 
Whenever someone asks me about Dota, I wince a little. Because I know that even if they’re really interested, and even if they read all the guides, they’re still going to probably bounce off the surface. League of Legends is a bit better, but it’s still acerbic as all hell. Which makes me happy that Awesomenauts is headed to PC, and Steam. When it comes to the friendliest Dota-likes, Awesomenauts is just about at the top of the list.
Those of you familiar with Heroes of Newerth might also be familiar with ‘ARAM’, a player encouraged game mode that turns out to be quite a lot of fun. It stands for ‘All Random, All Mid’, and features everyone on the team, err, going random, and then going mid. It’s not really all that complicated. But it is an awful lot of fun. And it's coming to League of Legends.
What is the best champion in League of Legends for beginners and new players? Where should you start? What LoL champion should you play? These are a daunting set of questions: so many choices! So much information!
One hundred and sixty five pieces of equipment. Twenty nine bundles. Eight tools. Six couriers. That’s Dota 2’s store, right now. It’s quite an impressive haul, especially when you consider that the majority of all the items you can slap onto your favourite heroes right now are community made. But there’s one item that’s very much Valve’s own, and very much Important with that capital I. Because it’s you that needs to pay attention to the fact that, right now, you can buy Dota 2, and play it.
Since November last year, teams have been competing in League of Legends for a spot in one of the regionals that are leading up to the World Championship of Season 2. The total prize pot for the entire tournament is $5 million, although $1 million has been given out already. It’s a frankly obscene amount of money, and it’s really establishing League of Legends as a premier E-Sport along the likes of Starcraft 2. 
