My first five ranked matches went surprisingly well. My teammates were (mostly) competent and I walked away 5-0, feeling good. Number six was a little rough.

I queued up with Everett and we jumped into a game. At the loading screen it looked a little ugly. We had a Gangplank, which I never trust anymore, and our teammates were struggling to keep up from level one. The enemy Fiddlesticks was completely dominating the game, up to 17 stacks on his Mejai’s at one point – it was bad.

We got lucky, though. Around level 12 their Taric started to chain-DC, giving us a chance to farm up and come back to win. I felt bad for the other guys, but we really did have a better late game team.

Number seven was my first loss, made all the more frustrating by unbearable lag. From what I’ve heard it’s only the ranked queue, but the lag is such that at times I would see two second delay from the time I clicked to the time I casted. The other team had it too, but they were much tankier than we were and could last through the lag spikes much better.

I wouldn’t care nearly as much about the lag if it weren’t in ranked play. Ranked matches are meant to provide a forum for players to show off their best skills and have a ranking that reflects those efforts. When you introduce massive server side lag, you pretty much negate the chances of that happening.

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 seriously cannot fathom the answer to that question. Originally it looked as though Riot was going to let players self-rank for the early games. You would select a box, as it shows in the pic above, placing you with players who had selected similar ranks. Apparently that didn’t go through, though. I’ve been paired with people in their 20s in both games I’ve played so far. I’ve also had rage quitters on the opposing team in both games.

This really doesn’t make for a fun initial experience for everyone. I hate to be the guy crowing about ELO, but as mentioned previously, I’m in the top 3000 player base, potentially as high as top 1500. There’s no way I should be playing with level 22s. It’s not fun for me. It’s not fun for them. One of the things I love most about this game is the competitive environment and it’s totally out the window with an ELO reset.

There is a chance ELO has been marginally reset, meaning they may have just normalized everyone’s ELO a bit to give some players a fresh start, but still try to pair you by level and some measure of your skill. I will say, judging by the players I’ve seen thus far, it doesn’t look as though that’s the case.

Are you guys experiencing severe skill gaps?

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 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!