League of Legends

I did not play DotA, but now I wish I had... I'm hooked on this style of gaming.

League of Legends is a free to play Defense of the Ancients kind of game. No ads, and you can unlock all gameplay related stuff through playing too, or buy it.

For those that don't know DOTA, the style is like... It's hard to explain without playing it or watching someone play it but I'll try my best here... Warcraft 3 Hero Class gameplay (you only control 1 character) in team PvP Base vs. Base.

You can sign up for the game here.

In any case, anyone else play this game? I'm pretty darn hooked. Metal Butter from Korea actually turned me onto this game saying that pretty much all of his VF friends in Korea are hooked on this game now. They're not related, but that's what he said lol. He's also a fellow Monster Hunter ^_^

Here's Game Trailer's Video Review.

 

Yesterday, the WCG North American Finals for League of Legends took place. The first match was quite exciting while the second match was at least pretty unique for high level play.

The commentary of the matches was done by Riot employee (and former Warcraft 3 tournament player) Phreak. He does a great job following what's going on and explaining it very well for viewers and giving insight into the characters used (or banned during the drafting process).

Here are links for anyone to watch the Finals (I especially recommend the first part):

North American Championships - Part 1
North American Championships - Part 2

The Ring of Champions: Road to LA (Southeast Asian Championships)
Southeast Asia is holding a big tournament, with great television style coverage, to determine the Southeast Asian representative at WCG next month.

You can follow the coverage (which starts soon) at the following link:
Ring of Champions: Road to Los Angeles

Enjoy!

-Chanchai

(And yes, I'm still damn hooked on this game! And I do think it has a lot to offer fighting game players ^_^)

 

(Did the edit button disappear?)

Followup to the WCG North American Finals...

Dan Dinh from Epik woke up the next morning and gave an account of the Finals ^_^

The WCG Experience - LoL

 

I'm pretty excited about the WCG Grand Finals!

It will be interesting to see how it plays out as so many things are unknown and each team seems to have their own story. I'll probably be posting (and maybe reposting older) links to various sources of information and commentary.

For today, I'll post something that was a pleasant surprise for me today and is probably the most mysterious of the teams competing in the tournament:

There are finally known links to the Chinese WCG Qualifier Tournament!

A lot of people in the West haven't seen how the Chinese are playing their LoL much (though I'm sure the videos are out there). But when you have a big tournament with a lot of promotion going on, you hope you'll see the top teams compete there. So here are videos from the Chinese Qualifiers:

Day 2 Matches
Day 3 Matches
Day 4 Matches

Source (Thanks Taygeta for posting these)

And here is a link to written coverage of the whole event:

Official Wrapup of the Chinese Qualifiers.

You have to love the official chinese site for lol: LoL dot QQ dot Com How much jargon do you want to put into a URL?

DO NOT FORGET: If you use the Google Chrome browser, you can have it translate the Chinese text to English text for you!

Weird News: Apparently both the European and the Chinese teams have had to sub-in a couple of players because of Visa problems. This has happened in international gaming competition before, so it's not completely rare or unusual. Though it is unfortunate...

 

WCG International has begun!

Today the teams are playing round robin which will determine the seeding for the elimination bracket. And Riot's LoL Page is providing streams!

Official League of Legends WCG Page
As of this writing, CLG (North America) has won their game against Another Story (Southeast Asia). China Hero (China) takes their first win by defeating Team SK (Europe).

It's also worth checking out the League of Legends Community - WCG 2010 Boards. You'll get a lot of discussion and updates live here.

Again, this is only the Round Robin stage and teams are developing their strategies for the finals tomorrow.

Runeterra has some coverage and updates of what's going on via the following links:
Discussion and Detailed Coverage via Forums
Twitter
Runeterra's WCG Starting Point (where you can find the above links)

Things are pretty interesting so far, though I hope someone is recording all of these matches for later viewing. Next two matches will be up at Noon Pacific Time!

