Category: league of legends (Page 153 of 163)

      LoL: Patch day woes

      March 16, 2010 /

      Ghost Gangplank.It’s finally patch day, and for real this time. Unfortunately this patch has one very serious problem – it can completely trash your installation. There are now several posts on the forums filling rapidly with reports of trashed installations after attempting a patch. I’ve experienced the same problem and had to reinstall, a long and painful process with the number of players forced to do the same.

      I don’t hesitate to say that I’m a little worried for Riot. The company is having huge scaling issues. Between the server crashes, the large number of bugs/exploits that come with each patch, and the string of nerfs and buffs that seem out of line due to a lack of testing, I can’t help wondering when they’ll catch up. The list of open positions is enormous and shows some gaping holes in current company structure. Here’s a short list of what Riot’s missing: Technical Director, Database Administrator, Director of Operations, System Administrator, Senior Game Designer. That’s a short list, obviously not including junior level positions. All of those gaps are presumably being filled along with other regular duties by the current staff.

      As excited as I was for this patch, I can’t help feeling more than a little miffed by all the problems. Oh, did I mention the Jax buff? Yuck.

      Development, league of legends

      LoL: Matchmaking or Solomid

      March 14, 2010 /

      SoloMid logo.One of the hottest points of contention in LoL is the utter lack of a competitive ladder system. The longstanding response from Riot is that “it’s coming,” but without any timeframe players are starting to get restless. Solomid.net popped up some time back as an alternative for high-tier players looking for scrimmages. It has since continued to grow and is now offering an ELO-based league for anyone that’s interested.

      Signups are simple – they’re using Quakenet IRC to run things with a bot to set up games based on the internal ELO. One of the big benefits to Solomid is that they use a draft system for official games, which is really the only way to have a skill-based competitive match in my mind. The downside, though, is that you’re playing most of your games in practice so you’re receiving reduced IP. There’s also the potential for the same kind of elitist community to pop up as did with TDA in DotA.

      The good thing is Riot is embracing the Solomid community. Whether it will fail or fly, it’s the best solution for players looking at a competitive option until ladder season starts.

      Development, league of legends

      LoL: The state of Gragas

      March 13, 2010 /

      Gragas the Rabble Rouser.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?

      Development, league of legends

      LoL: Fake patch day

      March 12, 2010 /

      Server is OnlineI 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.

      Development, league of legends

      LoL: Is the forum moderation system working?

      March 12, 2010 /

      LoL forum shotIf 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?

      Development, league of legends

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