Every two weeks, we give you our verdict on whether or not the latest League of Legends champion is worth buying. Take a seat at the table with Josh, Lucas, and Hollander Cooper as they wax poetic on the joys of blowing people up with magical bombs as a maniacal Yordle. Could Ziggs be the diminutive demolitions expert you've been looking for?
As always, you can download and play League of Legends for free on the game's official site.
In the latest installment of the League of Legends Champion Roundtable, Josh and Lucas are joined by GamesRadar's Hollander Cooper to give the run-down on Sejuani, the newest female tank to storm onto the Fields of Justice. Is she really worth your money? Only one way to find out.
As always, you can download and play League of Legends for free on the game's official site.
I ran out of my spawn area on League of Legends' Dominion map and made a move for the nearest capture-point, which an enemy Sona was stealing from us. I was confident I could take the flimsy healer and reclaim our home point, but before I can get in range, a burst of flames erupts around me and burning-man Brand bursts from the bushes. He's now pacing side-to-side between me and Sona, tossing out flames if I get close, but stubbornly refusing to let me drag him off point, where I could safely kill him.
Now, Brand running interference on a point in Dominion isn't that unusual—but this Brand is a bot, and he's ruining my day, courtesy of the improved AI and bot rosters being added to League of Legends in the next few weeks.
This morning, Riot Games joined Google, Reddit, Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook on the growing list of internet-based companies to publicly oppose the two extreme anti-piracy bills circling in the U.S. Congress, and asked its fans to do the same. Riot CEO and co-founder Brandon "Ryze" Beck outlined his company's objections to the two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), on League of Legends' official forums and gave several examples of how the bills would harm League of Legends' gameplay and community if they passed. Among them, he warns that it could mean the death of livestreaming and other community-generated content websites like DeviantArt and Reddit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0mTT7kPLYA
With a new champion released every two weeks in League of Legends, it can be hard to figure out where your money (RP) and time (IP) are best spent. That's why we've devised the Champion Roundtable, where we examine the latest champion's mechanics and talk about what we liked or what left us unsatisfied. Join Lucas and Gavin as they discuss their best moments with Volibear, the armored polar bear champion, and whether or not they think you should pick him up.
http://youtu.be/JAFJHvv0VaI
Humongous free-to-play real-time-strategy League of Legends' Series Two circuit begins soon, and Riot Games has literally just released a trailer for it.
"The Season One Championship earlier this year broke viewership records, and I'm excited to share our plans for Season Two to encourage more competitive play," Marc Merrill, Riot Games' co-founder says in the trailer.
The events are set for Europe and North America, starting with regional championships and culminating in a huge live tournament. It all sounds jolly exciting.
For our first-ever cover featuring a free-to-play game, it had to be the incredibly popular League of Legends. Our in-depth guide to LoL's upcoming new Dominion mode will ensure that you have the advantage on launch day by taking you through the ins and outs of the map, plus a look at the map creation process and upcoming champions in the works at Riot Games. As if that wasn't enough, you'll also find a code in every issue for an exclusive Caitlyn skin (good on North American servers only) which will also unlock the champion herself if you've yet to purchase the sultry sniper.
In other mega-news, our extensive Diablo III hands-on preview will tell you everything you need to know about the much-anticipated hack-'n'-slash ahead of the beta, and addresses your Auction House concerns. Meanwhile, we've the inside scoop on supernatural steampunk-style FPS thriller Dishonored and the verdict on the tropical zombie-bonanza that is Dead Island. Missing this issue is, in a word, inadvisable.
Hey you, internetter! If you're reading this on Sunday evening, you're just in time to catch the planet's best professional StarCraft II players at Major League Gaming's Raleigh finals. If that sounds interesting - and it sure does to me - then have a look at the stream above. Some quick background of who's left and who's playing who below the cut: people who've got family over for the weekend who inexplicably don't play games and are instead waiting for the VODs and killing people who spoil the winner for them (hello!), might want to avoid looking below.
