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      Riven Skill List Announced

      September 11, 2011 /

      Come Tuesday (hopefully) we’ll all get a look at the newest champion to join the League: Riven, the Exile. Riot posted her skill list this weekend, which, as always, gives us a chance to breakdown her potential strengths and weaknesses. Let’s have a look.

      Passive – Runic Blade: Riven’s abilities charge her blade, causing her to do bonus damage on her next autoattack. Riven can store up to 3 charges, but only expends one at a time.

      Broken Wings: Riven steps forward and lashes out in a series of powerful sword slashes. This ability can be reactivated up to 3 times in a short period.

      1st Use/2nd Use: Deals damage to a small area in front of her.
      3rd Use: Jumps into the air and slams downward, causing a larger impact nova that deals damage and knocks nearby enemies back.

      Ki Shout: Riven damages and stuns nearby enemies.

      Valor: Riven dashes forward and gains a shield for a short duration.

      Blade of the Exile (Ultimate): Riven’s sword reforms, giving her a percentage multiplier on her total attack damage, extended range on her damaging abilities and basic attacks and the ability to use Wind Slash once.

      Wind Slash: While Blade of the Exile is active, Riven can reactivate the ability to emit a large shockwave that deals damage to all units hit based on their missing life.

      My first response on seeing her skill list went something like, “wow, that’s a lot of combo abilities.” I’m always a little wary of skill descriptions that read “does X, Y and Z.” Her Ki Shout and Valor both seem to be fairly normal (though I still hate shield abilities and this one is even paired with a dash – why do we need to be able to harass/initiate without risk?). I’ll have to see how Broken Wings plays in game. It will either be a cool combo ability or feel like a clumsy version of Three-Talon Strike. I’m hoping for the first. I’m also guessing the knockback will be something like Maokai’s Arcane Smash – nothing too big but enough to count.

      Her ult, on the other hand, sounds like a mess. It’s a steroid plus a missing-health-based nuke. It’s a little unclear what kind of range she gets on the active nuke, but from her pictures it looks like it may be slightly larger than a Talon Rake. I’m not a huge fan of steroid skills because I think they’re pretty tough to balance.

      Steroids are also somewhat opaque to opponents. When Vayne ults, it’s not exactly clear that she gains a bunch of attack speed and damage. I know she can turn invisible, and seems to be insanely fast. I know I seem to die more quickly, but it’s difficult to quantify exactly what it’s doing in the moment. By contrast, it’s pretty obvious how hard a Caitlyn ult or a Tibbers or a Karthus ult is going to hit just by taking a quick look at farm.

      I’ll hold off on too much judgement, though. I think the combination of a dash, a mini-dash, an AoE stun, and a knockup could be a lot of fun. As I write that out, though, and consider it with a missing-health AoE nuke, I can’t help but think she’ll be a frustrating opponent.

      Activision, FG LoL Mondays, Minecraft, Strategy

      LoL University Aims to Help Noobs

      September 9, 2011 /

      ryze_splash_5

      A couple intrepid community members have started up a new site designed to help gamers that are new to League of Legends or the MOBA scene in general get a feel for the game. It seems like a pretty cool service, though the website could use some serious work. What name could be more appropriate than the LoL University?

      The concept is simple enough. Veteran players sign up to be mentors and get evaluated by a “council” of players before they can take on students. New players can sign on as students by making a forum post stating their level, experience, and the things with which they need the most help.

      I’ll be interested to see if this thing takes off. Gamers are a notoriously arrogant bunch. It’s pretty rare for anyone I’ve seen to ask for help from a stranger. Learning a game’s mechanics and strategies is something of a rite of passage in most gaming communities. With a game like LoL or DotA, though, it takes a long time to familiarize yourself with all the different champions, items, and summoner spells. I could see where having someone to help you along might be nice.

      If you have some noobie friends that you’re looking to offload onto someone else (I understand that feeling, if only because I’ve been so many players’ noobie friend in so many games), point them to LoL University (they also have a thread on the official forums). Let me know how it goes, too. I’m curious what the experience is like, but I’m not sure I’m ready to sign on as a mentor.

      league of legends

      Riot Kills Mac Client, My Remaining Faith in Their Customer Service [RANT]

      September 8, 2011 /

      Note: This is the rant version of a post on communication I wrote earlier today. This is centered on Riot’s Mac Client shutdown. It is long. If you’d rather read suggestions for solving the problem, here’s the link to my earlier post.

      I’ve been trying to give Riot the benefit of the doubt over the past 6 months. I got a bit cynical for a while there, but the bottom line was that I was enjoying their game, a game that experienced such explosive growth that very few companies could possibly have maintained, and if I wanted to play with new friends they could jump in the game for free. All of that is great stuff.

