Last night IGN released the first gameplay footage of Nocturne. The footage is basically a champion spotlight, without all the detail devoted to showing the champion’s individual skills. It’s a nice look at what he can do. I really love the fear tether idea. It’s not entirely new – just a remake of Leblanc’s Ethereal Chains – but it adds nice flavor to the character. Check the video and, as always, let me know what you think about Nocturne in the comments.
Author: Jeff Morgan (Page 85 of 260)
Riot revealed Nocturne’s skill list today, just a few hours before players will have a chance to guide him on the Fields of Justice at PAX East. I’m bummed I wasn’t able to secure a media badge to the event this year, but hopefully I’ll get out to some other conferences in 2011 and meet up with the Riot crew. All that aside, let’s check out the Nocturne skill set.
Nocturne looks like he’ll play a lot like Mercurial Spectre from DotA. He has a very similar dagger effect and his ultimate offers the same teleportation skill, though with a more limited range. Here’s the official list:
Duskbringer: Nocturne throws a shadow blade which deals damage, leaves a Dusk Trail, and causes champions to leave a Dusk Trail. While on the trail, Nocturne ignores unit collision and has increased Movement Speed.
Shroud of Darkness: Nocturne empowers his blades, passively gaining attack speed. Activating Shroud of Darkness allows Nocturne fades into the shadows, creating a magical barrier which blocks a single enemy spell and doubles his passive attack speed if successful.
Unspeakable Horror: Nocturne plants a nightmare into his target’s mind, dealing damage each second and fearing the target if they do not get out of range by the end of the duration.
Paranoia (Ultimate): Nocturne reduces the sight radius of all enemy champions and removes their ally vision in the process. He can then launch himself at a nearby enemy champion.
Umbra Blades (Passive): Every 10 seconds, Nocturne’s next attack strikes surrounding enemies for physical damage and heals himself for each target hit. Nocturne’s physical attacks reduce this cooldown by 1 second.
He’s looking like a pretty cool assassin-style toon, something like Master Yi with some interesting mobility tools. It looks like he’ll also be a pretty solid jungler with that passive, although I said the same thing about Renekton and his jungling hasn’t been excellent.
On the heels of this morning’s “Why, oh god, WHY does the EU have Co-Op vs. AI first?!?” on the forums, Riot has set the new feature live on the US servers. Players can now queue up as a premade team or solo and be paired with teammates to play against bots. The bots might be better than the standard Custom Game fare, but they certainly aren’t good.
Part of the problem is that they don’t jungle, and the bots seem to make bad decisions in 2v1 situations. If you stick to the lanes, chances are you’re going to win and win easily. When you start to get near brush, that’s where the bots actually seem okay, but mostly because their reaction times are instant. I blinked over a wall as Kassadin in one game, only to have the Annie on the other side instantly hit me with three skills. No joke, the combo landed before fog of war cleared, but I still managed to get the kill.
I did have one instance over my three games that I actually thought the bots played well. Trundle Bot and Ashe Bot were both top, both underleveled. They slipped into fog of war near our outer turret as my team made our way through the jungle to gank. As we approached from river, I got exhausted, ignited, silenced and Ruptured by the Cho’gath we hadn’t known was up there. It was a damn good bait, and like I said before, the timing was instant.
As much as the bots benefit from being run by a computer, they’re also hurt by it. You can kite the bots just by getting close to them with low health. They instantly run toward you and will often chase just up to tower range. I’ve also seen bots trying to take jungle minions get stuck walking in circles when a champion approaches them.
All of that said, it’s definitely more interesting to get ignited by an Ashe after she arrows you from outside the screen than it was to watch Yi bot two-step his way back to a turret while you killed him in Custom Games. What do you guys think?
UPDATE: Since writing this post, Riot hotfixed to make Co-Op vs. AI live. While cool, it doesn’t have an effect on these suggestions.
The forums were again ablaze with outrage this morning, this time because Riot released the Co-Op vs. AI game mode to European servers before those in North America. Adding insult to injury, Phreak posted a video recap of an Olaf vs. Soraka fight from the Co-OP vs. AI preview Riot held a full month ago. As I’m sure you recall, we were also told the new bot matches would go live in the “coming days” after the patch that implemented the feature clientside. Well, it still isn’t here, and this is far from the first time Riot has mismanaged a feature launch or leaked an update far too early. Frankly, Riot desperately needs to improve its customer relations across the board, and it wouldn’t take much. I’ve come up with three simple, low-cost steps Riot can take to repair customer relationships and restore the good faith of its playerbase.
1. Stop Overpromising/Underdelivering
Riot knows this. The company knows it botched the Magma Chamber announcement in a big way. CEO Mark Merrill had this to say in a recent interview:
“We feel terrible about the whole experience there, where we learned a valuable lesson. We do a lot of iteration, we have a lot of cool design, where we’re innovating on lots of features and maps, modes, and all sorts of these things. And until we nail it and get it right, because our core experience is really fun, because there’s built-in expectations that users have on quality, we don’t want to screw anything up. And so we’re willing to take the time — and sometimes it’s a painful amount of time obviously — and it’s our fault for setting expectations the way we did.”
That’s actually a fantastic apology, but why are we still seeing this mistake being made? Where’s the Tribunal? Where is Co-Op vs. AI? The Magma Chamber mistake has been made several more times, and its breeding bad blood in the playerbase. This issue is compounded when the features that are leaked too early would add great value to the game. This week’s bans highlight just how much good Tribunal could do. I realize it’s being delayed so that it can be implemented properly, but the fact that I know of its existence and know that it is overdue makes the glacial pace of bans/suspensions all the more frustrating.
