backdooring
Latest
The Summoner's Guidebook: Time as a resource in Dominion
I feel that time is the least understood concept in all of gaming. People in World of Warcraft or other MMORPGs talk about how they "farmed something for free" all the time. Obviously, this is a fallacy, as a gamer's time is worth something. In League of Legends, time is a very important factor. I'm not talking about the time you have to play the game, although we could talk about it on a macro scale and do time-to-IP graphs for their silliness value. Instead, I'm talking about the actual time in-game that you spend accomplishing goals in a given match. In Summoner's Rift, the goal for the first 10 or 15 minutes is to get as much gold and XP as possible. If you can directly deny the enemy time by harassing him out of lane, you're taking away his time, which effectively takes away his gold and XP. As the game progresses, time is still traded for gold, but it's also traded for the other team's time (via teamfights). If your team manages to win a teamfight, the enemy cannot affect the battlefield and your team is free to take objectives. This week, we're going to talk about time in Dominion. While time is a fairly complicated thing in SR, it is even more complex in Dominion. There are many different things to do with it, and there are no easy decisions about how to spend it. If you're interested in learning more about how to better make those choices, read on!
The Summoner's Guidebook: The game without a meta
It should be no shocker that the Crystal Scar is my favorite League of Legends map. Dominion is a more frantic and dynamic gametype, and it rewards tactical, free-thinking play more than the Classic game mode. The Classic maps reward technical skill and strategic thinking, but they aren't my preferred battlefield. I know a lot of you dear readers feel the same way. Dominion is weird because it doesn't have a real, established metagame. Although cries of "4 top, 1 bottom" can be heard in virtually every match, they rarely hold up for more than a few minutes, and the four top players can be seen running backdoors, ganking bottom, or solo jungle roaming as the game progresses. This is my first attempt at a Dominion overview, but the honest truth is that even the hardcore analyst-types like yours truly struggle to define exactly what wins Dominion games. There's a lot of room for discussion on this one, so let's get started.
