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Get your free League of Legends soundtrack now
You know what's awesome? Free stuff. Free stuff is awesome. And League of Legends is notable for giving away free goodies over the years, so we're not surprised to see that Riot's put the game's brand-new soundtrack album up on the site as a free download -- before it's going to be sold elsewhere. So if you want to get 15 generally excellent tracks (we know; we've listened to it), then head on over and snag it now!
Jam out to The Music of League of Legends
Today, this is our jam. The Music of League of Legends - Volume 1 collects 15 new and classic songs from League of Legends, available to download for free or for listening on YouTube. "The amount of blood, sweat, and tears that went into this project makes me so fucking grateful to be surrounded by such talented nerds," Riot Associate Brand Manager Tyler Eltringham said on Facebook. "This is the music of League." Show your earholes some love today and give Music of League a listen.
League of Legends Amumu music video is a tear-jerker
Amumu is the saddest of all League of Legends champions – as he wanders around Summoner's Rift, he says things like, "Come play with me," "Let me give you a hug" and "Where are we going?" with the most broken, depressing inflection. See, Amumu is cursed with eternal sadness and an inability to make friends, as Riot's new music video, "The Curse of the Sad Mummy," demonstrates with beautiful, terrible clarity. Ugh. You can sit with us, Amumu! See the video and Amumu's creative spotlight on the official League of Legends site. [Image: Riot]
League of Legends studio CEO headlines DICE summit
Riot Games CEO Brandon Beck is the opening keynote speaker at the 2015 DICE summit in Las Vegas, The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences announced in a press release this week. Beck founded Riot, the studio behind League of Legends, in 2006. He's poised to take the DICE stage on Wednesday, February 4. Also scheduled to talk at DICE is Monolith Design Director Michael de Plater, CastAR co-founder Jeri Ellsworth, Ubisoft's New IP Editorial Director Tommy Francois, Funomena CEO Robin Hunicke, and Twitch COO Kevin Lin, among others. See the full lineup in the below press release. DICE runs from February 3 - 5 at the Hard Rock Hotel Las Vegas. The talks and 2015 DICE Awards will be streamed on twitch.tv/dice from February 4 - 5. [Image: Riot]
League of Legends hikes across Europe for 2015 Worlds
The 2015 League of Legends World Championships will again span multiple cities and multiple countries, though this year it will all be in Europe. The 2014 World Championships spanned Taipei, Singapore and Korea, and Korean team Samsung White took home the trophy. Riot Games has yet to announce which European cities will host Worlds this year, but it should release details in "the coming months," the company says in a blog post. "Europe has been a home for LoL esports since the very first steps in our journey," the post reads. "It's the setting for the EU LCS, the host for many memorable esports tournaments and events, (including our inaugural World Championship in 2011, IEM, Dreamhack, and last year's All Star tournament) and the home of some of the most talented players to dominate the game. It feels great to bring the 2015 Championship back to players and fans who have played such a big part in our story." Even if you're not a pro League of Legends player, you can get in on the eSports action with some fantasy gaming. The EU LCS Spring tournament kicks off today; watch it here.