2. Implied Expectations Still Have to be Met
As Tuesday, February 15th rolled around I was getting geared up to play the newest champion in the league, Maokai. I fired up the client that morning and much to my surprise, servers were up. Awesome! Unfortunately, they had never gone down. The Maokai patch was delayed by a day.
Several players made forum threads about the delay and received responses like the following, from Phreak:
This week most likely. No promises on patch date.
Actually, guys, when you released the previous dozen-or-so patches on a Tuesday, Tuesday became patch day to your customers. Similarly, when you release a Champion Spotlight showcasing a champion’s skills accurately for several weeks, we assume those spotlights will be accurate on launch day. When Renekton launched, he was very different than he looked in the Spotlight. I realize both of these situations involved last minute changes, but those changes need to be foreseen and dealt with accordingly. Remember, you set the two week patch cycle, not the players. If it’s too tight to accurately represent and release a product, maybe you need to reconsider the patch cycle. Repetitive action on your part implies expectations from the consumer. When your action changes, you’ve failed to meet expectations you set, explicitly or otherwise, and that creates a bad customer experience.
3. Revive the Blog
The last official League of Legends blog post went live on June 10, 2010. It was actually a great post, giving players a closer look at upcoming changes to the recommended items for each character in game. Unfortunately, the blog wasn’t updated very often (despite several posts on June 8th that were conspicuously just a few minutes apart) and content that would otherwise be appropriate for a blog was sent to the forums. More unfortunate still is that the forums lack functionality to make them a decent place to get information. The red tracker is pretty weak when compared to community alternatives (CL Gaming’s is awesome), there is no search function, and posts go up so fast that important posts often get buried.
Oddly enough, Riot is pretty good at communicating with players on the forums. Red posters respond regularly to community concerns, but how much of the community actually sees those posts? Shurelia started a thread a few days ago just to make a weak Rammus joke. That thread has since become one of the most transparent looks at the design process behind League of Legends the company has ever had in the public forums. Shurelia has leaked changes for several champions next patch. Morello has posted to drop knowledge on some fool several times. It’s an awesome post, but the community needs easy access to that information, access that should come from Riot. Pendragon’s ban post would also make a perfect blog entry.
As it currently stands, we have the easiest access to the announcements that have disappointed us in the past. The good stuff, like designers thoughts on different champions or interesting posts about design in general, are buried under tens of thousands of forum posts without a way to search for them. Riot needs a centralized location to highlight the positive aspects of its relationship to the playerbase. Personally, I think a blog is perfect solution (and it just so happens I know a fairly prolific League of Legends blogger).
I know that the issues I mentioned in this post are complicated. I know that Riot has to make sure it can deliver a quality product before releasing features willy-nilly. I know it isn’t as easy as just flipping a switch. As you probably noticed, these three solutions all concern communication. That’s really where Riot is missing the mark. The game is still pretty great, the upcoming features still look awesome. By communicating more effectively with the playerbase, Riot can capitalize on the positive aspects of League of Legends and restore the good faith of its loyal fans.
The biggest news to come out of Culver City this week has to be the bans Riot issued to several thousand offending players. I have to admit, I was a little worried when Pendragon made the initial post. I’ve been a bit more ragey than usual in my ranked games. My rating has plummeted from the high 1500s to mid 1300s over the past couple weeks, a frustration I’ve leveled at whatever feeder/afker/incompetent-boob is closest. I’m still in the clear and I’ve refocused most of my frustration into attempts to climb the ELO ladder. Other players were apparently a bit more liberal with their insults, but surprisingly, few players understood why they were banned.
Pendragon made a post offering to explain to the first five respondents, all of whom must have been banned for a week or more, the reasons they had been banned. The reasons? Racism, afking, intentional feeding, reporting other players’ positions through fog-of-war, real-life threats, claiming to be/know a Riot employee, Teemo shroom art (that one made me laugh). It’s a hell of a list, especially considering that chat logs are recorded.
Honestly, I have to wonder why these guys think they could get away with it. Some of the players seemed genuinely surprised to get banned. And to think, I was worried. I make aggressive use of words like “moron,” “idiot,” and occasionally “mongoloid” if I’m feeling extra emo. I swear profusely. But none of this is even close to racism or the kind of game-wrecking crap like fog-of-war revealing. The funny thing is, I’m a really nice guy on an average day. I don’t belittle people. In fact, I even try to avoid fraternal diminutives like “bud” or “bro” lest they be misconstrued. I’m typically friendly to a fault.
When I’m online, though, and all I want is an enjoyable game with skilled players, I’m like a toddler. I don’t get my way and something ugly starts to bubble up. Obviously, anonymity exacerbates the problem. The fact that I don’t have to see the targets of my aggression make it that much easier to unleash. It’s a strange phenomenon, and something I’ve been making a concerted effort against since I first logged into a competitive video game. I still slip and freak out here and there, but it’s gotten better over the years. I figure by the time I’m 50 I should be a zen master of cool composure, even when my son is whooping my ass at Soul Caliber 34.
What about you? Is your online personality dramatically different than you behave offline? Just a little more ragey? Or have you already achieved enlightenment?
FOLLOW US!
CATEGORIES
© 2026 Fearless Gamer
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