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'League of Legends' pirate Gangplank is dead; long live Gangplank
Gangplank is dead. Riot, the developer of League of Legends, took an unprecedented move this week and killed off one of its champions, the pirate Gangplank. He's completely unavailable in the game right now, even for people who have thrown down real money for skins. Gangplank's surprising death came as part of the Bilgewater event, which builds up the lore in League of Legends' more pirate-y champions, including Gangplank and his apparent assassin, Miss Fortune. "We encourage all Gangplank fans to remain calm for a few days until we can fully assess the situation," Riot writes. "At this time we are not addressing refund requests for him or his skins but please know that over the next several days we'll do our best to make things right for everyone." The fact that Riot has killed a champion and isn't offering refunds to dedicated players suggests that a larger plot is afoot. What do you think Riot plans to do with Gangplank, now that he's taken a long walk off of his own, short plank?
Pro gaming doesn't need balls to be considered a 'sport'
The hockey game on the flat-screen behind the bar had served as a pleasant background visual as I ate dinner. But with my plate cleared, the action on-screen drew my full attention. I took a sip of beer as players converged on the puck, white jerseys sliding into red and sticks slapping intently over a small, swift black dot. More furious movement and some of the athletes fell back as others rushed forward chasing their objective: Control the puck. I took another sip. Two men, one from each team, flew toward the black dot as it slid across the bottom wall of the rink and the rest of the players settled into position behind them, constantly moving, pushing for dominance of their immediate areas. Each person on the ice clearly had a specific role. And then halfway through my second beer, it clicked. "It's like they're playing League of Legends in real-life," I thought, frozen in mid-sip. "Holy shit. I think I understand hockey now."
JXE Training Day: How to play your first 'League of Legends' match
We covered the League of Legends basics during our very first episode Training Day. Loc Tran, he of San Jose State University's rising League team, gave us the lowdown on just what multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games actually are, what it's like to play them and which ones are right for beginners. This week, we dive into matches against live players. What do you need to know the first time you play League of Legends? What class of character is good for you? We'll answer those questions and more on today's Training Day.
JXE Training Day: What is 'League of Legends?' An expert explains
Look no further than the world of eSports for a concrete example of how the very idea of popular culture has warped in the past decade. Just because something is popular with an enormous group of people, that doesn't mean that it's truly ubiquitous. When most people see the word "baseball" around the world, they can conjure up the basics. eSports, and all of the many very different games that fall under that banner, still occupy a weird, weird space. Take League of Legends, arguably the most popular eSport in the world. The League of Legends World Championship can net 32 million viewers and all of those viewers can still be called "crazy" by successful, seemingly popular sports reporters while scholarships for League of Legends college players are laughed at. Just because there are millions of fans, that doesn't mean everyone knows what they're fans of. Engadget will be your guide into this world of competition. If you don't know what eSports are, what a MOBA is or what a League of Legends may be, then we have a show for you. JXE Training Day is a regular eSports show for beginners, introducing competitive games and how to look at them. Our first series begins with an extensive, bi-weekly look at League of Legends.
Gay, transgender players restricted in 'League of Legends' tourney (update)
As eSports continue to grow so too will the walks of life who participate. That's something that a League of Legends tournament organizer in the Philippines has seemingly failed to realize with the announcement of its upcoming "all feminine" event dubbed The Iron Solari. In Garena Philippines' outline it says that it's having open discussions with members of the LGBTQ community about whether or not gay or transgendered women in particular should be allowed to participate. Why's that? Fears of an unfair advantage. Yes, really.
PlayStation Network goes down following cyberattacks (update 2: Xbox as well)
Sony may be experiencing a few unpleasant flashbacks this weekend. Both the PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) are slowly recovering from a denial of service attack that flooded their server connections, kicking many gamers offline. The group claiming responsibility, Lizard Squad, reportedly started out bombarding servers run by Blizzard (World of Warcraft), Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile) and Riot Games (League of Legends) before swinging its attention Sony's way.
League of Legends out now on Mac in open beta ... finally
League of Legends has finally released that Mac open beta that we heard was coming just a little while ago. Back in 2010, Riot Games had a ported Mac version all ready to go, but eventually determined that it just wasn't good enough, and not compatible with, the way they wanted to run their game. That led to a shutdown on development, but the company secretly restarted work on a native client, and it's now out and ready for download for everyone. League of Legends is currently the biggest game in the world -- it's a "multiplayer online battle arena" title based on the old Defense of the Ancients mod, where teams of five players battle each other from a top-down perspective. If you're a fan, you've probably already gone to download the Mac version, and if not, it's completely and totally free to play, so you should definitely check it out for yourself. Oh, and watch the announcement video -- it's funny. The Mac version is fully cross-platform, so all of the champions, skins (including the new "iBlitzcrank"), and so on are all available right away on the Mac. It's still in open beta, so there may still be some issues, but those should be fixed soon. At long last, we've finally got a full version of League of Legends, all ready to play on the Mac!
