About a half hour ago Guinsoo posted the tweet you see pictured. It sounds to me like there’s another emo skin on the way to pair up with Emumu. The real question: is it a skin for an existing champion or something for the new champ? Could it be a mummy skin for whoever is set to release next Tuesday?
I had almost forgotten about the Champions Online F2P launch today. My MMO fire has all but died out in the wake of my Minecraft discovery and the joys of playing jungle Nasus in League of Legends. I was browsing the Minecraft subreddit, though, and found a post that reminded me of the release. I jumped on Steam to sign up for the new service and download the client.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem possible to download the client from Steam. All you get is an executable file that then downloads the necessary files. I pulled the executable from the official website and started my download. Minutes later, my internet connection was all but crippled, but I was only pulling files from Cryptic at 16 kB/s. Yes, 16.
I’ll probably queue the client to download overnight, but that doesn’t make my day one experience any better. The free-to-play model is based on the idea that your user experience is good enough that people will want to pay for more content. So far, I’m not feeling great about Champions.
Riot recently announced that summoners will soon be able to play co-op games against computer controlled champions for IP. It sounds like a cool system, at least for getting back into the mix if you’ve been away for a while or want to test a new champion. More interesting to me, though, is the screenshot that’s in the current client for the service.
As you can see above, the picture shows what appears to be an updated client with some new features. For starters, there is a ‘Game Mode’ field. This could mean very good things for players who, like myself, enjoy a little variety. I would love to see all-random deathmatch implemented, and it would be interested to have an All Random All Mid option as well. The bad news is that the field is blank other than ‘Classic.’ Granted, Riot probably doesn’t want to leak anything, but that could also be an indication of just how far off these new game modes might be.
It’s hard to see much else. The new format is much more conducive to multiple maps in a list format, instead of the current grid button system the client uses to select game types. Any guesses as to how far away this client is? I’ll say six months.
This is coming a little late in the cycle, but here are the skins we can expect this week. Granted, the release of Vandal Vladimir, who I’ve also included here, might delay one of these releases.
Personally, I love that Lumberjack skin. It makes me really want to get back into Sion. I haven’t played him in a long time – before the Cryptic Gaze speed buff most likely – so maybe I’ll revisit him.
I’d like to see a little more creativity from the Xin Zhao skins. At some point Pantheon and Xin are just going to collide and share skins if we keep going for every historical, spear-wielding archetype out there.
One of the most visited topics on the official LoL forums is the relationship between champion IP pricing and Riot’s apparently insatiable moneygrabbing. It’s not a discussion I’ve ever been able to understand. People are complaining that a completely free game occasionally encourages you to spend a couple bucks to support development…errrrr….what? I actually made a post to that effect in one particularly long thread and got downvoted and flamed so fast you’d think I recommended making burgers out of babies.
But I digress. The real point here is that Riot is responding to community demand by promising that the next champion to release will release for a price lower than the 6300 IP the majority of new champions cost.
Here’s Moneypenny on the forums:
We are aware that we have had a number of higher IP priced champions of late. However, Renekton was an amazing Champion, and we’re confident that he will be worth your IP or RP. We plan to release the next champion at a lower IP price in order to be able to offer a variety of prices for you all. We hope you enjoy Renekton and we look forward to bringing you a lower IP priced champion in the next patch.
~Moneypenny
Update:
Summoners, our next champion is going to be very exciting and fun to play, but we want to ensure we have a mix of IP prices and so we have decided that she will be released at 3150 IP.
So there you have it – the next champion will cost 3150 and it’s a girl, no less.
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