The League of Legends Journal: Day 1
Yesterday I wrote a post for a different site announcing that a game called League of Legends just revealed that they had 15 million registered users. Seeing as how that’s more than World of Warcraft, it kind of stopped me in my tracks.
I’d heard of it in passing, especially recently when over a million people tuned in online to watch the season one final, and from all these massive numbers pouring in, there has to be something to it.
I’m all for broadening my horizons, so I thought I’d just dive in and try it out for myself. My decision, and likely that of many, many others, was aided by the fact that the game is free to play. We hear that buzzword thrown around a lot lately, but what it really means is this. The game is free to download, playing is free, but if you want, you can buy items in the game to upgrade your character or advance their level more quickly.
What this means for LoL (hilarious acronym, I know) is that you can level up the old fashioned way, by playing, or just shell out actual cash to move things along more quickly. This doesn’t affect gameplay, because even if you buy all the best items in the game, you might advance to higher levels, but you still need actual skill to be good at the game, and lots of it. From what I can tell, almost every helpful item can also be unlocked with hard work and regular XP. The only things that can’t are cosmetic items like different costumes for your characters, which doesn’t actually affect gameplay at all.
Sometimes it can be hard to tell what the f*ck is going on.
When the PR department at Riot found out I had taken an interest in the game, they graciously offered to give me some from “Riot Points” which is the type of currency you buy with real life money. I checked my account and found 15,000 points sitting there, and when I checked the legend, I saw that was the equivalent of over 100 real life dollars. Wow.
But honest citizen that I am, I’m not going to buy a million upgrades for my character to give him a head start. I’m going to do things the old fashioned way, from the bottom up, and perhaps I’ll splurge on a costume change or two when I feel like it later on. Much thanks to Riot for the generous donation though.
The game itself is best described as an action RTS. Now I thought I was familiar with RTS games, as I’ve been playing Age of Empires, Command and Conquer and Starcraft for years, but that experience really didn’t really translate at all to this game. It’s like World of Warcraft meets tower defense, and it’s been a bit tricky to get a hold of, but I think I’m starting to get used to it.
Ahhh, home base. Nice and life refilling.
There are two sides full of heroes, characters you choose that each have their own unique set of powers and abilities. My favorite part of the game so far is just how many unique heroes there are. I believe the total is over 75 now, with more being added every so often. Clearly this is not Diablo or Warcraft, and there are a million different ways to play the game. Each character has a brilliantly crafted set of portraits and their own unique backstory, though the plot is best read online, as you won’t see much of it in the game itself.
In contrast to the tons of playable characters, from what I can tell, there are only two maps, 3v3 and a 5v5 variants, which seems strange for a game that prides itself on diversity of choice when it comes to heroes. Each map gives each team a base, and several paths to their other team’s base with defensive turrets lining the way. Both sides routinely spawn minions which fight the other team and are crucial in securing victory. The goal is to work your way through your opponents defensive towers and kill their main base. Sounds easy enough, but the game is like tug of war, with tons of fighting often yielding little result or movement. The average length of each of my 5v5 games has been about 40 minutes, except for the one time I accidentally bumped up the difficulty to intermediate, and got crushed by a bunch of computers in about 20 minutes.
At first the game was really frustrating. I was so close to killing other heroes or towers but I died at the last second every time. Progress takes a LONG time, and there’s a level of strategy that clearly most new players, myself included, don’t grasp which makes everything harder. I was shocked when it took me about 45 minutes to even beat the TUTORIAL battle, and it’s not exactly rolling out the welcome mat for new players.
A snow level? Where the hell is this?
What’s become clear is that the game requires a huge amount of skill. This isn’t tower defense where you buy some turrets and sit back and hope your strategy works. This is closer to something like Diablo or Warcraft where battles are heated and one wrong click can have you dead in a few seconds. You have to be a master of “micro,” individual unit control using hotkeys for spells and abilities. “Macro” is less of a concern, as you accumulate gold through time and kills, but it’s more of an afterthought than your primary concern.
I’ve gone through a few different characters so far, a heavy handed brawler, an icy archer and a winged armored she-angle who I picked because she looked so cool. What I’ve found is that you’re going to have to play around a LOT to find the right hero (or heroes) for you, and so far from what I can tell, melee is the most annoying class as it thrusts you into the action, often ahead of your protective minions, and into danger that can wipe you out in a matter of seconds. A far more appealing prospect is to snipe from afar as a ranged attacker and let other heroes or minions do the gritty work for you. Also, slowing spells are a must or your enemies will simply run away from when their health is low and you’ll never kill them.
The leveling system caught me a bit off guard as I figured you would upgrade each character individually rather than your profile as a whole. You level up each hero during each match, and upgrade your powers and equipment as you do so, but this is all temporary and you start over after each match. The only thing you retain is a skill matrix that offers little bumps to things like mana, health, damage or armor and applies to ANY character you choose. It lets you experiment more yes, but you also feel a bit less attached to whatever character you end up with for a given match. It’s like being able to switch classes in World of Warcraft at any given time and have your level transfer too. Useful yes, but very different from typical RPGs.
The universal skill tree.
