A few weeks ago I wasn’t seeing Gragas at all. Even after the buff he was beyond rare, relegated to nearly Katarina levels of nonexistence. Since then, though, he’s shown up more and more often, and since he’s free this week I thought it would be appropriate to run a State of the Hero analysis on the rabble rouser.

Gragas is a very deceiving toon. Most new Gragas players think AP is the best way to go, especially when they see how hard barrels can hit early in the game. Think of those things like a small nuke, though, and you’ll be fine. Attack damage Gragas is much stronger, mostly because of the low cooldown on Body Slam. Think of Gragas like Blitzcrank – plenty of skills to proc Sheen for tower pushing and a nice set of attack skills for laying down some burst damage.

The only time Gragas really has problems is at the end of the game. If you haven’t been playing strong – by strong I mean at least 2:1 for your K/D ratio – you’ll find it hard to blow through an opponent without some help. For the rest of the game, though, Gragas feels just fine. If you have some health regen runes you should find it easy to stay in lane with a little help from your passive.

The one thing I find problematic about Gragas is that it’s almost necessary to have Clarity. Without it you will have serious mana problems if you want your damage to scale relatively quickly. I would love to see a little buff to Drunken Rage, but it already provides so many buffs that it would be hard to justify increasing any one of them without decreasing another.

If you’ve not played Gragas, this a great time to give him a shot. Stick to your lane, pick your fights wisely and you’ll probably have a lot of fun. Who doesn’t want to be a big fat guy throwing around wine barrels for fun?

I was pretty excited about the upcoming content patch, so you can imagine my chagrin when my News stories remained the same after this morning’s short patch. The patch only took an hour and fifteen minutes and has yet to have any info associated with it. It was probably some kind of behind the scenes work to prep for the patch next week.

Yes, unfortunately I think we’re looking at next week as the official launch. It could be very early in the week, but I would plan for a Tuesday downtime. The post announcing skin bundles has been ninja-updated to include the phrases “available through the end of the first weekend post-patch” and “through the end of the patch weekend” instead of those March 14th dates originally listed.

I guess my initial instinct was right. I’m not surprised. Again, this patch is so content heavy that there is very little room for error and a lot of places mistakes can be made. I’m glad they pushed it back.

If you’ve been to the official forums recently you’ve no doubt noticed the fallout regarding T0ggle and his guides. There was the usual threadspamming and mass downvoting from multiple accounts by several parties, all of which led to a pretty interesting thread on forum moderation. A lot of LoL’s moderation is done by community upvoting and downvoting. Too many downvotes and threads get locked. I’ve posted my take on the situation below.

The biggest reason I don’t spend more time posting in these forums is that the community moderation system seems to heavily reinforce mob mentality. As many others here have mentioned, upvotes and downvotes are often made carelessly or targeted at threads for disagreement rather than an actual rating of the content.

I hate to bring it up, but the queue dodge penalty was a prime example. Almost all of the discussion around that was severe polarization on both sides of the issue and a back and forth of upvotes and downvotes.

That said, most of the locked threads I read deserve it. My concern is that the system too easily discards minority opinion simply because it is unpopular. I’ve read enough decent locked threads to know that reasonable discussion gets downvoted because users don’t agree. That’s not a “forum” at all.

I would also love to see a more robust set of user features – PMs, a small profile, etc. That would give players the option to start/continue discussion between a more focused set of users than the public option allows.

So what do you think? Is community moderation working? Do we need dedicated admins or would that just be the same problem on a smaller scale?

It’s been three days since Riot officially confirmed the patch for this week – yes, I’m considering a sale on new content that ends this coming Sunday an official confirmation – and there’s still no word on when it will actually drop. Nothing. Nada. No post in the announcement forums, nothing in the server status forums. Not even an update to the sale announcement that pushes the dates back.

I’d like to say I’m not one to speculate but, frankly, I speculate often so here it goes. My guess is that there’s some trouble related to a widespread Twisted Treeline rollout. I still stand on the assumption that it’s coming in this patch. The matchmaking test on the Test Realm was so short that my guess is they got a quick confirmation that, yes, it will work. If it was a no, you can bet there would have been more testing to figure out why. It’s a pattern Riot has followed rigorously to this point. Hell, when it seems 80% of the population can’t connect or chronically crashes the servers are set to “busy” while the team attempts to sort things out.

It’s also safe to say that this is the biggest patch since launch, with the possible exception of the store. The Twisted Treeline update will change the game in a huge way, and will likely a whole new set of hardware. Add to it the major revamp the patch gave to Twisted Fate and the release of a new champ with completely new mechanic and you have the heaviest content patch we’ve seen.

I’m still convinced it won’t happen, though. Tomorrow’s Friday and there’s still no news.

A friend of mine was on a serious Zilean kick for a while. He loved most everything about the toon, except the fact that it could be difficult to target himself in the midst of a fight. Getting that ult off is crucial, especially when you’re getting nuked. His speed controls suffered from the same problems. Well, no more. The upcoming patch has a little known change coming to spell casts: smart casting.

Players will be able to define a set of “smart cast” hotkeys that allow for self casting or the targeted cast of a spell like Karthus’ Lay Waste. By default, the modifier will be “alt” for all of your spells. On Zilean, for example, this means by pressing “alt + r” you will cast your ultimate on yourself. Pressing just “r” will still bring up the targeting cursor for selecting your allies. If you want to get really fast, you will be able to select teammates with the F keys for even quicker casts on your allies.

The change was implemented with Ezreal in mind. Since all of his skills are skill shots, players needed a way to quickly cast, like the cursor cast for Karthus. This gives players that option, so you can just hotkey your spell straight to cast while you’re chasing down a target.

