Author: Jeff Morgan (Page 143 of 260)

All Roads Return to WoW: The people are still the important part

Keep your people close.

I know a lot of you don’t enjoy WoW, or at the very least you’ve burnt out, but I’m still having a lot of fun playing, and I can only see that going up. The main reason: people.

I got back into WoW basically because I knew that a buddy who plays League of Legends was around. I didn’t think – not in a million years – that I would be back with my old raiding guild just a month after I started playing again. It’s actually pretty exciting and has turned out to be the thing I missed most from the game experience on the whole. It’s really nice to have a group of people consistently around for a game. I have that to a smaller extent currently in LoL, but I spent hours with these guys (and gals – hi Ishi!), for good or ill, and it’s been fun to reconnect.

If you find yourself bored or disinterested in any game, I’d recommend one of two things – get to know some people in game, or get to know some people in real life. Either way, you win and win big.

Should ranked games have free champions?

Champion splash.

Here’s something that came up today, mostly because I was seeing a lot of Mordekaiser players. Then I realized he’s free this week (I only looked because of the miserable quality of some of the Kaiser players). The question pretty much asks itself. Why do we have free champions in ranked matches?

The question I always like to ask regarding ranked matches is, “will this enhance or encourage more competitive play out of more players?” I have to say, I think the answer here is no. Most champions only come up on the free rotation once every few weeks, some even longer than that. Should ranked matches really be full of champions that a player might use for a few days at a time, once every few weeks? It seems to me that if you’re going to use an ELO system that doesn’t account for individual player performance, I would think a primary goal would be minimizing the attrition from bad players and maximizing a good player’s ability to carry a team. Having teammates who don’t know the champions is a huge problem in that system.

Granted, there are exceptions to this rule, but I think the only thing holding it back from being a great idea is the current 14-champion requirement to enter ranked play. Reduce it to ten, which will be an increase for some players, hopefully forcing them to play more games at the level cap rather than less before jumping in to ranked play.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow

Just a quick note to let you know we’ll be back to daily coverage of LoL and other various gaming topics tomorrow. I got to spend a great weekend in NYC and visit a close friend and Halo buddy in Brooklyn but I’m back in NC tomorrow and set to get back in the swing of things.

This week I’ll be starting some careful analysis of the different matchmaking queues, hopefully talking to a statistician or two about some of the issues with matchmaking, and providing a thorough look at the state of Vladimir and Xin Zhao since the nerf. In case you missed it, I’m also going to start up a Fearless Gamer in-house game night, most likely on Mondays. Stay tuned for more info.

Community inspires official skins

Back on the road today so another quick post as we fight through rain outside Philly. This is some good news, though. Riot has seen fit to pick up three more community skins for official distribution.

This is the kind of thing I love about Riot. The developer could easily put an end to custom skins, or at least send them underground. Instead they embrace the artistic community around the game, throw some RP at the guys making the skins, and give us more choices in game.

As for the skins, you can now get Groovy Zilean, Deep One Kassadin, and Frosted Ezreal in the game store. Zilean is my favorite of the three, but I might have to wait for a sale before I pick him up.

Oh how I long for the LoL Mac client

Apple.A few months back, Riot announced that it was developing a Mac OS X client for League of Legends. Why don’t we have it yet?

This isn’t a, “why are you ruining my life, Riot?” post, but rather a “please, please, please make this a reality,” post. I committed to avoid buying a gaming laptop some time ago, mostly because it isn’t truly a laptop. I don’t want a 17-inch screen, I don’t want it to weigh 11 pounds. I want portability and functionality without egregious size. That said, LoL isn’t exactly a taxing game, and it would be nice to log in when the night is winding down and try to pick up a quick game with the new champions and features when I’m not at my home machine.

I’m guessing it will come some time in late fall, though it wouldn’t be a huge surprise to see it pushed to the holiday season.

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