league-of-legends
Latest
League of Legends rewards positive behavior
Just how toxic is League of Legends' community? According to Riot Games, it may not be as bad as it once was. The team posted a letter praising "positive behavior" in the community, saying that 95% of players have never received punishment. Furthermore, only 1% of the crowd have caused issues that resulted in lengthy bans or chat restrictions. Riot says that it is trying out new ideas to further combat bad behavior: "We've recently been focused on addressing extreme cases of verbal toxicity, and will soon be testing additional systems that address gameplay toxicity like leavers, AFKs, and intentional feeders." To players who haven't received any punishments in the 2014 season, Riot will be granting four-win IP boosts next week.
League of Legends spotlights Kalista, the Spear of Vengeance
Yesterday, Riot Games formally unveiled the long-rumored Kalista, the Spear of Vengeance, a new champion coming to MOBA League of Legends. Says the studio, Kalista is a marksman who cooperates with her Soul-Bound to deal substantial sustained damage, access her full repertoire of abilities and wither her enemies under her relentless assault. Kalista’s potential is unlocked by solid communication and cooperation with allies rather than raw mechanical skill. While still capable in her own right, Kalista misses out on Soul-Marked's bonus damage and effective use of her ult without direct cooperation from her ally. Riot has a brief unembeddable spotlight clip on the official site; we've included a longer one from YouTuber SkinSpotlights below.
Professional League of Legends streamer makes over $817,000 a year
If you ever tried to make the argument to your parents or loved one that you could be earning a living from doing nothing but playing video games, now you have some solid ammunition to back up your case. OnGamers translated an article that discusses how several professional Chinese League of Legends players are making six-digit salaries a year from streaming. One such player is 22-year-old Wei Han-Dong, who "retired" from playing professionally in order to sign a contract to stream 90 hours of matches a month for $817,863 a year. He maintains that streaming is less stressful than entering in tournaments, in which he was part of a world championship team in 2012. The lengthy article discusses how competitive and costly the world of professional esports and streaming has become, how managers are paying large chunks of money to sign players, and how the industry is rife with negativity and instability.
League of Legends poised to generate $1 billion in annual revenue
Few things mystify me more than League of Legends. I just don't get MOBAs in general and Riot's juggernaut in particular. Judging by a new report from SuperData Research, though, I'm fairly alone in that assessment as the title is poised to break the $1 billion annual revenue barrier. According to SuperData, LoL generated $946 million via in-game spending between January and September of 2014 and, get this, it makes more money than World of Tanks, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, and Hearthstone combined.
League of Legends tops MMO revenue list, Hearthstone No. 10
MMO games, including MOBAs, compose 21 percent of the worldwide digital game market and are on track to generate $11 billion in revenue this year alone, SuperData Research reports. By 2017, that number is expected to rise to $13 billion. In 2014, the No. 1 MMO in terms of revenue is League of Legends, which has so far generated $946 million, beating out subscription games such as World of Warcraft, which is No. 4 on the list with $728 million. World of Tanks comes in at No. 5 and represents the largest revenue gap on the graph at $369 million. Dota 2 is No. 9 with $136 million, and Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is No. 10 with $114 million. See the full graph below.
Samsung White wins League 2014 World Championship
Korean pro-gaming team Samsung Galaxy White has taken home the championship title and $1 million prize from the 2014 League of Legends World Championship, developer Riot Games announced today. The team went 3-1 against Chinese team Star Horn Royal Club, dominating their rivals in the first two matches, faltering on the third, and finally sealing the tournament on the fourth. Samsung White's Mata, who functions as the team's support role, won the title of 2014 World Championship MVP, finishing the tournament with 18 kills, 27 deaths and 253 assists. Samsung White lost only two games throughout the entire 2014 tournament, one less than 2013 champions SK Telecom T1. This is the second year in a row that Star Horn Royal Club has taken runner-up. Last year's World Championship totaled 32 million viewers, the highest number in eSports recorded history. Riot has not yet released the numbers for the 2014 World Championship. [Image: Riot Games]
Riot tweaking LoL's refer-a-friend to combat account sellers
If you've been using Riot's refer-a-friend program to bot, commit fraud, or otherwise misbehave in and around League of Legends, your time's almost up. The company has announced changes to the program in order to prevent would-be sellers from loading up accounts with skins and currency. The new RAF update will reward players with 1000 IP for each referred friend who reaches level 10. You can refer a total of five people, and three referrals nets you the Grey Warlock skin while five grants you Medieval Twitch. Full details are available via Riot's blog post.
