Category: Editorial (Page 29 of 34)

      Who is The Wiggin Boy?

      November 21, 2010 /

      Guess Who?I want to start this by apologizing for the lack of content over the past few days. I’ve been busy with mainsite work, which, after mentioning to a couple folks who play in the Monday night gamenight I host, made me realize you would have no idea what that means. It also made me think, hey, you guys read the stuff I put together every day and I really appreciate it so I figure I could tell you a little about myself. Give a little context. That whole thing.

      Obviously my name is Jeff. I started writing here more than a year ago, mostly about general industry news and trends. It was all very boring, but I was still fairly green to the blogging scene. I started writing here because I had done some writing work for this blog’s parent site, Bullz-Eye.com as well as a sister blog to this one about technology and gadgets, Gadget Teaser. Around last December, a couple friends who I had gamed with in the past mentioned League of Legends. I was immediately in love, being a long time Dota fan myself. I started looking around for League of Legends blogs and didn’t find any so I focused this blog in that direction and here we are.

      As for my personal life, I’m twenty-six, living in North Carolina and writing full-time. You know, I think I’ll just go back to the beginning and give you a little rundown of my experience as a gamer and we’ll see how this goes. I’ve been gaming since I was a kid. In fact, I have some very vivid memories of myself as a kid, running around the house on Christmas Eve chanting “Nin-ten-do! Nin-ten-do!” I didn’t get one that year, but I played at my friends’ houses as often as I could and I was a big computer game geek. Fast forward a few years and I got an N64 for Christmas and got truly hooked on the gaming scene. My Advanced Chemistry course in high school had about a day a month during which we had nothing to do. A few of us would bring in consoles and we’d hook them up and order out some of the best drive-in burgers you can get (look up Swensons if you’re ever in northeast Ohio). In college I was a huge Halo freak. My friends and I played across the LAN for huge chunks of the day, every day of the week. We skipped class for Halo (and Counter-Strike before that). We played in local tournaments. We hosted our own tournaments, and I even looked up a few regional tourneys when I was home on breaks. Once upon a time I was thinking about playing Halo professionally. I even played with a few of the world’s best players at the time in a tourney outside Columbus and fared well enough to fuel the dream. Instead, I met a girl and started writing and went after those things, but I didn’t exactly leave gaming behind.

      Shortly after college I started playing WoW. I was almost exactly two years late, just before the launch of Burning Crusade. I joined a server with a couple friends, the same friends who got me into LoL, incidentally, and just ran with it. A year later I was an officer in a BT raid guild, gobbling up info about Wrath. That was about the time my brother told me about Dota. I had seen him play it a couple times, but I had gotten as much from Warcraft 3 as I thought was possible, so I didn’t mess with it much. A couple months passed and he was still playing so I joined in. I fell in love with the playstyle – the pace, the reasonable game length, the complexity of different characters and builds, the flow of the map – and left WoW behind.

      That basically brings you up to speed on my history writing here and my history gaming. I recently rekindled my WoW flame, but that has since died out (a story for another post) and I’m still going strong with League of Legends. I’ve also started writing more reviews for the blog’s parent site, alongside Jason Zingale, who has long been in charge of the gaming section among other things at Bullz-Eye. Jason’s reviews are more about the experience of playing a game than the technical side, which I’ve always appreciated. I really don’t care if something has the Havok engine if it plays like crap. It’s a good spot to turn if you’re looking for some new reviews.

      Anyway, I hope this gives you a little insight into my life. I’m thinking about starting up a personal blog in the coming weeks, which I’ll be sure to share here. It will likely be focused on pop culture, but even more likely it will be a confused wreck of half-baked thoughts and theories. If you like things a little more organized, this will still be the place.

      Editorial, league of legends

      The ‘Normal Stats’ support thread

      November 14, 2010 /

      normal-stats

      I’ve been playing a lot of normal games lately and I’ve been seriously miffed at the lack of stat support for normal players. I love being able to see my K/D/A ratios for individual champions in ranked. I love looking at my total stats. Why don’t normal players get the same treatment?

      Seriously, it sucks that the best I can see are my total minion kills, my takedowns (seriously, wtf is this), and total wins. I want to be able to get the same kind of data I get for ranked. I want to see my most played champions and who I’m best with. I want to know what champions need work.

      I’ve made a thread in the hopes of raising Riot’s awareness on what I consider a fairly serious community issue. The stats are already being recorded, so let’s get access. You can find the thread, with an included poll, on the official forums. Get over there and vote for some normal stat goodness.