-Chanchai

 

The World Cybergames Finals are still going and it's been awesome!

Europe dominated the first match (with Twisted Fate), but North America (with a strong early game and awesome Anivia play by JiJi) evens the score by dominating the second match!

Third and final match is about to begin. You can watch it at the WCG site or at http://www.leagueoflegends.com/wcg2010/

GREAT FINAL MATCH FOR THE WORLD CYBER GAMES CHAMPIONSHIP!

 

Chanchai whats your username on LoL?
I missed the finals do you know where I can watch?

 

I've spent a good amount of money and time into this game. It's a great game but the one problem with it is that it's a team based game.

I actually consider myself pretty skilled in this game (spent a lot of time). The truth is that no matter how good YOU are, you still need reliable teammates. This goes with almost any team based game though, so that's the one thing I still love about fighters.

The ability to not have to rely on anyone else but yourself.

 

Yep, same reason I'm not too hot on team games.

If you succeed, its a team effort, if the team fails, the fault is usually at one player. Personally I dont like that.

 

Yeah I know. Dota types are always like that. Glory do you want to play together sometime?

Or any vfdc members?

 

Here are videos of the WCG International Grand Finals:

North America (CLG) vs. Europe (I Wear Capes IRL) - Game 1
North America (CLG) vs. Europe (I Wear Capes IRL) - Game 2
North America (CLG) vs. Europe (I Wear Capes IRL) - Game 3

Note: The reason the quality of the video isn't good is because WCG chose to stream the events in low quality (and their High Quality wasn't so high quality despite people having to pay for the feed). The rest of the tournament that was streamed (Round Robin matches and Semifinals) were of much higher quality because Riot Games used Own3d on those matches and posted to the CL Gaming channel there. The finals stream was WCG's territory...

 

I will create a VFDC Room in the game.

1) The chatroom interface is located at the bottom left, under your buddy list.

2) Act like you are creating a new room called "VFDC"

3) Once you are in the room, click on the settings button on the upper right corner and set it to AutoJoin.

Though we might have a slow start, I'll always keep that room open (well, I'll always autojoin it when I logon).

There is also an "SRK" room that I created and is still relatively active. Not too many people there, but sometimes it grows and I'll always have it going.

My username is "Chanchai" ^_^

I won't be able to play much this week and I'm still only summoner level 18 (I really don't get much time to play the game but I squeeze it in as much as possible).

Looking forward to seeing you guys on LoL!

 

Definitely know what you guys mean, but...

I really love this game, but yeah, it's a team game and anyone who has played it long enough can totally understand where you're coming from and some of the frustrations that happen in this sort of game where teamwork is huge.

In my experience, which is limited to leveling so let's call it Low-Mid level on solo queue... One bad team member doesn't usually ruin the game unless you're fighting a premade (in which case you were likely to lose if they were good).

That said, this game requires teamwork but in the solo queue I've found that 3 is the magic number in most (not all) cases. If there are 3 decent or good players who are working as a team whether it is communication or teamfights or coordinating a backdoor--then the probability of winning seems pretty good.

For a few weeks now I've pushed myself to play tank (mainly Shen) and it's paid off well in terms of my development in the game, but it's a harsh experience in solo queue because a tank on a team with no teamwork is likely to feed if he's really trying to do his job or die trying to save someone. Also, tanks are measured mainly by assists if you were to measure by stats, but all measures of a tank really depends on the team itself. If the team sucks, a tank can play great but he's not gonna get the kills and there is only so long a tank can crowd control and usually that CC is limited to a single target.

So playing as a Tank is a thankless experience when looking at a lot of random people you queue up with. Even when your team wins, some people think you fed because as a tank you held the enemy's attention while your team got the kills--and you might've died along the way (especially if your team cannot focus fire). But it's certainly been rewarding as a growth experience and thank goodness I still have a positive win/loss despite always solo queueing by myself while leveling. I'm happy playing tank and I won't call myself a great player, but I am loving it ^_^

Because I am still leveling, I am able to always tell myself that winning itself isn't the goal (it would be if I was playing ranked or in a tournament), just learning and improving is great and I'm having a blast with it. And I have met friends in the game, and have brought outside friends into the game.

