League of Legends

In the latest issue of PC Gamer, this game got the 'best free to play game of the year' for 2010. So I decided to give it a go, and it does deliver as advertised.

A detailed description:

It is indeed an action/RPG game in the 3rd person. You, the 'summoner' engage in a contest, either a 3x3 or 5x5 match, and choose a 'champion' that you will control in the game. The game itself is based on a map with 'lanes' which are paths to the enemy base. The victory condition of the match is to destroy the enemy 'nexus' which is a structure in their base. Your own base will periodically produce monsters as well that are not controllable and will automatically attack the enemy monsters and structures.

As your champion kills enemy monsters, they gain gold and exp. Each champion has 5 skills. 1 passive skill, and 4 that you can improve as your champion goes up in level. 1 of the 4 skills is a overpower type of skill with a much longer cooldown time due to its power. There are about 68 champions in the game to choose from, and are unlockable via IP (explained below) or rage points (which is what you buy with real currency - explained below). There are always 10 randomnly selected heros 'unlocked' for free players every month or so. If you have no unlocked champions these are the ones you have available to you.

In addition to those, there are also 2 spells from a pool of 12 or so that the summoner chooses at the start of a match. These can range from an enemy debuff, to a self-speed buff, AoE heal spell, or an instant revive if you get ganked.

The gold you gather is spent at your base at the equipment manager. Your champion has 6 slots for equipment that will give various buffs and abilities to your character. The better/stronger items need to be 'constructed' by buying certain smaller items which combine into the better one. All buffs stack except for unique abilities.

Further improvements are made via a generic summoner skill tree that appears rather WoW-ish in nature, and is divided up into attack, defense, and support. Your summoner goes up in levels as well by getting exp from battles, and you get 1 skill point to add to this tree as you level.

The game also implements a glyph system for further character tailoring. As you fight, you gain a form of currency called IP, which can be spent in the online store for glyphs. These add minor and stackable buffs to any champion you control in a fight. They can add crit percentage, extra armor, extra armor pen, etc. You get an extra slot for every level your summoner gets.

The online store uses either rage points, which is what you buy with your real cash, or the already mentioned IP points, which you earn by playing matches. I didnt see anything in the store which you couldnt buy with both.

It is a fairly steep learning curve as there are a lot of options and things to consider. Also, finding a champion that meets your playstyle could take a bit as well. As a newbie, I played roughly 10 games or so last night and won between a third and half of them. Several of the losses were simply because someone on your team disconnected and you were left shorthanded. But thats always a potential pitfall in any team oriented PvP type of game. Overall, I found the graphics, pace, play-style and complexity of the game enjoyable. I will give this a go for awhile and see where it takes me.

 

The real-money points are called riot points. The biggest difference between RP and IP is that additional skins (which are purely cosmetic) and the champion packs can only be bought with RP, while additional runes can only be bought with IP. Everything else can be purchased with either.

And yes, the learning curve is a bit steep, but that's common of all DotA-likes. LoL is comparatively easy.

Also, a tip for newer players: Don't bother with Tier 2 runes, they are way to expensive for what they do. Stick with Tier 1 runes (they are dirt cheap, no reason not to have them), until you can buy Tier 3 runes.

 

The learning curve is not steep after about 2 weeks of 2-3 games a day play, learning the 5v5 map, tower range, nuisances of aggro, and learning about buffs/drag/baron. I didn't play any moba games before LoL, and in about 3 months I was probably around a 1200 player, which is considered average. I'm not that good of a video game player, only really playing Pokemon games/civ/misc games before this. The closest thing I player before LoL to it was CoD probablyD). There are some champs(Anivia, Ez for example) whose skillcap is quite high, but some champs are very simple to learn and play(Sivir, Ashe, Annie to name a few). LoL is by far the easiest dota spinoff I can think off, because of its relative lack of skillshots. Wanna learn a dota game? Play LoL imo before switching to another one.

Now if my internet would stop being so bad I could actually climb elo in ranked. I think I'm about a 1400-1500 ELO player after around 6 months.

+1

 

Actually, on the forums, I read a couple posts which said dont even bother with runes/glyphs/etc. until tier 3, and to just save your IP until then.

Good adive maybe based on the above?

@cull. Do you not get ELO in normal games?

 

I played without runes until level 20 with no problems (without having had any experience with Mobas before). Spending the IP on champions is a lot more fun, and helps you get better faster.

Normal games do have an ELO system, but your ELO is not revealed to you.

 

You can skip T1 runes if you want to, it doesn't make that much of a difference either way. T1 runes are ridiculously cheap though, and provide around ~40% of the effect of a T3 rune I think, so they aren't a bad deal. I picked up T1 runes to fill out 2 all-round pages before level 20, and only after that started to invest heavily in runes.

 

t1 runes aren't really that good tbh. You don't really feel runes until lvl 20, where you hit your second quint. Before apen/mp5 got a hard nerf, it was probably worthwhile to buy ip for t1 runes until lvl 25 to get a little advantage if you're the type of person to only want to play 10 champs or at the beginning. Now, I would only do so if you're hardcore play 1 champ, but get best rune page for that champ that you can. If you just wanna have fun, I would probably skip t1 runes.

IIRC, t1 runes are 60% of t3, but like 10% of the cost.

Normal games have ELO, but you have no clue what your ELO is. You could guess. I'm like 320-240 or so, including my leaves due to real bad internet, so around 1600-1700, maybe 1800, especially since I've only pulled ahead in w:l recently(last month or so)

 

Bumping...

Been playing this game for about a month now... It's actually quite noob friendly (although I tend to find most games easy to pick up these days, so my view might not be representative.) It's a lot of fun, that's for sure. If anyone wants to play with me on the Euro servers, add CunningTF

 

Bumping. If anyone is interested, NESL games are currently being streamed. http://www.own3d.tv/live/17484/National_ESL_League_of_Legends

Commentary by ColbyCheeze and Grackis (who is a surprisingly good caster). I'm posting this here because the NESL streams really aren't getting enough attention as it is.

 

Yeah, I found Grackis commentary to actually not that bad considering his stream.

 

I used to play a lot of LoL, but gave it up because I got tired of the constant badmouthing by idiots. I played a lot of tanks/semi-tank characters(Alistair, malphite, Blitz, Poppy, Nasus, Cho'gath, Gragas) and was pretty good with most of them(I also liked to play Kog'maw and Zilean). The problem was that everything is always the tanks fault, even when it's not. I got tired of dps characters taking all last hits from creeps, so when the end game hit I usually lacked my core items to do my job properly and was basically a oneshot kill for the opposing team. If I'm not having fun when playing with the characters I like then what's the point?

Don't get me wrong, I still like the game and think it's great, but as it is in many online games some of the players make it worse than it is.

 

IMO only way to play this game is in a premade group or duoing.