      Current Affairs, Editorial, league of legends

      I hit 1600 ELO (and I don’t want to be there any more)

      November 12, 2010 /

      1600

      It took almost 500 games but I finally managed to push my way through and break the 1600 ELO barrier. I’m now officially among the top 1000 players in the ranked Solo 5v5 queue and, I’ll be honest, I had hoped it would be different, though I’m not really sure why.

      I think the thing I expected most from high-tier play was more coordination/communication and less finger pointing. It has actually been quite the opposite. In most games I’ve played since 1550+, where I’ve been for a while now, players rarely talk, sometimes to the point that you can’t get a response about comps, picks, and builds in champion select. Believe it or not, it’s really important for the team to know if you’re playing AP Twisted Fate. It’s also disconcerting when a player takes smite on an atypical jungle toon if your team already has a strong jungler. For whatever reason though, whether it’s the arrogance that comes from having proof of success or something else, high-tier players rarely want to talk about this stuff.

      Another strange phenomenon at high ELOs are the players who think they can prove that the underplayed champions are actually strong, but that they just require skill. This isn’t just a few people, either. A ton of players do this. In particular, I can think of a guy I see on occasion who picks Gangplank regardless of his team’s composition. I’ve tried reasoning with him, saying things like, “Hey, how about someone else. We already have three melee,” or, “Gangplank isn’t a very strong mid these days,” to which the response has always been some form of “fuck off.” I can understand his frustration. Sometimes it’s fun to play guys like Gangplank, and in some comps, Gangplank fits very nicely. But when you’re locking a niche character the moment the champion selection screen lights up with complete disregard for your team composition, you’re making it infinitely less likely that your teammates have a chance of winning. The fact that I’ve seen him (the player, not Gangplank) in several games, not one for which Gangplank has made sense, and that he’s not only had a bad attitude but then blamed everyone possible for our inevitable loss dissolves any sympathy I might have for the guy.

      He’s not the only one, either. A lot of high-level players share this sort of delusion about their level of skill with a given champion. The reality is, some champions just aren’t fit for high-level competitive play. You might see some marginal success with them, but it will almost always be anecdotal, an exception to the rule.

      There is one problem with high-tier ranked that I knew would happen. As your ELO improves, there are fewer and fewer people at your rank to be paired with. A couple things start to happen. On the rare occasion that there are ten people of a wide ELO spread from 1600 and up online and looking for game at the same time, you get paired with and against people anywhere from 1600 to 1900. That’s not so bad, because a lot of those players seemed to be very similarly skilled. What happens more often, though, is that you become the balancing factor for someone’s duo queue. Shortly after hitting 1600 I played a ranked game in which I got Corki for another player with my first pick. He ignored my requests and picked me Rammus, even though we had a jungler (lane Rammus is a nightmare). I got stuck bottom with Kayle, who I begged for the first five minutes to “PLEASE STOP PUSHING THE LANE.” I got no response, and the player spammed Righteous Fury until we were slammed up against the enemy turret with Shen and Malphite in front of us and their jungler working up increasingly violent and creative ways to orchestrate our demise. I got out of the game only to find that he was nearly 200 ELO my junior. Either he or someone on the other team was in a wide disparity duo queue and I was there to hopefully balance things out.

      At this point, I find myself enjoying normal games at least as much as, if not more than ranked. There’s more champion diversity and players are generally more friendly. I’ll still likely play ranked, but I think that will become increasingly rare. The experience just hasn’t been very fun lately, even since improving my ELO.

      Current Affairs, Editorial, league of legends

      The case against mindlessness

      November 8, 2010 /

      sona-difficulty

      I’ve written a lot of posts recently about the overpowered toons in League of Legends and I realize several of them may have come across a little whiney. I often have emotions around a given aspect of the game before I’ve really sat down to put the words behind those emotions, so you guys get to read me working through the crap to get at the heart of the matter. Well, thanks for bearing with me.

      This post is a culmination of a few different posts regarding relative champion strength and the overwhelming fury I feel toward champions like Sona and Mordekaiser, so I hope it will be a little more focused and my point of view will be easy to understand.

      Most of my frustration with League of Legends in the past few weeks has revolved around the relationship between a champion’s strength and the skill required to provide the maximum team benefit that champion provides. For many of the overpowered champions in the game, the problem is that the champions are both strong and incredibly easy to play. It’s something I think Riot misunderstands, as you can see from the difficulty screen above. There is literally no situation in which I would consider Sona difficult to play.