Even in bad games, there are ways to work on your game, so I'm really enjoying it and remind myself of that all the time. However, I certainly have gotten upset a couple of times when paired with a loud jerk... but in those very rare moments, I'm happy they have /ignore (player name). It's helped and I've still had wins even in those matches.

It is a team game, but I like how turnarounds can happen in this game. Let's assume none of us are High-ELO ranked players here and say that in general (and outside the High-ELO), you can turn a match around even if you lose the opening and the midgame. It's something I love about LoL and from what I've heard, something that is a bit different from DOTA or HON...

Those games seem to have a crazy snowball effect from what i've heard and a good carry in those games almost wins it completely for the team. In LoL, a team at a disadvantage, if they can come to work together even when their base is being taken apart, can usually recover in items and ultimately at catching up to level cap (18) to even things out and fight it back. If your team has a champion that can backdoor, they can at least break an enemy inhibitor with one or two sneaky heroes while they are pressing hard on the base and force the other team to either go back on defense or start to lose a chunk of their base from within.

I've also lost games where my team had ridiculous kills and better combat skills than the other team. And I've won games where we were being more or less "outplayed" by a strong premade, and despite my team being randomly made in solo queue, 3 of us were able to coordinate a backdoor rush that got us to win 3 seconds shy of their victory. Crazy stuff.

Anyways, LOVE THIS GAME!

And it would be awesome to eventually have Team VFDC!

-Chanchai

 

On the LoL threads at SRK that I participate in I tend to throw up helpful (I hope) links and occasional tips. So I'll probably toss them up here since I know there are players that don't post, but do play LoL. And I really like today's Tip of the Day ^_^

Tip of the Day:

Watch Tree Eskimo's Livestream.

I think this is a great Livestream for most LoL players because Tree Eskimo is great at commentating his own games as he is playing them. He lets you know what he is thinking and how he is assessing the games and his understanding of the game seems quite good. This doesn't make him the best player or even the best teacher of LoL, but he really is providing a superb resource. Definitely worth watching for most players--Highly Recommended!

Note: LoLBase isn't perfect, but here are the stats that are available for TreeEskimo. At the very least, it shows he is generally a high-ELO player.

 

I added you my nick is Blatant.

 

AWESOME NEWS!

League of Legends won 5 awards at GDC Online (aka GDC Austin) this year!

In celebration, Riot Games is celebrating with two great perks this weekend!

1) As promised to players, for winning the coveted Audience Award (getting the most votes from players), every account will get 4 Win IP Boosts for free.

2) Because LoL won so many awards (the other 4 voted by the developer community), ALL CHAMPIONS WILL BE FREE TO PLAY THIS WEEKEND!

Hopefully the servers will be able to handle the traffic this weekend. Wonderful news ^_^

Source: GDC Online Awards 2010 - Gamasutra coverage

Awards:

Best Online Technology
League of Legends
Riot Games

Best Online Visual Arts
League of Legends
Riot Games

Best Online Game Design
League of Legends
Riot Games

Audience Award
League of Legends
Riot Games

Best New Online Game
League of Legends
Riot Games

-Chanchai

 

I'm all about getting team VFDC together.

Nammy and I play this all the time. We are stuck in solo queue hell though

I'll add you Chanchai, my summoner name is Super.

 

I used to play this a lot as well. But I wouldn't mind teaming up with some VFDC people.

 

I'm surprised this has so few replies and it's such an old thread!
I used to play a lot in 2011 and a bit 2012.Now I can't play that much because my laptop overheats when running it and shuts down in the middle of the game.But boy do I miss playing it!

I have one account on EU west,lvl30 and one in EU north-east,but not above lvl20 because it isn't my main.I wonder if I can make one in NA too...