EVE Evolved: Fixing EVE's player activity
It's been a sort of running gag in EVE Online throughout the years that players spend inordinate amounts of time docked in stations and spinning their ships around in the hangar, but this is oddly close to the truth. Those of us who have been hooked to EVE for years know just how intense the game can get at its most frantic and how incredible it is to be present for historic events and important PvP battles, but those moments are rare, and there's typically a lot of downtime between periods of activity. For every PvP battle fought, incursion fleet formed or wormhole op organised, players often have to spend hours in stations or in space amusing themselves or doing busywork. With gamers now spreading their increasingly limited free time across a growing catalogue of online games, some EVE players log in for only a few minutes per day to queue skills, chat with corpmates, and see if anything interesting is happening. The recent announcement that the upcoming Phoebe release will contain infinite length skill queues has some players concerned that people will lose the motivation to pop their heads into New Eden each day and see what's going on. Since the best sandbox gameplay is emergent in nature, just getting players to log in so they're available to take part in something awesome when it happens is extremely important. In this edition of EVE Evolved, I ask whether EVE is in trouble due to its recent decline in player activity, look at the impact of people with just a few hours per week to play, and suggest a new app idea that could help solve all of those problems.
League of Legends reimagines Sion, the undead juggernaut
A new and terrifying Sion is stomping across lanes in League of Legends lately, thanks to a long-overdue "reimagining" and re-release. Riot Games was pretty harsh in its post-mortem of the old version, saying, "Old Sion had countless problems: He was a mage with an ax, he'd end up with two redundant abilities regardless of how he built, his model had aged horribly, and he had some pretty... interesting voiceover." The team decided to rebuild him to fit his profile as an unstoppable undead warrior. The new Sion is tanky with powerful attacks that can be deployed dupliciously in order to mess with the reflexes of opponents. You can check out Sion's champion spotlight video after the jump.
League of Legends introduces Ranked Restrictions for toxic players
League of Legends is a really popular game, but it also has a pretty noxious community reputation. That's something that's on the forefront of the mind of the Riot Games team, and it's being addressed with the latest patch. Players voted down for negative behavior are already operating under a chat restriction, requiring them to play a certain number of games before they can speak in the game again. Now those players will see another restriction, though: the inability to access ranked play. Rank restricted players will have a certain number of games that they must play before they can return to queueing for ranked matches just like with chat restrictions. Players who are deeply into negative territory and rank restricted at the end of a given competitive season will also be ineligible for receiving special rewards for ranked play, meaning that poor sportsmanship doesn't pay at any level of the game. While there are potential abuses for the system, it's an obvious effort to make the play experience on all levels a more positive one for players.
Play League of Legends in college, win scholarship money
The League of Legends North American Collegiate Championship returns for the 2014 - 2015 season with a larger competition layout and new region splits. Last year, 540 teams competed from 300 universities across the US and Canada. "This year, the competition's even bigger," Riot says. "The season now spans the entire academic year and we've split North America into four competitive regions: North, South, East and West. We're also making it easier for new players and teams to compete by collaborating with four community partners with a solid history of running League tournaments." The Qualifiers kick off on October 17 and registration for both the Ivy League of Legends and Collegiate Star League tracks are open from now through October 16. Two additional, shorter Qualifier rounds hosted by TeSPA and WellPlayed Productions take place in early 2015. Each Qualifier track crowns one winning team per region, for a total of 16 groups in the playoffs. The playoffs should be held around April or May 2015, Riot says, and the North American Championship will take place in Los Angeles, California, later in 2015. The top four teams win scholarship money: $30,000 per team member for first place, $15,000 each for second, and $7,500 each for third and fourth. See the full registration schedule and rules in the NACC FAQ, and check out your school's clubs here. Good luck, Summoners of academia! [Image: Riot]
Get Imagine Dragons' League of Legends song for free
League of Legends has an official song for its 2014 World Championship, and you can get it for free today. The song is "Warriors" by the band Imagine Dragons. "To kick off the start of the action, we set out to craft a war cry to rally behind in a creative collaboration with Imagine Dragons," Riot posted on its site. "Whether you're a solo queue warrior or fighting off the LCS jitters –- every moment counts." The MP3 is available for free on the site, but if you want the full animated music video, all you have to do is hit the jump below.
Like WildStar music? There's a concert for that
If you happen to be in Poland on September 26th, make sure to grab tickets for the GameOn multimedia show, the first part of which will feature selections from the scores of popular video games, including MMOs like WildStar. Composer Jeff Kurtenacker blogged that he is "absolutely honored to announce that the GameOn concert in Krakow, Poland, will be premiering a new arrangement of Our Perception of Beauty (Drusera's Theme), which [he] composed for the MMO WildStar by Carbine Studios." According to Kurtenacker, this concert will mark "first time WildStar music will be played in a concert setting"; he also notes that flutist Sara Andon, spotlighted throughout the WildStar score, will again perform at the concert. Music from World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and other games will also be featured. Kurtenacker spoke to Massively's resident Jukebox Hero last year about his work on WildStar. He has since released several exclusive and free music tracks for players.