      Mordekaiser falls under that same umbrella. There are players who think it’s tough to know when to fight with him, but I could not disagree more. Your team is there, you fight, and you get a ghost and murder the other team. If they aren’t there, don’t fight, unless you have a ghost with you, in which case you should kill the entire opposing team. In all seriousness, though, Kaiser’s ease of use comes from his shield, which allows him to be a serious threat to any opponent in lane just by standing in range. Consider other casters, like Annie for instance. If Annie wants to deal damage to me she has to get relatively close, giving me the opportunity to deal damage in return. Kaiser has to do the same thing, but his shield removes his personal threat, allowing him to harass at will without consequence. It’s a crappy mechanic to play against, but worse yet, it encourages players to be sloppy and lazy.

      The easy to play/easy to win champions actually hurt the game as a whole by allowing players to enjoy success without the skill to back it. One of the great things about this game is that the wide variety of champions can encourage players to get better. When I saw my first good Shaco I thought, “damn, I want to be that guy.” I was horrible with Shaco when I started, but now I’ve probably played 500 games or so with him, so I’m really good. It took time. My first game with Sona, I died too much. Every game after that, I dominated with her. It was easy farming, easy laning, and once I had a locket, easy winning. When those types of champions dominate games, players don’t learn how to gank, how to lane, when to run, when to dragon, any of it, nearly as quickly as they do with a difficult champion.

      Then there’s the simple fact that strong champions carry weak players to higher ELOs. I have run into at least ten different players who, after seeing their favorite champion banned or chosen (most often it’s Mordekaiser, I’m not kidding), say something like, “Shit man, they took my guy. Anyone wanna trade? I don’t have many champions.” That’s a problem. I expect players to be able to play a variety of champions and fill a variety of roles, just as I hope they expect the same from me. I know I’m a great carry, but I’m also a very good jungler, a very good nuker, and a decent tank/support player. I own every champion in the game. I can play every champion in the game with a modicum of success. The same can’t be said for the jungle Kaiser I played with over lunch who tried to gank MF middle by walking out of the mid-lane river brush with red buff and trying to auto attack her. No. No, that’s not going to work.

      I want to see thoughtfully designed champions, champions with very real, very high skill ceilings. Enough of the MFs and the Sonas and the Mordekaisers. This is the same issue I used to complain about with Sivir, but back in the day, Sivir was just about the only toon with a crazy-low skill ceiling and a crazy-high impact. These days it’s like a free-for-all on high-impact mechanics that require as much thought as relieving my bladder. Biological imperatives aren’t interesting, and neither are mindless champions. Make me a toon that I want to learn instead of someone I could play with my elbows and I’ll remain convinced that this is the game for me for the near future.

      Champions, Current Affairs, Editorial, league of legends

      Are tanks too tanky?

      November 8, 2010 /

      sadmummy_splash_3

      This isn’t exactly a revelation, but it’s something I’ve been seeing a lot in my past few games. I’ve spent a lot of games playing Corki and Tristana recently, and I’ve been horribly frustrated by how well a tank can scale.

      It actually seems to be a really complicated problem. At first I wanted to blame it on items – Warden’s Mail/Randuin’s Omen is crazy strong against ranged DPS. If you’ve ever chain-slowed yourself against a fleeing Mordekaiser you know what I’m talking about. But it’s more than just the fact that defensive gear (Randuin’s) is arguably much stronger against DPS than the DPS anti-tank item (Madred’s).

      There’s at least one more issue, though, and that’s the conflicted itemization between carry items and carry runes. Most DPS players run flat armor penetration runes, which are great early and later against casters, but actually kind of terrible against tanks. They reduce the total effectiveness of Last Whisper, which is a big deal. Last Whisper is still a great item, particularly for the cost, but the fact that you lose any effectiveness whatsoever kinda sucks. You also have to consider that most ranged DPS try to get an Infinity Edge as early as possible. It’s a huge DPS bump, but many of the popular tanks in the game are so good at farming that they’ll have close to 4000 gold by the time you get IE, which means they’ll probably cut your damage in half with items.

      The other thing that bothers me is that tanks also have incredible control on top of their high damage and survivability. Taunts, snares, stuns, slows, often a combination of these things, plus very respectable damage output with a Sunfire Cape or two.

      I actually miss Alistar these days. Yes, in his heyday he was obnoxious to play against, but it was because of his control and pretty much nothing else. Alistar can take a beating and a half, but you rarely had to worry that he was going to kill you right out. I always thought it was kind of cool that he could pop his ult and rush a turret to push, even if he wasn’t going to bring down your carry. It made him seem nuanced and interesting – a playstyle that was tough to master. The best tanks in the game now are great farmers, great gankers, excellent pushers, and huge damage threats. That’s not really all that interesting, and it’s certainly not very fun.

      Champions, Editorial, league of legends

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