      There were a few bumps along the way – we were promised things we never got. We were promised reparations for some customer services snafus and never got them. We’ve been promised new features for more than a year and they still aren’t here. But today a friend of mine sent me a thread that trumped it all and effectively killed any remaining faith I had in Riot as “the most player-focused game company in the world.” As of this past Tuesday, Riot officially killed the League of Legends Mac client.

      I’m not here to bitch about the disintegration of the Mac client. It had been unsupported for months, and though it ran, some fairly serious problems would pop up from time to time for many of the users. I understand that maybe it was just more work than it could ever be worth, or that it just might never get to an acceptable state. I get that. What I don’t get is the method Riot used to communicate the change, the way rewards are being handled, and the message Riot is sending to a portion of its playerbase.

      Forums have a couple problems, not the least of which is the amount of data they generate. Important posts get buried and can be incredibly difficult to find again, and that’s only for the forums you actually read. When a platform has been unsupported for months, chances are good that players stopped reading the Mac Client forum. Hell, who says they were even reading it in the first place? I know for a fact my brother didn’t read it, and the Mac client was the only way we were able to play LoL together since his PC died.

      Then there’s the timing. The announcement was made on September 2nd. The shutoff date was September 6th. That’s four days. Four days. That has to be a joke. It’s not just that the notice window is so small, it’s also that the consolation prize for Mac testers can only be verified within that window. Here’s a quote from Tamat’s post:

      Riot would like to give all active participants in the Mac beta a code that unlocks the Champions Pack, as a token of appreciation for the time they have dedicated to helping us evaluate the Mac client and our sincere apology for not being able to have the testing work out as originally planned. To qualify for the reward, you must have a majority of your logins come from the Mac client, and you must login to the Mac client and click on the Store button between Friday, September 2 and Tuesday, September 6.

      So if you aren’t actively reading the Mac Testing forum (which is probably most people) and don’t log in for four days, you get nothing but a giant middle finger to stare at. This might not affect millions of customers. This might not affect even a thousand customers. It will affect some, though, and the message from Riot to those players is loud and clear: We don’t want you. Despite the time you spent testing the stillbirth that was our Mac client, we’re only going to offer a thank you once, and only for four days.

      It’s pretty easy to imagine a situation in which players wouldn’t be able to log in for four days, or that they might choose not to. You know, like if they had been planning for the end of a season that was delayed without explanation. If they made the grind to Bronze or Silver or Gold status and then decided to check out other games while they waited for those rewards to come through. Gee, wasn’t that also a holiday weekend? You don’t think anyone may have been traveling or otherwise away from a computer that entire weekend, do you?

      Well, we actually don’t know the answer to that because, as far as I can tell, Riot hasn’t been back to that announcement thread since Friday. I say “as far as I can tell” because that thread is now more than 100 pages long, and I’ve only been through about 30 of them. I would use Riot’s DevTracker, but it’s actually more polluted than the thread itself (more on that in today’s earlier post). I would use CL Gaming’s redtracker, but I can’t filter for the Mac Testing forum because, again, no one reads it or posts in it.

      So I’m done. I’m done digging through thousands of forum posts for information that should be easy to find. I’m done assuming Riot knows best. Most of all, though, I’m done believing that somewhere Riot has a plan, that when the timing is right they’ll let us in on it, or that they’re actually in touch with their playerbase at all.

      Come at me, most player-focused game company in the world. Prove me wrong.

      Editorial, league of legends

      Riot needs a new communication channel

      September 8, 2011 /

      I’ve written about this in the past, but recent events have once again brought to light the fact that Riot desperately needs a new way to communicate important information to players. The forums just aren’t cutting it anymore. Important threads are getting buried, relevant threads are getting downvote-locked, and announcement threads are being relegated to obscure forums because of the giant LoL troll population.

      Community Involvement vs. Communication of Important Information
      Riot has always excelled at community involvement but failed at communicating important information to the community at large. That sounds contradictory, but there’s a big difference between community involvement and the communication of important issues.

      Community involvement includes responses to threads like “Break the game in one sentence,” or “@Riot my 1000th win.” Don’t get me wrong – Riot responses to these threads are valuable, but on a different level than the important information. Riot responses to these threads build community relationship and strengthen the tie players feel to the developer. Involvement makes us feel like a part of the Riot family, like we’re in on the joke.

      Communication of important information relates to things like the Riven patch delay, the delay of the end of Season One, the Mac Client shutdown, ELO decay, the AoE bug (sorry, official forum post has been deleted), Dominion, champion changes, customer loyalty issues, feature teases, and so on. You see what I’m doing there?