One of the best differentiators between League of Legends and Dota is surrender. If at 25 minutes it seems a sure loss, teams with a heavy majority vote – 4/5 – can surrender the game by simply typing /surrender. It’s a great mechanic for those steamroller games, whether you’re on the giving or receiving end of a brutal beating. It saves time and a lot of frustration for most everyone involved.

It can be annoying, though. I’ve had many games that have been close, only to have the other team surrender as we’re pushing down inhibitor turrets. It’s a small thing, but sometimes it’s nice to have that complete victory. The thing is, the minor frustration of not finishing a game is nowhere near the frustration of enduring a guaranteed loss because your teammates won’t surrender. Quite a few players believe there is some sort of surrender penalty and won’t surrender because they don’t want to cripple their IP gain. It was almost implemented – luckily, Riot was smart enough to see the problem and simply moved surrenders to 25 minutes instead of keeping it at 15.

Apparently Zileas posted a few months back suggesting a penalty for surrender. I haven’t been able to find that post – what I found was an old post asking Riot to reconsider. Zileas posted a couple times inside, both of which provide a disconcerting look what was then the possible future of the surrender mechanic. Basically Riot wanted to distinguish between true losses and surrenders so that it could properly “reward” players who stay until the bitter end. In turn, teams that surrender will be subject to a penalty, likely in the form of reduced IP gain. His first response is below:

Players tend to do what they are rewarded for. Players get a lot of satisfaction out of “Finishing” opponents off in our game, and everyone enjoys that sometimes. We want to reward people to not surrender for this reason.

This “reward” system completely ignores the fact that players can “surrender” by standing afk at fountain while the other team pushes it in. The strategy is used all the time with AFK players because it’s a waste of everyone’s time to play the game out. The new system wouldn’t have “rewarded” anyone, it would have incentivized people to AFK, effectively ruining the game. This was one of Dota’s major problems, one Riot combatted with the surrender vote.

Zileas’ second response revealed that the game would be going to 15-minute surrenders if a penalty system was implemented.

we want 15 min surrenders — but the platform doesnt distinguish between losses and surrenders presently. Once it does, we will go 15 mins. Right now, if we did that, the optimal behavior would be to chain surrender at 15 mins every game.

Luckily the system never went through. I’m not sure I would have noticed if that was the way surrender had always worked. We likely would have just seen a lot more AFK once a player thought the game was decided.

Harmonix made a major announcement today on Facebook of all places. The next iteration of the Rock Band series, Rock Band 3, will be launching this coming holiday season. Here’s the full post:

Harmonix is developing Rock Band 3 for worldwide release this holiday season! The game, which will be published by MTV Games and distributed by Electronic Arts, will innovate and revolutionize the music genre once again, just as Harmonix did with the original Rock Band, Rock Band 2 and The Beatles: Rock Band. Stay tuned for more details!

Innovate and revolutionize you say? Could that possibly mean that this Rock Band will finally be the one that actually teaches you how to rock?

Source: Facebook

A post in the official forums today confirmed that we’ll be seeing the Ezreal patch this week along with a very special treat: ghost skins! The images for Ghost Fiddlesticks and Ghost Gangplank have been in the client for awhile now. Just think, you won’t have to see four posts a week theorizing about revive, Mordekaiser’s ult and the method to unlocking these beauties. It’s actually simple -give Riot your money and they will give you the skins.

There’s still no word on pricing, but the official post did mention that both ghost skins would be available at 20 percent off regular price through the weekend. This patch will also have a Highland Tryndamere skin, adding some Scottish flavor to everyone’s favorite barbarian.

As for Ezreal, everyone, myself included, is waiting to hear his cost in IP. He’s getting the typical new hero + skin bundle for a small discount at 1375 RP. Obviously that points to a 975 RP price, which could mean either 3150 or 6300 for the IP cost. I’m hoping for 3150 since I won’t be buying it with RP. I’ve got more ghostly things to spend my money on.

I decided to try something new recently and give Sivir a go. I’ve always hated her, mostly because I’ve seen her pushing power completely dominate a game. She’s always seemed like an unstoppable force in the right hands, so I figured I should see if it’s really the toon.

Let me just say that I think Sivir might be the best character for mid in the game. She bulldozes creeps for very little mana and has no trouble with champions that aren’t built for extremely high survivability. I’ve faced casters, tanks, and carries all mid and had very little trouble, even against the good players. Some of them slowed my farm, forcing me to take Spell Shield over Boomerang Blade, but no one has been able to completely shut me down.

As of this post I’ve won 80% of my games as Sivir. My losses were actually in premades during which I suffered from unskilled teammates. In one game I was paired with a level 13 Annie. We lost. Badly. In the other games, though, I’ve been such a force mid that I have to wonder about her balance. I don’t think she’s particularly good for solo queue. Without solid team coordination she has too much pushing power that, when coupled with a move speed modifier and a spell shield, gives her the survivability to truly own a game.

Really, I think this latest patch has caused most of the problems. She has always been strong, but with the heavy prioritization on farming, Sivir can easily level gap people in ways only the best gankers could previously do. The upcoming patch should help, reducing the range at which she can farm and increasing gank XP. I’ll update this post with a little more in-depth match detail when I’ve spent more time with her.

As if the news of Steam coming to Macs weren’t enough, fanboys can rejoice today for more great news from Valve. As the latest issue of Game Informer confirms, Portal 2 is coming and it’s coming to Macs.

The PAL Game Network has scans of the cover story from Game Informer, which shows the basic info about the game – developer, release window, platforms, etc. There isn’t much more information, other than the fact that the game will be incredible. If you haven’t played the original Portal just go buy the Orange Box. It’s easily one of the most enjoyable games I’ve ever played, no lie (the cake on the other hand…). And it all started as a trial.

Luckily for us, Portal 2 will be a full-length game, set to release this fall.