Category: league of legends (Page 128 of 163)

Are Riot’s servers ready for Season One?

Server Fire.

A few months back it wasn’t entirely uncommon to see the servers go down every other day for long periods at a time. Sometimes they would come back up only to go down again. The trend has returned recently, though to a different degree. The 5v5 Matchmaking queue has been down frequently over the past several weeks, which often leads to Busy status for the server.

So what happens when Season One launches? We’re getting a new client and a bunch of new features, all of which encourages more people to play and people who have maybe taken a break from the game to make their triumphant return. In short, Season One will be the most aggressive server load Riot has yet seen. Will Riot be ready?

Honestly, I think not. I hope we see unparalleled server stability, but Riot has proven itself to be young and struggles with the scale of the game. That’s not necessarily a fault – every young development house with a wildly successful game is likely to have this issue. There just aren’t enough highly skilled and experienced developers and support techs in the wild to support this kind of rapid growth. On the one hand, we can applaud Riot for its dedication to quality – only highly qualified people are filling company positions. On the other, though, it means we will suffer some frustrating times surrounding the game’s most anticipated features.

Season One launches July 13th!

Season One client.

Well, Riot proved me wrong…sort of. The League of Legends Season One will launch with much fanfare a week from today, along with the new hero, Xin Zhao.

Riot hasn’t released any more information regarding the inaugural season, other than pointing to the original Season One preview. Also, I should point out one very important word in Pendragon’s post – “targeting.” No guarantees on next Tuesday, folks.

I’m hoping Season One is as cool as it has the potential to be. I’ll mostly be playing the Solo 5v5 playlist, with the occasional 3v3 when I have friends online. I think it will be tough for me to find a solid 5v5 team, despite my active play schedule. I do tend to split my time these days, playing a few games here and there between a more active work schedule. I’m willing to bet most serious 5v5 teams will want to get a lot of playtime in over the next couple days.

Xin Zhao ability list

I’m going to keep this short and sweet in honor of the holiday weekend. As spazticmonk pointed out in the Xin Zhao preview post, his full ability list is up over at Leaguecraft. Here’s what they’re saying:

Tireless Warrior (Passive):
Xen’Zhao is healed for 30-70 hit points for every 3 attacks that he lands. This amount increases by 5 every 2 levels.

Battle Cry:
Xen’Zhao passively increases his attack speed and can activate this ability to further increase attack speed and lower his ability cooldowns with each attack.

Three Talon Strike:
Xen’Zhao’s next 3 standard attacks deal increased damage, with the third attack knocking an opponent into the air. Deals double damage to minions.

Crescent Sweep:
Xen’Zhao rapidly spins his halberd around him, nullifying incoming missile attacks targetted on him and dealing damage to all enemy units near him.

Audacious Charge (Ultimate):
Xen’Zhao charges an enemy, dealing damage and slowing it and all other enemies in the area. Audacious Charge increases Xen’Zhao’s armor temporarily and lowers the cooldowns of all of his abilities.

From the sound of things his playstyle will be pretty close to Akali with a little more focus on survivability. More on this later. Hope everyone is enjoying the weekend.

And the next hero IS…another melee champ [Xin Zhao]

Is that a cattle prod?

Riot’s announced the newest hero by way of a Dev Diary at PC Gamer and it looks like we’re getting yet another melee character. Despite that little setback, Xin Zhao sounds pretty interesting and has the thing that, in my mind, sets good melee apart from the bad: a way to close the gap.

The actual information about Xin Zhao is pretty limited. He’s a martial-arts-inspired spear wielding fighter with some kind of initiation power and a slow. Zileas put it this way:

We came up with this design build because we wanted to capture the spirit of the free-moving fighters you might see in martial arts films. Xin can move freely about the battlefield, drawing power from attacking his enemies, so he can act as an initiator and maybe even as a tank, while still able to deal lots of damage very quickly. One problem we struggled with was how to make Xin Zhao able to initiate but not be a full tank. We tried a number of iterations on this, trying out different defensive components to his Audacious Charge and ultimate. In the end, I think we came up with a really strong build that our players are really going to enjoy.

As for his abilities, this is all we know so far:
Three Talon Strike: (cornerstone ability) A series of attacks that culminate in a powerful move that inflicts considerable damage to his opponent.
Unnamed ability: Increases his attack speed and causes all of his attacks to cool down his other abilities much faster than they normally would.
Audacious Charge: Quickly charge an opponent and slow them down.

Not the best descriptions in the world, but it is nice to see that he’ll be able to jump into a fight from a distance, a key component to keeping melee from going the way of Olaf. With a gap closer and a slow, he pretty much fits my criteria for a solid melee champion. He also has built-in attack speed increase, which gives some item flexibility for damage or survivability.

Perhaps the biggest news of the article is that Xin Zhao will launch with Season One. A lot of people are speculating that S1 is close, but I think it could be as late as the second half of July, if only because I don’t want to get my hopes up. From the sound of this article, Xin Zhao is pretty much done, but then why not list his other two abilities? Then there’s the holiday weekend to consider, though development schedules often ignore that kind of time off and offer comp time after major features launch. It really could go either way. I’ll err on the side of caution and cast my vote for the week of the 18th. Prove me wrong, Riot. Prove me wrong.

How much LoL lore do you know?

Map of the League.With a game like LoL it’s hard for me to remember that there’s an attempt at some sort of backstory for the characters and locations. It makes me wonder, are any of you guys into that stuff?

When I played WoW I got marginally interested in the lore. Every now and again it was nice to forget about the grind and focus on the motivation for doing a particular quest or dungeon. The Nesingwary quests were a lot of fun in Outland and Northrend (the STV ones were pretty awful). LoL doesn’t cater to that kind of “motivation” right now. When draft mode launches I guess you could pit warring factions against one another.

There’s a thread toward the top of the General Discussion forums that draws on the LoL lore to request new Noxian heroes. Anyone play with this kind of conflict in mind?

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