Riot: League of Legends Mac client ready 'within a month,' and why it's so late
As promised, I went by Riot Games today in Los Angeles, and got the lowdown on the long-awaited (but soon-to-be-released) Mac client for the company's popular game League of Legends from PR manager Chris Heintz. Heintz told me that the Mac version of the game is already up and running on the Public Beta Environment, and that it should be available as an Open Beta on the live servers "soon. Not 'Soon (TM)'," he told me, "but soon. I would imagine within a month." So what happened? Why did we hear about a Mac version years ago and then see Riot shut it down without releasing it? "When we originally developed the Mac client, we developed it with a partner, and it was a port, effectively. Our service model and how rapidly we patch wasn't really compatible with that approach, and also the performance and stability of that client wasn't up to our players' expectations, and so we killed it," says Heintz. But this new version, developed internally at Riot, is set to run the game natively on OS X. "As soon as we closed down the earlier Mac beta, we had always planned from that moment to develop a native Mac client that would actually be able to serve the needs of Mac players. We knew it was going to take some time, but we wanted to do it right." In the meantime, Riot even saw a group of players develop an unofficial Mac port of the game, and Heintz says those players were used during the beta test of this new version. "The beta crew that we went after was the iLoL community. Instead of trying to recruit a new community we already had that group of tens of thousands of dudes. And so we invited them." Heintz says that Riot doesn't have any major expectations for what the new client might do to its already impressive 12 million players a day. He says the company already knows the community wants to play the game on Macs. "We think that alone justifies the Mac client. There's already demand -- there was a Change.org petition just for us to treat Mac users the same! And so we're sorry it took a while, but we're here."
Riot Games shutting down League of Legends for Mac
Bad news for League of Legends gamers on the Mac -- after years of teasing about a Mac client for the popular free-to-play title (I even saw it running way back when), Riot has decided to pull the plug on plans to make the game Mac compatible. There has been a beta client floating around for quite a while now, and there were even servers to run with it. But those servers are going down, and Riot has made the decision to put the Mac client on hold indefinitely. Because of this, and even if you have the software, you won't be able to connect to the game from the Mac version. Bummer. Riot says it can't "guarantee the quality and frequent updates we deliver today on the PC and are expected by our player community" on OS X, and while there is a long-term plan to make the game available on the Mac, it's not going to be ready any time soon. If you do want to play the game on the Mac, you can load up Boot Camp and install the Windows version. But a native client is a no-no for now. Fortunately, Mac users are going to get reimbursed somewhat: Everyone who has "a majority of your logins come from the Mac client," and is able to log on between September 2 and 6, can click a reward button will get a Champions Pack for free.
League of Legends splits European servers into two regions
Riot Games made the decision this week to split up its European server into two separate platforms in order to help out with lag and other issues. The company is now running both "EU West" and "EU Nordic and East" servers on the Old Continent, each offering League of Legends matches and services to their various regions. Feedback on the official forums is mostly positive (and the split should provide faster games to those on either of the new servers), though a lot of players seem concerned that there's another division between the two regions. You can read the full press release after the jump -- Riot says each server is designed to support "hundreds of thousands of concurrent players." Just between us, though, if they could send a little extra lag to Evelyn players, there'd be no problems with that.
Hands-on: League of Legends for the Mac
Defense of the Ancients is one of the most interesting stories in all of gaming -- it was originally a player-created mod for the Warcraft III real-time strategy game, and it completely revamped the RTS game into a RPG/hack-and-slash mashup, where the player controlled a champion character that fought to turn the tide of battle on a player-vs-player map. The mod proved so popular that game companies are now creating their own official versions of it, and League of Legends is one of those -- a "DotA"-style mix of hack-and-slash gameplay combined with a few RTS elements created by Riot Games. "LoL," as players are calling it, actually has the best pedigree of all the DotA clones -- two of the mods' designers were (and still are) involved in the games' development. Now LoL is coming to the Mac -- Riot Games invited me to come and see the game this week running natively on their MacBook Pro. The game uses a free to play model, so if you're running Boot Camp, you can go and download it right now and play to your heart's content. But Riot is convinced that "there's millions of gamers out there" who want to run their game natively, and so sometime later this year, it'll be available in OS X. I got to check out the game on official Apple hardware, ask them if they had any problems porting it over, and poke them a little bit about how RTS games might work on the iPad. Hit the link below to read on.