Raptr shows MMOs and MOBAs dominating the top 20 in August
Raptr's tracking of play choices among the service's gamers in August paints a picture of a wide love for MMOs and MOBAs. World of Warcraft holds a respectable #2 spot, followed by Final Fantasy XIV (#10), Warframe (#11), Guild Wars 2 (#12), Star Wars: The Old Republic (#14), and Firefall (#20). However, former Raptr #6 holder, WildStar, has dropped out of Raptr's top 20 entirely. "With a late July release, Firefall made a 40-spot jump into the top 20 for August. Not too surprisingly, Firefall is converting more players from fellow F2P shooter Warframe than any other game, with Dota 2 coming in second," Raptr posted. Other online titles fleshed out the list, such as League of Legends (#1), Dota 2 (#3), SMITE (#5), and World of Tanks (#13). Card battler Hearthstone is still hanging onto the top 10 at #8.
Here's a League of Legends Ascension gameplay preview vid
The League of Legends YouTube channel dropped a new gameplay preview video earlier today. It's called Ascension - Gameplay Preview, naturally, and it's one-minute-and-48-seconds worth of footage from LoL's latest featured game mode. You can view the clip after the cut and you can learn more about the game mode at the official website.
Riot Games kicks off e-sports documentary
Want to know more about e-sports without all of the "watching e-sports" that it would otherwise entail? That's the purpose behind a new documentary being assembled by Riot Games. Road to Worlds is all about tracking the path of professional League of Legends players as they fight through the championships, culminating in a shot at the top prize at Worlds. The first episode is available past the cut and runs for about 25 minutes, exploring the origins of several competitive teams and how players first broke into the industry. If you want a deeper look at the culture, or if you're already a big fan of e-sports and want to watch more about them, jump on past the break. The remaining portions of the documentary will be posted later this month, on September 12th and 15th.
League of Legends moves beyond its own lore
What are your current thoughts about the storytelling in League of Legends? Yes, it's entirely acceptable to respond to that question with a cocked eyebrow and a confused expression. A new developer blog by Tommy Gnox addresses precisely that, explaining that from the beginning, the narrative side of the game has always focused around creating a justification for how the game works. That's all well and good, but it winds up not creating a great deal of space for any exploration of stories beyond the game itself. Gnox goes on to lay out a new plan for the game's storytelling in the future, explaining that there will no longer be a perfect one-to-one correspondence between the game and the lore. While older elements will remain in place, some of them will be allowed to fall by the wayside in favor of more interesting stories and character perspectives. If you've got an investment in the game's world and characters, check out the full blog for more information.
Heroes of the Storm is late to the MOBA party, but Blizzard isn't worried
Blizzard's upcoming MOBA, Heroes of the Storm, has a lengthy development history. Officially, development on the game began in 2010. The full story however, goes back to 2002, with the release of Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos and a mod called "Defense of the Ancients" (DOTA). If that acronym sounds familiar, it's probably because it's also the name of Valve's popular game, Dota 2. If you're confused on the capitalization, the former is an acronym while the latter doesn't stand for anything. As for why Valve would use the name of a mod created for a competing company's game and why Blizzard would let go of the name that kickstarted a genre worth hundreds of millions of dollars well ... there's a story there, too.
Seen@PAX: A girl and her adorable teddy bear
There are some video game characters and props we don't mind seeing transformed into life-sized statues - Evolve's Goliath monster is undeniably cool, and seeing the Batmobile at E3 made our feet yearn to press pedal to metal - but sometimes things you find cute and cuddly from a distance turn out to be chilling and creepy up close. Such is the case of League of Legends' Annie, a little girl who can transform her teddy bear from being a huggable, wuv-able wittle fwend into ... well, just take a look. They call him Mister Tibbers.
Riot Games starting programs to help support retired e-sports players
So what do you do when you're too old to play e-sports on a professional level? Do you accept that you had a good run being treated like a rock star for playing a lot of games and move on with your life? Heck no. You need to start worrying about leveraging your brand and your media training. That's the sort of material covered by a new program headed by Riot Games, guiding professional League of Legends players on the path from the start of their career to their expected retirement at around age 27. The accepted retirement age for professional players is due to a decrease in fine motor control and reflexes, which means that as in physical sports, it's impossible to continue playing as you get older. While the symposia Riot is offering don't yet go into detail about what players can do after playing, they are meant to help keep professionals in the spotlight and support them when they can no longer keep up with the events. It's useful training for professional e-sports players looking to move through their career and have some direction for after the game.