Just in case you didn't know by now: League of Legends is a great game. In two short years, LoL's grown to be the leader of the free-to-play pack, and we can't get enough of it. But we've often wondered: just how MANY people like LoL as much as we do? It turns out that quite a few do. In fact, far more than a few. As LoL's first season is wrapped up, Riot released it's official batch of user statistics for their popular MOBA. Let's see how LoL stacks up against the competition, shall we?
I love e-sports. I mean, I really, really love e-sports. I love e-sports so much that when IMNestea played the then-named BoxeR in the Global StarCraft II League's season 2 final, I woke my girlfriend up at some unearthly hour in the morning and crowed at her about marine splitting until she had to physically leave the room. I've organised parties based solely around the activity of watching other people play games, many thousands of miles away. I say it here, on this wide internet, and I don't care who knows – I love e-sports.
But I didn't always love e-sports. If I went back in time to exactly one year ago, found myself, and said “YOU WILL LOVE E-SPORTS IN A YEAR'S TIME!”, year-younger me would've scoffed in my face. I've been aware of e-sports for as long as I've been a PC gamer: I lived through the false dawns of the early 21st Century, the Sujoy Roys and the Jonathan Wendels coming so close to pushing the activity of pro-gaming into the spotlight, then falling short at some intangible hurdle. Time and again I was promised the rise of Quake, or Counter-Strike, or some other competitive game in the televised market; time and time again they failed to ignite among the wider gaming community.
I could well have reacted like Kotaku's Jen Schiller did, when she repurposed an interview between Team Dignitas' David 'Zaccubus' Treacy, and top-end PC hardware types Alienware. Her post treats e-sports as weird and unnatural: a vestigial limb on the wider gaming animal that we'd all do better to hide under a coat. She makes her feelings about pro-gaming clear:
“Don't get me wrong, I love watching people who are better than me at video games play them for money, especially when I don't know those people.
Oh wait. No I don't.”
Jen penned another response, after seeing the reaction her original post dredged up from the e-sports community. Jen defends herself by claiming ignorance of the scene. A year ago, I could've claimed the same.
For the past week, the PC Gamer community focused their attention on playing League of Legends’ Tristana. We found camaraderie in the PC Gamer chatroom in LoL, with over fifty players at any given time meeting together and arranging teams for epic clashes. The only rule: someone on each team had to play Tristana. Readers and writers laid their best skills on the field of battle, and walked away with bitter shame or glorious honor. The conflicts ended in everything from narrow victories to complete crushings, but GG, they were fun!
We periodically host Call to Arms events that rally the entire PC Gamer community behind a single MOBA character for a full week of sweet, sweet gaming bliss. Our goal is to have fun and put our collective heads together to develop a community strategy guide for that particular character. This week, we're making it super accessible by choosing League of Legends' Tristana, who's free to play this week. Join us, and share in the glory by downloading League of Legend's client for free here.
Tristana – The Megling Gunner
Rocket-jumping is a time-honored, well-loved PC gaming tradition. For years, we've launched ourselves to the heavens with a fiery explosion and fired rockets mid-air at unsuspecting enemies during its sacred ritual. Enemies stand in awe as we rain death upon them from on high. Whether you mastered the skill in Quake or struggled with the timing as a Soldier in Team Fortress 2, now is your time to shine! Rocket-jumping isn't just for FPSes anymore--you can find that same addictive joy in League of Legends.
Update: Congrats to TSM for taking 3rd place! The Grand Finals between the European teams aAa (against All authority) and FnaticMSI are set to start at midnight in Sweden (3pm PST). Come back and watch the livestream with us on the site!
Consider this something of a public service announcement: if you're anywhere near a computer with internet access (likely, seeing as you're reading this), then you owe it to yourself to check out the livestream for the League of Legends DreamHack finals, which is currently (as of 10:45am PST) kicking off the match between aAa and Team SoloMid to determine who takes 3rd place and who'll be making it to the Grand Finals. With the pro-level shoutcasting and High Definition stream, this is one live event you shouldn't miss (even if you're at work—just tell your boss you have some important eSports matters to attend to). Check it out at Riot's Season One Championship site!
