My girlfriend and I are headed on a road trip up to Ohio this coming weekend to spend 10 days or so with our families. We’ve been preparing for the trip for the better part of the week so far – buying snacks for the road, doing laundry, all the boring stuff you do before a road trip. We also wanted to get together with some friends before taking off, which tonight meant dollar tacos at a local bar. They’re good too – way beyond fast food fare, replete with cherry tomatoes and a sprinkle of cheese.

A friend turned to me at one point during the meal and said, “I just read that League of Legends has 15 million subscribers. That’s huge, right?” Granted, he knows that’s the game I write about, but he’s not a particularly avid gamer, and certainly not a PC gamer. Still, he not only knew the game, he knew the numbers, and that speaks volumes more than any number could.

To say that League of Legends holds a special place in the gaming industry would be a gross understatement. At the beginning of the week, Marc Merrill gave us proof of the game’s success in numbers so big I couldn’t begin to break them down. My conversation over dollar tacos tonight gave me tangible evidence of LoL’s unique position in the industry.

I’m tempted to quote Spider-Man here, but I think I’ll just say this: keep earning it, Riot. Riot earned my loyalty to the game by honing one of the most energetic and aggressive new genres into an excellent play experience. To keep my loyalty, they need to give us something great for Season Two. I absolutely think they can do, but I’ve also been burned before, and that’s not a good feeling going into Season Two. Here’s hoping the game gets the support it needs. Here’s hoping that six months from now I have random people rattling off news stories about a game over dinner.

After finding that video this morning, I opened another thread called “Kennen Plushie” which, as you might have guessed, contains pictures of the homemade Kennen plushie you see. Yikes.

The best part, of course, is that it’s made by a girl, so most of the comments in the thread are something along the lines of “lol a gurl letz make out.” As weird as stuff like this is (I’ve never understood crafting stuffed video game characters), it’s also a sign that the community around LoL continues to grow and grow with increasingly dedicated fans. On the whole I’d say that’s a good thing for the game. Hopefully it means more money for Riot, which means they can hire more people to help resolve the scaling issues with which the game continues to struggle.

Sorry for the late post here today, readers. Between a couple new work projects and the iPhone 4G leak I was crazy busy today. Also, there hasn’t been much happening, but sometimes even that can be worth talking about.

I do feel like the community has settled into a pre-patch lull over the past week or so. New champions have been coming in such a flurry that it’s nice to hit that break in between patches where there just isn’t a whole lot going on. It seems to be a result of a few things.

First, Kennen appears to actually be in a good spot as I have suggested here and on the forums. Without many changes to the new hero people seem content to either ignore him or play him – kind of a perfect scenario. Second, Garen isn’t all that interesting. There was a lot of hype surrounding the other heroes and Garen just doesn’t have the same pizazz. I’m going to purchase him on launch and play him, mostly for my own curiosity and testing (and the fact that I have more than 10,000 IP banked and nothing to spend it on), but I doubt he’ll get a lot of playtime in my regular games. In my mind he’s a lot like Mordekaiser, with just a hair more utility from that silence. You know, I never realized how similar the two are until I wrote that (another post for the morning so be sure to check back).

Above all, I think the calm before the inevitable storm comes from the game’s maturation. From what I’ve seen the servers have been a bit more stable over the past week or so, and I’ve actually seen my ping improve by quite a bit in some cases. I hate to make the call too early, but I think Riot may have finally hit its stride. That’s not to say the game wasn’t succeeding – it absolutely was – it’s just that the success was outpacing development for a while there and we might finally be approaching equilibrium.