As the end of Season One approaches, players have been scrambling to rank up for rewards. I’ve been in the mix myself, finally pushing through and securing gold late last night. It was challenging, but that also made it fun, and as a result I’m going to get some rewards. The funny thing, for me anyway, is that I don’t care much about the rewards. I’m not a Jarvan player. I don’t post on the forums much, if at all, but the simple fact that there is a reward associated with a tangible goal made the journey toward that goal a lot more compelling.

There was also an interesting side effect, which is where the whole “importance of achievements” thing comes in. As my rating edged closer to the 1520 mark for gold status, players were more helpful and level-headed. Granted, this is some circumstantial evidence, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that the attitude adjustment is due to the fact that players have a common goal beyond just winning.

It’s rare that I play with people who don’t want to win, but there’s really very little incentive to winning beyond, well, just winning. The ELO grind really didn’t mean anything. Players at every ELO rank complain that the players in that bracket are noobs and trolls. There’s also the fact that ELO is an endless grind. I can hit 1800 but what then? More games? Maybe make it to 1900? Maybe fall back down to 1600? There is no tangible reward other than bragging rights to make the ELO grind interesting.

This Season One reward is nothing more than an achievement system, and for me it worked pretty well. I know there are still a lot of players struggling with ELO hell, but let me reiterate this – getting out of ELO hell won’t make your games that much better. There will still be trolls. There will still be feeders. There will still be games you just can’t carry. I don’t think you’ll see a real shift in player attitude until Riot gives us something more than just a win and a ranking to worry about.

It’s that time again, and though I have a load of thoughts about the Season One features I still want to cover the changes to the actual game. The Season One patch actually brought a lot of champion and game changes with it.

The most notable change, in my mind, is the Cleanse change. Prior to the nerf, Cleanse was the skill I saw most often at the loading screen. Now, though, it feels almost useless. As of the current patch, Cleanse only removes CC effects, silences, and blinds. That’s right, ignite cannot be cleansed. Neither can Morgana ult, Kaiser ult, Malzahar ult, or any of the DoTs in the game. This is a huge buff to the characters that rely on ignite for their killing power (Kat, Ezreal, Shaco) and a big fat nerf for most carries. I should also note that Cleanse does not work on Exhaust, even though it’s a slow/blind.

Among other general game changes, Revive now grants 225 percent run speed as a diminishing buff on use. Ignite also got a small damage nerf. The jungle has been normalized a bit so that one side can’t get an advantage over the other simply by lucky dual-golem camp spawns. Twisted Treeline experience is a bit different now that Grez no longer grants global XP/gold for the killing team. It will still be important, but won’t snowball nearly as badly. Turret damage is also up a bit, and there’s been a change to the way inhibitors respawn. Inhibitors always stay down for five minutes now, and if all inhibitors respawn, the nexus and nexus turrets become invulnerable. Just bring down one inhib to win the game.

There’s a new item in game that should make junglers happy:

New Item: Wriggle’s Lantern
+35 Damage, +30 Armor, +14% Lifesteal
UNIQUE Passive: 20% chance on attack to deal 500 damage to a minion.
UNIQUE Active: Places an invisible ward with 1100 range sight and lasts for 3 minutes. 3 minute cooldown.

It’s a cool item, especially because of the ward. It is a little on the expensive side when compared with the marginally greater cost of Madred’s and the much more valuable attributes on Madred’s. Still, the free ward is really nice.

On to the champion changes – I’ll be writing a separate post regarding Xin Zhao so check back for more info.

Heimer got nerfed versus turrets again – concussion grenade deals 50 percent less damage to turrets and has a slightly longer cooldown. It won’t fix all of the problems around Heimer but it will probably make people cry a little bit less.

Kassadin has received a bit of a rework. His W skill no longer drains mana and instead restores it on every hit (good for non-mana targets). It also now has an active that increases armor penetration by quite a lot. I don’t think it fixes his problems – he has to blink in to serious trouble to deal damage and then can’t really escape – but it should help if you want to try hybrid/AD builds. He also gains more attack speed from his passive than before.

Kayle caught another nerf – no splash damage on turrets and a Divine Blessing move speed nerf. I think this pretty much cements her as a useless bag of crap unless you can get a legendary farm over your opponents. With a shorter ult duration and less tower pushing, she’s pretty much back to her pre-buff level in my opinion.

Pantheon received even more surgery. His stun now scales in duration so you should be able to avoid a little Heartseeker damage early. His spearshot is now more expensive/less-spammable, and Aegis has had its CD normalized to 12 seconds. Overall he should be a little more fun to play in the early game (no more eternal cooldowns) and a bit easier to avoid in terms of damage output.

The rest of the changes are pretty small – a slight damage buff for Veigar, TF PaC can’t be dodged, hit box spells like Feast, Fling, and Consume are a bit easier to cast and a load of bug fixes. For the full list, read up on the official forums.

I finally got my launcher up and running and popped into a quick solo ranked game to try out the new system. I was so glad to see that the ban system was indeed implemented for solo queue that I said out loud, “oh, thank god.”

My first impression – my god are people tryharding. Bans in my game were a little silly, but the first three picks were Shaco, TF, and Sivir. It’s actually nice to see some well-rounded comps for once, but I have a feeling I’m playing against some pretty low-ELO folks. The other team ended up a mish-mash of toons – TF/Sivir/Kayle/Warwick/Mundo, while my own team looked a bit better at Shaco/Ryze/Xin/Heimer/Kaiser. Not a lot of stunning but there wasn’t much need.

I really like the pick interface. It’s a bit confusing all at once, but the tips were helpful and once I got my brain around all the graphical prettiness it was a smooth system. In game, though, I was experiencing fairly heavy server lag. With a ping of just over 100 I had a full second of delay, in some cases more. I’m guessing this is due to severe server overload but it still sucks. Hopefully things will improve as the night wears on.

UPDATE:This is looking like a sure victory. I’m 8-1 presently and they have a level 7 Warwick while I’m level 13.

I know, I know – I promised to be online around 9:30 and here it is 10:15 and I’m still not in game. Trust me, I’m not pleased. My install has been…finicky. I’m getting launcher error after launcher error and I can’t seem to get the thing to finish installing.

We may be looking at a full install this evening. Not cool, Riot. Not cool.

I couldn’t really have planned this worse. An opportunity arose for my girlfriend and I to get out of town and go see family and it’s about the only chance we’ll have this summer so instead of playing Season One tomorrow during the day, I’ll be driving from North Carolina to Ohio.

As you can imagine, that’s going to delay my Season One coverage by a few hours. We’re leaving pretty early, so hopefully I’ll be up and running at my parents’ house by mid-evening and blogging as I go. Just so you guys know, I haven’t fallen off the face of the planet or fallen so in love with Xin Zhao that I can’t even spare the time to write.

If anyone wants to celebrate the launch of Season One in style, check in around 9:30 PM EST. I’ll be there, ready to play with anyone that wants to. You can add me at “The Wiggin Boy.” Hope to see you guys there!