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Snow Leopard is feeding: Riot bump up minimum specs for League of Legends on Mac

League of Legends will continue to run on OS X 10.6, but only through virtual machine programs.

Part of the reason for League of Legends’ recent world-eating success, besides a metagame deep enough to lose your wedding ring in, is its scalability. It’s a game that runs like billyo not just on your big, upright rig, but also on your two-year-old laptop packed with integrated rubbish.

Consequently, Riot are very gentle when it comes to nudging up the minimum specs of this three year old game. But their hand has been forced by Apple, who’ve stopped security development on Mac OS 10.6, or ‘Snow Leopard’ as they so affectionately call it.

In a few patches’ time – they’re currently aiming for 4.7 – Riot will update LoL’s minimum specs on Mac to 10.7. Sorry, Lion.

Though Riot made the decision primarily to maintain the security of players’ game accounts, they say the switch to 10.7 will also allow them to make use of Apple’s upgraded tools to build a “better League experience” for Mac users.

More recent Apple machines tend to be eligible for free upgrades to ‘Mavericks’, the latest version of OS X. Still others – chiefly those bought between mid 2006 and mid 2007 – can be turned into Lions for a $20 fee. Check Apple’s Warranty page for specifics.

But for some older Macs, 10.6 is as far as they will go. For those players, there’ll be the finickity option of running LoL through the Windows client via a virtual machine program. However, Riot “strongly recommend” they invest in a new machine – though they acknowledge this “isn’t a possibility for everyone”.

“Since Apple has dropped security updates for Snow Leopard, your system (and your LoL account) will become increasingly vulnerable to risk,” they point out.

What percentage of you lot dabble in Mac gaming? With any luck, you’ve already resigned yourselves to the need for occasional upgrades on OS X, for which support tends to dry up rather more quickly than on Windows.

Thanks, Reign of Gaming.