      There are countless issues that are important to some or all of the playerbase, but they’re scattered all over the forums, buried in the middle of long threads, written as secondary red responses and just generally difficult to locate. When handled improperly, these issues make the playerbase feel ignored, unappreciated, and give the impression that Riot is out of touch.

      A Place for Everything
      The solution is pretty simple – each communication channel should have a clearly defined purpose. The forums are a great place for Rioters to interact with the community. This is where we should see the comments about the new Kennen plushie, the requests for games with Rioters, the Songs of the Summoned, the contests, the podcasts, the new databases, the in-house leagues. All of these things add value to the community, but they need to be separate from the communication of important information.

      The new communication channel is the place for important, design/balance/timeline-related Riot posts. You could send me to the DevTracker, but the DevTracker is totally polluted with the Involvement posts I just mentioned. It can take hours to find the red post I’m looking for. We also have the Riot logo next to threads to which a Rioter responded, but that only shows the first response. Even third-party DevTrackers, like the one at CLGaming.net, don’t quite cut it. They’re definitely an improvement on Riot’s own, but they still don’t get the job done. We need one location for all the important, game-relevant information.

      Riot Should Consider a Blog
      My personal recommendation for the new channel is a blog. It’s what I know. It’s what I’m familiar with. It also has several technical advantages. First, the links provide information about the post. URLs to my LoL blog all contain the month, day, and year the post was published. In most cases they contain the title. For community sites, this is great. No longer will I be sending readers to “http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=1185192” to read up on the Mac Client news. I could send them instead to “http://blog.leagueoflegends.com/2011/09/02/mac-client-closing-september-6th.” It’s a slightly longer URL but contains a nice preview of what they’re about to see.

      Blogs also focus discussion. I don’t want to dig through 400 pages of comments about upcoming Orianna nerfs, the majority of which (the comments) are three words or less. All of that discussion now appears in one location and, with a robust comment system, the quality responses can be voted to the top, where they will be most prominent. Yes, some things will still get buried – no system is perfect – but it’s far better than the current system, in which not just the comments are buried; the thread itself disappears.

      Most importantly, though, a blog centralizes information about this game. Someone requests design change information? Send them to the blog. How do I tell my friends about the latest Dominion update? Send them to the blog. Tribunal changes? Blog. Patch delay? You get the picture.

      Conclusion
      Forums aren’t the only way to give your playerbase information. They are one way, and they have a best use. Be clear about the purpose for each channel of information, Riot. It makes your intentions, designs, and struggles more transparent to the player base. We aren’t asking you to rush deadlines or put out underwhelming products just so we can have them. We just want easy access to information. We just want to know what’s going on.

      Current Affairs, Editorial, league of legends

      Champ of the Week: Unstoppable Farm

      September 7, 2011 /

      fallenangel_splash_2

      One of the primary things that prompted me to choose Morgana this week was how much trouble I had playing against her with Brand. I mean, it’s Brand. He’s an unstoppable force right now, but Morgana was still able to slam me up against my turret, which meant I had to focus on my farming and not on my harass. When the lane did push, I could never seem to stop her farm.

      That experience remains basically the same on the other side of the coin. Morgana’s farm is seemingly impossible to stop, thanks to the damage on Tormented Soil. In mid, the lane is also small enough that my opponents have had to play very carefully to avoid slow attrition thanks to Tormented Soil ticks. I’ve also been able to withstand their attrition with the spell vamp from Morgana’s passive. It’s a nasty combo.

      I think I played a game against a Malzahar earlier in the week, and he seemed to do okay. Like Morgana, his farm is nearly impossible to shut down, though Morgana can use Tormented Soil to keep him a bit low.

      The only real problem I’ve had so far is landing Dark Binding. Some shots are no brainers, but it’s not a great skill for harassing when my target can see me. The particle is damn slow, which makes it damn easy to dodge. I actually remember commenting to a friend on Vent while playing against a Morgana that she couldn’t land a Dark Binding on me. Now I get it. I had forgotten how tight the hitbox is and how slowly the spell moves.

      I was going to say that getting into a fight to cast Soul Shackles is a problem, but it’s so easy to farm that you should be durable enough to make this a non-issue. If you’re behind you’ll have to carefully consider when to jump in and drop the ult, but for the most part, I haven’t had any problems.

      Check back this weekend for the Morgana Champ of the Week wrapup. I’ll be adding video to the post this week as well. In case you missed it, make sure you check out the Master Yi wrapup video on YouTube.

      Champ of the Week, league of legends

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