Tag: afkers

      LoL: Dealing with losing streaks

      April 7, 2010 /

      Summoner's Rift defeat.A couple weeks ago I went on a tear. I had been somewhere around 50 games over .500 for a little under a month and for whatever reason it seemed the stars had aligned. I was getting matched with smart teammates who could communicate and move as a group. Even when my teammates left a little to be desired, my opponents were always in far worse shape. My win count climbed and climbed until I plateaued sometime last week at 69 games up.

      I should have seen it coming. Over the course of the past two weeks I’m now down 16 games, back to 53 over even. I know, that’s still 3 games positive, but when the swings come in batches of 15 games or so, I don’t really know what to do. As it stands I’m about as frustrated as I’ve ever been with the game. As my friends and I like to say, I seem to be losing the teammate lottery time and time again.

      Once my score dropped below 60 games up, I decided I would go tryhard, choosing only the strongest toons for the map at hand. I rolled a bunch of games as Jax and Poppy on TT and had my first Twisted Fate match on SR in a long, long time. None of it seemed to matter. I carried the SR game handily, with 2 legendary streaks and a handful of turret kills. The rest, though, were mostly losses. I’ve had teammates AFK, teammates leave, teammates who start fighting with one another before the game even starts. The latest trend is teammates who refuse to get survivability. Two games in a row I played with an ally Morgana. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but Morgana dominates on TT if she’s played well. The spell shield alone is enough to make any DPS champ climax with glee. Throw her ultimate down in a team fight and you’ve got nearly guaranteed victory.

      There is one caveat: she has to live. You know what doesn’t help her live? All the blasting wands my teammates keep buying. Then there was the Ashe that refused to buy any health items against Sion, Nasus, and Shaco. I’m sure you can imagine how that turned out.

      By this point I’ve given up on the tryhard comps. My last game I played Yi. I was legendary. We still lost because of the aforementioned Ashe. I’ve got my fingers crossed for some good action in the next round of games I have time for. I’ll be playing whoever strikes my fancy until I can turn this ship around. At the very worst, I figure my ELO will drop to the point that I can just steamroll some opponents and hope that the streak will turn in my favor.

      league of legends

      LoL: Patch Day

      February 24, 2010 /

      Vandal Jax.It’s patch day again, bringing us a slew of changes to some of the less popular heroes, a much needed (though still lacking) TF nerf, and the new champ, Mordekaiser. The patch also gave us one highly undesirable feature: queue dodge penalties. Overall, though, I’d say I’m pretty happy about this patch.

      My favorite part so far has been the Jax remake. I’ve played two games with him and he seems like he’s in a good spot. The extra HP makes a big difference and the Leap Strike change gives him a nice escapability buff. He’ll still struggle at times, as all melee DPS does, but the changes make a significant difference. Also, that Vandal skin is badass.

      I’ll be taking a look at the Warwick changes later today. I had a Warwick in one game, but he was awful so I won’t say he’s a good judge of the situation. The mana changes alone should be a boon.

      The TF nerf seems good, though it doesn’t address his real problem – map control. I played a game as Jax with Mundo, Ryze, Pantheon and TF in which our Ryze went AFK around level 9. We still stomped them, mostly because our TF held his port for the perfect moment in just about every situation. Sure, he does less damage, but when he’s stunning people consistently and turning even fights into landslides, I can’t help but think they nerfed him for the masses but he’s just as good for skilled players.

      Mordekaiser actually looks to be a lot of fun. The fact that you can cast his shield on creeps makes him a bit like Dark Seer from Dota, though it’s only allies. That would be an interesting change if they feel he isn’t laning well. He does seem to harass decently enough, and his ult is pretty cool. I’m not going to spend the RP on him and all my IP has gone into runes recently, so I’ll have to wait for a free week to give a real analysis.

      Lastly, the queue dodging penalty. This thing is so stupid I hate to even write about it. Every time you leave during champion select you get a leaver mark on your account. The first leave gives you a three minute queue penalty. The second brings it up to 10 minutes, though that timer does reset 8 hours after your first leave. I can’t understand why they would implement this when there are so many legitimate reasons to leave at champion select and no options to deal with those issues. AFK summoners are just part of the problem. There are also team composition problems, and the fact that matchmaking will still pair you with people on your ignore list. Add to all of this the fact that people are still dodging like mad and it’s pretty clear that a dodge penalty is about the worst solution Riot could have come up with.

      You can find complete patch notes in the announcements forum.