Prepare to be judged. Yesterday morning, Riot Games released the Tribunal--a peer-reviewing system that's supposed to help curtail bad behavior in their huge free-to-play MOBA. Our two resident LoL experts, Lucas and Josh, don their black robes and powdered wigs and jump into the judge's chair to test-drive the new system. Can we save the innocents of League of Legends from the hatred-spewing trolls? Can we discern misunderstandings from malice? Will our eyes ever recover from reading that much profanity in a single sitting? Read on for our harrowing tale (plus some ridiculous quotes from these people being banned).
If you frequent this site, then you’ve probably heard of Riot Games’ free-to-play MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena), League of Legends. You’ve probably also heard that it involves copious amounts of ganking, killing sprees, and people rage-typing in all caps. Maybe you even gave it a try, only to be discouraged by other players hating on you for being unfamiliar with every tiny facet of the game.
It can be a harsh community at times, but to be fair, one weak player on a team can make your chances of victory spiral downward in a hurry. Once you understand LoL, though, you’ll see why so many people are playing it: its addictive combat is some of the best around. I’ve put myself through the online grinder so that you don’t have to, and put together a dozen tips that will let you step into the arena with confidence and march onward to victory.
League of Legends fans know the cycle well: every two weeks, a new champion is released, kicking off a complex chain of events filled with various personalities. Most people are usually fairly excited (try to think back to the last time the servers weren't totally slammed on patch day—pretty much never). You've got the diehards, who make sure that they save up 6300 IP every 14 days to ensure that they can afford the new champ the exact second that they're released. You've also got the theorycrafters, who are already trying to figure out how overpowered the next champ can be and the best item/rune combinations to use with them.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, of course, you've got the haters. These are the guys that feel the need to troll every thread everytime a new champion is released, complaining that they want to play new maps. Or how they think the new champ will be OP. Or that not enough, or too many, female champions get released. Or that balance suffers as Riot adds more champions. Whatever camp you fall into, champion release days can be quite the polarizing experience. But what about the devs at Riot Games? What's their take on the champions that they've consistently released twice a month? We asked them, and they had some very interesting answers.
I can't help it—I love me some League of Legends, and it seems that I am not alone. Part of what makes Riot Games' MOBA so great is the variety of its characters, and how iconic they are—so iconic, in fact, that they've inspired heaps of fan art, most of which is (surprisingly) grade-A quality. Usually quickly lost on the LoL message boards among pages of complaints about Magma Chamber and other trolololing, I recently found two websites dedicated to collecting great LoL fan art. It was kind of like exploring a Pharaoh's tomb, albeit one filled with Teemo comics instead of preserved organs. I've put together some samples of the best artists and cartoonists out there, with links to archives of their LoL-inspired work.
Psssst. Hey! You, at the keyboard. You like League of Legends skins, don'tcha? Yeah you do. What, this patch didn't have enough? No worries, friend: I've got some secret skins right here. Take a peek at what lies in your future. I know what lies in mine: Easter Bunny Teemo. Whaddya say? Interested? [/end creepy alleyway salesman dialogue]
Good one Riot Games! You really got me with that prank—for a second there, I thought you'd actually confirmed plans to release of the Blind Monk, after years of denying he would ever be revived. Whazzat? It's not April Fools' Day? Then...it's true! Lee-Sin, better known to old-school League of Legends fans as the Blind Monk, is finally resurfacing after a two year hiatus. Come check out the classic champion's new moves, including a roundhouse kick that puts Chuck Norris to shame.
Riot revealed the official ability list and backstory for League of Legend's next champion, tree-wizard Moakai, who's slated to be released soon. Avid readers of our fine website won't find too many surprises--it's almost identical to the list that we announced last week in our massive preview of Maokai and Jarvan VI, which was based on our exclusive hands-on with the champion in December.
