This is a strange bit of news, mostly because Season One is over and done with. Riot released a second Season One Blooper Reel today as a thank you for reaching 260,000 subscribers on YouTube. I had honestly all but forgotten about the first Blooper Reel, though they both made me chuckle. The Nasus gag at the end of this one is definitely cute.

I’m hoping this means there’s a boatload of content around the corner that Riot isn’t quite ready to tease. I can’t really think of another reason to revisit a cute and fun video that ultimately serves very little purpose for a second time. July looks like it will be a big month for LoL news. We should be hearing about Season Two in the very near future, and the August issue of PC Gamer promises a look at 12 upcoming champions. That’s right, 12 – as in six months worth of champion releases all in one place. If I had to guess, I’d say we’re right on the verge of some major changes to the game. Bring it on, Riot.

Season One officially drew to a close this evening as Fnatic beat Against All Authority to take the Season One Championship. The game was an all-Euro match, thanks to some excellent play by aAa during the loser’s bracket semifinal round. aAa was able to win the match with a bit of an odd comp, thanks to some creative warding and incredible teleporting. It would be enough against Fnatic, though, who scored the final win in the second of the two game series against aAa.

I was a little disappointed to see the North American teams drop early. I’m not a TSM fan, but I though Epik had played really well for most of the tourney. The wheels fell off today, though. I honestly thought they might have been throwing the game with that double-AD, no tank comp. They are certainly a much better team than was shown today.

I haven’t yet had a chance to watch the Fnatic vs. aAa matches as I was in the car when they first aired. I’ve heard they were fantastic, so I’m hoping for some VoD action soon. In the meantime, Phreak and RiotEski put up a patch preview, which I’ve linked above. Lots of changes are on the way – check back tomorrow for a full roundup.

The Season One Finals at Dreamhack continued today with some truly extraordinary matches. Most of yesterdays matchups seemed to be fairly one-sided, match by match. One team would gain control of the map and exploit that advantage to the end of the game. Some of the matches had exciting moments and there were a few upsets, but the games were pretty short and straightforward.

Not today. Today the games were utterly insane. There were strange picks, odd bans, and epic, sprawling teamfights that ran from one end of the map to the other. There were Baron kills and counter Barons. It was a really exciting day, and we owed most of the excitement to the European teams, Fnatic (FN) and Against All Authority (aAa). Neither of the top two European teams looked very good yesterday – apparently Fnatic was missing a player and using a sub – but today they looked incredible. Fnatic showed up with amazing lane presence and some very smart bans against CLG, locking HotShotGG and company out of the tournament. Against All Authority dropped the first game in its series against TSM, but went on to steamroll to victory.

It was interesting that the tournament turned into a Europe vs. North America event, and it looks like it’s going to continue down that path. Tomorrow brings us to the semi-finals and the finals. As you can see from the bracket above, Team SoloMid and Epik Gaming will be fighting for the chance to face the loser of the FN vs. aAa game. That winner will then go on to face the winner of Fn vs. aAa. We could be looking at Europe vs. North America for the finals, but if TSM and Epik are off their game, North America will be out of the race altogether.

I hope you’ve had some time to check out the Season One Finals. I was really impressed with Riot’s streaming, as were roughly a million other unique visitors to the Season One microsite. I didn’t think I would get so excited, but it was really cool to be able to see the best teams in the world really showing their strength today. Seriously, if Fnatic’s Shushei doesn’t make you want to play Alistar, nothing will.

The Season One Championships are well underway at Dreamhack over in Sweden. I’ve been watching for most of the morning, though I did miss the super early games. It’s been interesting to see not only the different comps and bans, but also what Riot has done to livecast the event. At the peak, I saw some 180,000 people watching the games, which is really impressive for the first season of a video game.

Riot was also pushing its Twitter presence. I think the company is hoping to get “#esports” trending, though I’m not sure what sort of community presence there is on Twitter. Most of the time the #leagueoflegends hashtag is pretty sparse, but I would love to see a more active dialog happening there, even just for link sharing.

I think the best part of the tournament to this point has been the preview of Spectator Mode. It looks really nice, giving the viewer a ton of data about what’s happening on the battlefield. As we’ve seen from a few of the games, though, data isn’t everything. It’s true that at the end of the game the winning team typically has the gold advantage, but I thought Epik’s Doublelift was totally screwed when he got killed twice in the first couple minutes of the game against Fnatic. Miss Fortune also remained nearly 100 creeps ahead of Doublelift through the end of the game. Still, Epik somehow managed to pull a win (which, come to think of it, was Westrice’s Akali game).

At any rate, I’m really impressed with Riot’s commitment to making the championship an event for everyone, not just the players in the tournament. Have you guys been watching?

I think it’s safe to say that the League of Legends community is as restless as it has ever been. It has been more than half a year since the last major feature release, and promised feature updates remain unreleased months after their announcements. Several high profile players have made long forum posts with titles like, “@Riot why I’m losing interest in your game,” and, “Riot’s downward spiral.”

The thing is, I still have a lot of fun with League of Legends. My personal beef with Riot is that a game that once had as active a development cycle as I’ve seen has grown stagnant, relying on bi-weekly champion releases to keep the game fresh. I started playing the game in December of 2009. Just three months later there was a new map, not just in development, but in the matchmaking rotation. Somewhere along the way there was a client revision. Four months after the Twisted Treeline release came Season One, complete with ranked matches and a new client experience.

It has been more than six months since Season One launched. In that time, there has not been one major feature release to the game (sorry, tutorial modes don’t count). Magma Chamber was announced in September, as was an upcoming graphical overhaul. Both features remain unreleased. There is still no team/clan support. We still don’t have normal stats available, despite the fact that they’re being recorded. The achievements pane, which was introduced last July along with the Season One release, remains unused.

In short, it’s time. In fact, it’s past time. A major content update is long overdue for the game. Riot has had a lot of opportunity to expand the game and stay at the forefront of MOBA design. Without a serious release in the near future, I think we can reasonably expect the game to start bleeding players, either to other MOBA franchises or to different games altogether.