Former pro League of Legends team opens wallets to fantasy eSports
Former League of Legends team Vulcun started a new fantasy eSports website, offering a $250,000 prize pool for League of Legends spectators. Much like other fantasy sports such as baseball and football, players participate in daily challenges by selecting a team of competitors during the upcoming 2015 League of Legends Championship Series. Also like other daily fantasy sports challenges, both of Vulcun's free and paid leagues work on a salary cap basis; the best League of Legends players in the LCS will be more expensive to roster, so fantasy players will need to be discerning about the athletes they add to their teams. Founded by Ali Moiz and Murtaza Hussain, Vulcun earned $1.3 million in funding from investors such as eVentures, Battery Ventures and 500Startups, and the team plans to "re-invest every single dollar we make at increasing the prize pool for League fans." While this season's fantasy League of Legends prize pool is $250,000, Vulcun's next goal is to reach $1 million. The next LCS season begins on January 22, so those interested in Vulcun's fantasy challenges will need to request an invite to its closed beta. As League of Legends continues to grow in popularity as a competitive sport, universities are awarding scholarships to student eSports athletes. [Image: Riot Games]
Second US university extends League of Legends scholarships
A second school, Kentucky's University of Pikeville, has decided to join Illinois' Robert Morris University in offering scholarships to talented League of Legends players. This fall, the University of Pikeville will offer "at least 20 scholarships" to League of Legends players who will be treated much like other student athletes. "They'll have to have a certain GPA," said University of Pikeville new media director Bruce Parsons. "We'll look at them like student athletes. There will be practice time and video time when they have to study other teams for upcoming competitions." According to Parsons, the University of Pikeville League of Legends team will begin official tournament competition shortly after the start of the fall term. Despite NPR's flippancy, this makes a lot of sense, both for the students and the schools. While nowhere near as popular as the NFL or NBA, eSports has been growing exponentially of late - the Dota 2 International 2014 tournament was recently televised on one of the lesser ESPNs - which both affords gamers a scholarship opportunity and offers a new potential revenue stream for the increasingly large number of universities in danger of losing control over their other revenue-generating sports programs. [Image: Riot Games]
27 million people watched League of Legends' world finals
Riot has posted the viewership numbers from League of Legends' 2014 world championship, and they're pretty impressive. That said, the total unique viewer count for the finals (27 million) dipped by five million from the 2013. Riot says that this year's viewers tended to watch for longer periods of time for an average of 67 minutes as opposed to 42 minutes the previous year. You can soak up the rest of the numbers at Riot's official website.
Riot will pay you cash to find League of Legends bugs
A discovered vulnerability in League of Legends led Riot Games to the conclusion that it not only needed to react to such issues when they arise, but to be more proactive in discovering these weak spots in the game. To wit, the studio has implemented a bug bounty program that will reward players who find vulnerabilities in LoL's code. The studio has been testing out the program with a smaller group and has given $100,000 in rewards so far: "Currently in closed beta, the Riot bug bounty program is only available to a few security professionals who we've already identified. These professionals have helped us squish more than 75 bugs, vulnerabilities, and exploits, including client crash exploits, vision related exploits, and vulnerabilities that could potentially lead to player impersonation on forums."
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.
Vainglory mobile MOBA launching on Tuesday
Vainglory, "the MOBA perfect for touch," will be launching on the Apple app store in North America on Tuesday, November 18th. "Once the game is live worldwide, you can look forward to future updates with more heroes, more player-requested features, and other fun stuff," the team promised. If you want to give this free-to-play title a try, you're going to need an iPad 2 or better or an iPhone 5 or better. Vainglory is already out in other parts of the world and boasts a top-notch gaming experience for mobile devices. It was first mentioned during Apple's September press conference and was developed by former Blizzard, Riot, and Supercell developers.
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' Halloween event is positively Harrowing
The Harrowing, League of Legends' Halloween-themed event, has begun. To celebrate the spookiest of holidays, developer Riot Games has released two new skins, three new player icons, re-released more than a dozen old skins, introduced a new mode and produced a new cinematic video explaining the in-game lore behind The Harrowing. Champions LeBlanc - a powerful illusionist mage - and Wukong - a monkey martial artist - are the lucky recipients of new skins, while fan-favorite skins like Kitty Cat Katarina and Definitely Not Blitzcrank have made a return. Prices vary wildly for all of the skins available, so check out Riot's full list to see how much it'll cost to deck your favorite champion out in some sweet costumes. Once you're dressed for battle, you can head into League's Hexakill mode. Hexakill, which pits two teams of six against one another, debuted earlier this year on the game's 5v5 map. This time, the chaos is contained to Twisted Treeline, League's smaller 3v3 map that just so happens to also feature an enormous spider monster. "Claustrophobes - and arachnophobes - need not apply," reads a description on the official announcement. To learn what The Harrowing is all about, check out a new cinematic after the break.
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.
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.
Korean League of Legends shoutcasters are too much fun
Riot's shoutcasters – the hosts, analysts and interviewers on the ground during League of Legends tournaments – are professional, friendly and informative across the board, but there's something special about the Korean casters. Something energetic, frenzied and, most importantly, so much fun. YouTube user BaegMon collected a few stand-out moments from Korean shoutcasters during groups A and B in the 2014 League of Legends Worlds tournament earlier in September. The 2014 League of Legends World Championship is heading into its Knockout Stage, slated to start on October 3. The Finals take place on October 19. See who's in, who's out, and the tournament schedule at lolesports. [Image: Riot]
