League of legends

[Jennifer]

We already had a discussion about league but it was piggy backing a DOTA thread so I figured I'd make a fresh new one.

I know we've had a couple players in the past, but the short version is that league is one part RTS, one part RPG where you control a single character - or champion - in a team of four other people, fighting an enemy team of five others. The objective of the main game mode is to take a series of towers/turrets and push further and further into the enemy territory until you destroy their base, called the 'nexus'.

And repeat. What adds depth though is that there are over a hundred champions in the game, lending itself to an enormous range of potential match ups and team compositions; the map and the objectives stay the same, but no two games will be quite alike thanks to the huge number of characters available.

'Tis free to play and though you don't start with every character unlocked, you can build up to getting them with the ingame currency which you get just from playing. You CAN throw money at it if you are impatient, but there's no obligations to, and no champions are inherently designed to be 'better' than others, so it's not a matter of starting out with rubbish beginner characters and getting stomped by people who have the shiny 'better' ones. Theoretically every character is equal, although a few are considered stronger or weaker than others at any given time thanks to balancing and the metagame.

So yeah. I play on the NA server and a little bit on EUW (though not nearly as much, cause NA is where my friends play). I'm currently gold rank in the league system. It's not a bad time to start following the game because it's the middle of the world championships, which is increasingly become a pretty huge thing; it's been gaining the attention of some major sponsors lately and in terms of online sports League's approaching the top of the mountain right now.

Anyone else?

[Kirk]

My students play it constantly. Some even missed my exam because they were on it. It's a dangerous game to start playing if you ever want to see sunlight again.

[Stoner]

I play on and off.  Mostly just ARAM or bot games with new champs since I'm pretty dismal at it lol.  If I had to rank myself I'd say Wood 5.

[Black Death]

I play it when it first started ... was never good at it ... but it was fun

[Kirk]

One of my friends at Uni was obsessed with Dota, so I played that a fair bit. I was shit.

[Jennifer]

I do think one thing there is for the game is that it can have a really weird difficulty curve because of the size of the playerbase, especially when you're first starting out and a solid chunk of players you run across are actually people playing on low level accounts who are very experienced with the game. It is a hell of a timesink though, I'm not sure I want to guess how much time I've spent playing it in the year and a half or so since I picked it up, lol.

[! JDM The Professional !]

Like you Jen, I've put way too much time into LoL. Brilliant game that no matter how long you've been playing (I started playing DotA 9 years ago and was an original beta LoL player) you've always got more to learn.

I am taking a long Break atm as I need to have a life.. lol

[Jennifer]

Been a long time, but I figured I'd rez this because the world championship final for league is in the next couple weeks and I'm pretty hyped up for it. I dunno if anyone else finds watching esports interesting, but there has been a lot of excitement on my end, especially watching the team I support make it to semis.

[Black Death]

well esports does have some appeal , especially if it game that you play , because you feel it something that you can do also.  very interesting entertainment

[J-Reb]

Reviving this thread. I finally took the leap after being utterly bored with any and every other MMORPG. I tried resubbing WOW a few weeks ago and it was just blah. Couldn't do it.

I've played 7-8 games now of LOL and have enjoyed it quite a bit. The PVP without having to grind as much truly makes this a much more enjoyable experience than any other game out there and, well, it's free - can't beat that! Anybody else playing?