I’m not sure what about Season One requires a cinematic trailer, but I’m glad Riot made one. I especially like the images of the summoners controlling their heroes. Really cool stuff.

A few months back it wasn’t entirely uncommon to see the servers go down every other day for long periods at a time. Sometimes they would come back up only to go down again. The trend has returned recently, though to a different degree. The 5v5 Matchmaking queue has been down frequently over the past several weeks, which often leads to Busy status for the server.

So what happens when Season One launches? We’re getting a new client and a bunch of new features, all of which encourages more people to play and people who have maybe taken a break from the game to make their triumphant return. In short, Season One will be the most aggressive server load Riot has yet seen. Will Riot be ready?

Honestly, I think not. I hope we see unparalleled server stability, but Riot has proven itself to be young and struggles with the scale of the game. That’s not necessarily a fault – every young development house with a wildly successful game is likely to have this issue. There just aren’t enough highly skilled and experienced developers and support techs in the wild to support this kind of rapid growth. On the one hand, we can applaud Riot for its dedication to quality – only highly qualified people are filling company positions. On the other, though, it means we will suffer some frustrating times surrounding the game’s most anticipated features.

Well, Riot proved me wrong…sort of. The League of Legends Season One will launch with much fanfare a week from today, along with the new hero, Xin Zhao.

Riot hasn’t released any more information regarding the inaugural season, other than pointing to the original Season One preview. Also, I should point out one very important word in Pendragon’s post – “targeting.” No guarantees on next Tuesday, folks.

I’m hoping Season One is as cool as it has the potential to be. I’ll mostly be playing the Solo 5v5 playlist, with the occasional 3v3 when I have friends online. I think it will be tough for me to find a solid 5v5 team, despite my active play schedule. I do tend to split my time these days, playing a few games here and there between a more active work schedule. I’m willing to bet most serious 5v5 teams will want to get a lot of playtime in over the next couple days.