I’m having a halfway decent fun with the game after an initial period of frustration. I’m branching out to more and more characters and learning about things as I go. I’m going to play a bunch more and perhaps write a follow-up post in a week or so and assess whether this game is a mere distraction or something you could really get into.
Play it for yourself here at LeagueofLegends.com.
The main rule for playing LoL is to know what map awareness is. If someone from your lane on the other team goes missing, be sure to call that out in chat. Ashe (the ice-ranger) is a perfect character for new people to play.
It sounds like you have been lucky and have not played with or against many rage filled people yet. Games that follow the DotA (Defense of the Ancients, warcaft 3 mod) tend to develop really nasty communities that become incredibly angry if something goes wrong in the game. LoL is no exception though between my time with it and another DotA based game (Heroes of Newerth), the LoL community was a little nicer.
With regards to buying things, the game has two currencies. One is always gained by playing and the other is what Paul got free. The ingame currency is actually used to buy things for the meta-game. The real money currency can be used to buy boosts to how much ingame currency you get or skins for champions. Each week the free champions rotate to keep the games fresh
I’m a big fan of the game myself. I didn’t realize it got THAT big, let alone in such a short span of time. It takes time to learn everything and the first few levels are rough since they can tend to have “Smurf” accounts made by better players showing up and just wrecking new players.
Once you get a feel for the carries/mages then you can start to have a lot of fun.
Ashe, Ryze, Annie, and Tristana are good champs to learn starting out. Not too hard to get decent with, and tend to be a lot of fun to play. Not to say you can’t play other champs, but they’re able to stay a bit out of a fight and still hurt a ton.
I say this with all deserved respect… WORST GAME EVER.
Sure maybe it’s slightly fun if you like playing a game where you click fiercely at a screen and feel you have no actual control of any player you’re attempting to control. Also if you like playing a game that emulates another game that was made over 7 years ago. Or maybe if you enjoy playing games that have you bypass progress and achievement as long as you pony up some credit card cash for whatever armor and other bologna you need.
Forget this lengthy breakdown of a complicated game I care nothing about. Is that the Violator from Spawn on the right of the header image? I smell infringement.
Welcome to the party Paul! I would say based upon this article that you are having a fairly typical introductory experience to LoL. Your comparison of LoL to Diablo I think is pretty accurate, and typically I describe the game to others as a 45 minute competitive game of Diablo. Keep with it and you’ll start to get the finer points. Some very basic pointers to offer:
1) When you are in your lane always let your minions go first, and then follow them in. The single most important function of the minions are to act as your protection against the other team’s minions, and to a lesser extent enemy champions. Further more, when attacking any enemy tower never go in on a tower without a squad of minions with you. The towers will always target minions first, and will continue to shoot at the minions until they are ether all dead or you damage an enemy champion. When you’re attacking a tower be sure that you pay attention to the remaining life of your minions and start to run away when you have only 1 minion left, unless the tower is really weak.
2) Buying potions at the beginning of the game can be helpful, but understand their behaviour. Mana and health potions will not usually save your life in the midst of a fire fight since they refill you slowly over time. Their intention is to allow you to stay in lane longer before you have to return to base, not to save you in a pinch.
3) Fight with a tower at your back whenever possible.
4) Don’t let the bastards get you down. For the most part, people I’ve played with have been nice. However, there are quite a few idiots out there too. Don’t put much stock in what they say.
Well those are some basics.
My two favourite things about the internet have just become one…LoL and unreality. Just a heads up though, this game is ruthless when it comes to new players. Flaming is often an issue, but once you get into the game i find it very hard to stop playing.
@JZ – yeah that was my first impression too. looks like a blue violator. maybe mcfarlane or capullo had something to do with the art for the game..? i know capullo did some art for blizz a few years back.
When I started playing I found it very useful to research guides on how to play characters. There are 2 main websites for them at the moment being:
http://www.leaguecraft.com
http://www.mobafire.com
Having a look at how other people successfully play champions can make playing them yourself a whole lot easier.
On a side note, this genre of games are refered to as MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena).
@truant & JZ – That’s Cho Garth. He’s a pretty bad a$$ tank character. He eats people, and when he does he gains HP and also increases in size. When he’s fully grown he’s monstrous in size on screen. A lot of fun to play. He’s also darn stylish looking in a top hat and tails.
clearly my friend you have never played DOTA before.
Please, oh please try Heroes of Newerth. Its like LOL, but better, more mature and more akin to DOTA.
Hey Paul, long time LoL player here. What’s your username? I’ll add you and we can play together, I’ll help you out.
And by the way, HoN is FAR harder to learn than LoL is.
There’s a warning that every blogger should know before commenting on LoL.
Warning: The comments section will turn into a HoN vs. LoL shitfest.
If they gave you 15k riot points, don’t feel bad about using them. League of Legends is probably the only game out where you cannot buy power. You can buy XP/IP Boost (2x rewards after a match) and you can unlock your characters sooner (or skins) but none of this would actually make the game easier. You can just buy a few quick heros and enjoy yourself
“Clearly this is not Diablo or Warcraft” Nope, this is DoTA… and an easier version of it to be honest…
Buy wards paul.
BUY WARDS!
People say easier like it’s a bad thing…
1. Last hit every minion you can.
2. Use /ignore command for more pleasant gaming experience.