      Development, league of legends, News

      LoL: Queue dodgers make the dodging even more worth it

      February 13, 2010 /

      Evelyn, the noobmaker.My friends and I have a new rule: no Heimer, no Eve, period. It held guideline status, but there was always some occasion where our team comp looked good, despite the potential for a noob Heimer or Eve and we would let it slide. Every time we made the exception, or so it seemed, we would lose. The player would be just as bad as we expected and our team would fall apart by the 30-minute mark. The same thing happened last night, which is why we’ve taken that guideline and bumped it up to constitutional amendment levels. In the current matchmaking system I will no longer play a game with Eve or Heimer in it.

      Say what you will about queue dodging, I value my time in the game too much to spend 25 minutes watching teammates feed, and as experience dictates, Eve and Heimer players are noob players the vast majority of the time. I don’t have fun trying to drag them along behind me, giving encouraging advice that they just won’t heed. Instead, I’m always going to try to convince that player to switch toons or I’ll be dodging the queue.

      There are a lot of other people who obviously feel this way. Most games I have to wait through two or three queue cycles before I can play. For the most part, it’s not something I mind, if only because I can understand the mindset. As queue dodging becomes more prevalent, it becomes more beneficial to my sanity to dodge as well. When it takes five to ten minutes to find a game, I want that game to be competitive, not a landslide in either direction. It’s a vicious cycle, but one that’s become almost necessary for my enjoyment of the game.

      I would love if this was not the case and there is a simple solution: fix matchmaking. Queue dodging, for me, is a symptom of the poor matchmaking system. I would be totally fine playing with Heimer and Eve if I was confident my teammates were at least decent players and hopefully aware and ready to compensate for their respective champion’s weaknesses. That’s just not the case, though, and until I start to see significantly better players in my queue, I’ll be dodging the champions most prone to noob players.

      league of legends, PC

      LoL: The community take on queue dodging

      February 10, 2010 /

      Rawr-pendragonThe forums have been riddled with posts about queue dodging for as long as I can remember. Riot has made official that it will be penalizing queue dodgers with a time limit between joining games. As someone who admits to queue dodging, albeit rarely (the queue dodging, not the admission), I can’t think of a worse thing for the game. The matchmaking system is so far from providing reasonable results that the player has to have some option for managing his/her teammates. I’ve included my own post below but be sure to keep up with the thread.

      My problem with the queue dodge penalty is that it prioritizes finding a game over quality of gameplay. The simple fact is that matchmaking is not accurate enough to ignore player discretion when it comes to team composition. Why should players be encouraged to play games with teammates who have a clear misunderstanding of the game.

      Case in point – I joined a lobby the other day in which my team was a bad mix of casters, including a Heimerdinger (sorry Heimer players, the vast majority I see are poor players) and a Katarina (with rally, which, unless she specced for it, won’t help this team). I mentioned our need for a tank and offered to play one if we could switch someone out for ranged physical DPS. Katarina insisted that she was both physical DPS and a tank. I tried to reason with her and explain the mechanics and was met with, “Do you even see my character?!?!?”

      As others in this thread have mentioned, the time wasted by queue dodging is regrettable, but the time spent playing a game with severely under-skilled players is typically at least 25 minutes for all players involved. I’d much rather spend 10 minutes finding a decent game that might last 35-45 minutes than 3 minutes finding a game I will not enjoy.

      As for the “artificial ELO inflation,” you have to realize it’s a two-way street. As matchmaking functions now, I would guess that my ELO is artificially seesawing, based on the skill level of my teammates. One game everyone plays as I would expect and at least attempts to coordinate. The next I watch as a player on my team dies 3 times in 8 minutes – this is someone with a fundamental misunderstanding of the game mechanics. My only assumption can be that a similar player is on the opposite team for some sort of balance, in which case my loss (if my team happens to feed more than the other) unfairly penalizes my ELO because I was “beaten” by a player with a much lower ELO than my own. I’m then bumped down to playing both with and against players who are below my skill range, hoping my team manages to die less and we pull out a victory, which will likely not award the same amount of ELO I’ve lost to get to this point.

      My solution is that we leave queue-dodging and reevaluate the lobby system. I realize this is something you have probably already discussed and others have obviously mentioned. Really, though, as the game grows it seems it would get easier to fill that one spot than drop all players and restart the search. In many cases I’m seeing the same 2-4 people in my lobby queue dodge after queue dodge. Wouldn’t it be easier if we just never left?

      league of legends, News, PC

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