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The Summoner's Guidebook: LoL melts special snowflakes
Never let it be said that I don't listen to feedback. Recently, one of you readers suggested that I write about following the metagame, and I thought, "Hey, why not?" This was largely spawned by the Penny Arcade comic suggesting that somehow, a player should pick the champion he wants without regard for what his team needs. Who actually believes that this is a good thing to do? League of Legends is a team game. Characters in LoL are designed with strengths and weaknesses. It is not only important but natural to pick characters that fit together. The natural evolution of this thought process is the metagame: a series of standard roles that characters can fill on a team. I've talked about meta before, and you guys seem to have differing opinions than I do. "Meta is for the sheep," you say. I don't think that picking the right man for the job makes you a sheep. I think of it more like running with the pack rather than being a lone wolf.
The Summoner's Guidebook: League of Legends' revamped 3v3 mode
I really liked playing on the Twisted Treeline prior to the recent revamp. It felt like Summoner's Rift lite: a way to practice the key SR skills in a gametype that didn't require quite as much map awareness. Now, League of Legends' 3v3 mode has taken on a different face, and it doesn't feel much like SR -- or any other map, for that matter. I didn't want to comment right away on the new direction for TT. The game mode is new, and the metagame is in its infant stages. People are trying new strategies and builds, and while initially strong tactics have already been discovered, there's no telling whether those tactics will last into the start of Season 3. Any competitive game has points in time when different things are overpowered, and as people discover new counters, the true metagame will start to surface. This week in the Summoner's Guidebook, we'll look at my first experiences in TT and what I think of the new mode. It's starkly different from the old version, and the strategies are not obvious. Is it as broken as the detractors say, or is the meta still coming together?
The Summoner's Guidebook: Is League of Legends' grind too much for a competitive game?
League of Legends has had one of the most meteoric ascensions of any current e-sport. From the first tournaments of season one to tomorrow's MLG Summer Arena, LoL has made a bigger splash in the e-sports community than any title launched since StarCraft II. However, the long grind to get to summoner level 30 poses a difficult barrier of entry for players looking to someday join the pros. It isn't necessary to grind levels to unlock +3 infantry weapons in StarCraft, so gating runes and masteries behind a grind seems a bit ridiculous. I've thought that the forced grind was excessive since I started playing LoL. I'm not opposed to having a grind at all, but I've always thought it was silly that levels and runes can't be purchased with real money. Are levels and grinds bad for a competitive game like League of Legends, or does the grind actually improve the quality of player skill at the higher levels?
Tilt to Live devs return to iOS with accessible turn-based strategy in Outwitters
One Man Left is the two-person studio behind the very popular 2010 iOS release Tilt to Live -- and that's all the two developers have ever released so far. Alex Okafor and Adam Stewart are finally ready, however, to show off their brand new title, and I got to play with it briefly last week at GDC. The game is called Outwitters, and it's a strong right turn from the arcade frenzy action of Tilt to Live. Instead of bullets flying everywhere, Outwitters is turn-based strategy that takes place on a board of hexagons, with three different factions battling it out over time. Players can play as the Scallywags, the Feedback, or the Adorables, and each faction has a number of different units (including one faction-only unit each -- the Feedback, for example, have a floating brain that can turn units against their team) to pit up against each other on the game's various battlefields. Turn-based strategy is often overly complex, but Outwitters smartly keeps things quick and relatively easy. You're given a number of resource points per turn, and you can use those points to move around, attack, or summon new units to the board every time your turn comes around. Those points can be saved up over time (so you can save up for a special unit), and there are also special spots on the board which will grant you more points as you hold them, so conquering parts of the map will help out a lot. The gameplay itself is sort of similar to Robot Entertainment's recent release Hero Academy, and yes, One Man Left did do a little bit of forehead-slapping when Hero Academy arrived right in the middle of development on Outwitters. But the game is definitely different enough: The boards are bigger, and there's a fog of war, which means there's no "undo" option. In Hero Academy, you can try as many turns as you like before registering your moves, but in Outwitters, it's think first and then move for good. I played a little bit of the pass and play mode, but there is an extensive online component, with unranked and fully ranked play across a number of different leagues. One Man Left has really gone the extra mile for online play, so there will likely be no shortage of competitors to match yourself up against. Just like Starcraft 2's league system, you can start in the Fluffy League, and rank your way all the way up to the Super Titan League, so if you're into the game, you can play Outwitters for a long, long time. The title will be free to download, and then (similar again to Hero Academy) players will be able to pick up packs of maps and extra teams for an extra fee, or be able to just buy the whole shebang in one go. Outwitters seems excellent, and of course we'd expect nothing less than the makers of Tilt to Live. Turn-based strategy probably wouldn't have been my first guess when thinking about a followup from these guys, but nevertheless, I'm looking forward to the game's release in a few months.
