With the arrival of Season Two, Riot has released the Ranked Team feature. Through the Summoner profile pane you can now create and join Ranked Teams, all of which will hold a separate ELO. It’s a nice feature for allowing players to get ranked with various groups of players at various skill levels. The teams come free-of-charge; all you need is an account with Summoner level 30.
Each Summoner can be a part of up to five teams, which seems generous. I know I definitely don’t play with enough people on a regular basis to get on five teams. It’s pretty nice to have the extra headroom, though. Riot also added a special “Ranked Team Draft” to the invite screen, making it somewhat easier to invite just the people from your team.
Along with Ranked Teams, Riot has put together a competitive minisite for all the competitive news. Check it out when you have a chance.
Among the features League of Legends is missing, the ability to queue with multiple teams has to be up near the top. I’m not a particularly social player in that I don’t find myself queuing with full teams in ranked. I usually go for the 2-3 friends in normal kind of thing. For a lot of players, though, a full premade is the way to go, but with friends at different skill levels the ELO system just doesn’t work.
Enter the new Team system. In Season Two, players will be able to join teams and maintain a separate ELO rating for each team in which they participate. It’s a great system, something used by many RTS franchises. Obviously it has its pitfalls – a high ELO team can just make a new team at any time and stomp through the lower ELOs – but this is definitely a nice step forward for Riot and League of Legends.
I’m wondering if this will also include some new stat tracking features. It would be frustrating if we could participate in teams without any real way to see each team’s individual match history. Hopefully we’ll not only be able to see our own histories but also have the ability to look up teams and see their histories as well. It would be nice to see the types of comps other teams are playing, provided the metagame makes a little shift.
This is a great feature announcement. Good on you, Riot.
Also, I found the awesome header image at the FYLoL Tumblr.
I was worried this would happen. As the end of Season One drew to a close, I had a goal in mind: I wanted to get gold rating. There wasn’t really a personal reason, either. There was a reward; a reward that I wouldn’t use very much, but still, it was something I could point to and say, “I got that because I did X.”
It was a grind, too. I had to play a lot of games to hit gold. The grind pretty much killed any desire I had to play Lee Sin beyond the finish. I got incredibly close to the 1520 mark and then dropped ELO several times. But still, it was a goal. It was something to shoot for. It was a lot of fun.
Fast forward six weeks or so and I’m having a little trouble enjoying the game like I used to. There aren’t any in-game goals for me to strive for. I could try to rank up my solo queue ELO, but to what end? More ranking up? Not exactly a compelling sales pitch.
I know League can’t always be my number one game, but I do think there’s a lot more to be done to keep veteran players interested in the game. The Jarvan skin was a great idea – why not produce more skins that could be tied to certain achievements. Win 250/500/1000 ranked games, get a cool skin. Play 10 ranked games, get a one-time, one-day IP boost. These kind of things don’t cost a lot of money to put into the game and encourage more players to try more things. My assumption, which I suppose could be totally wrong, is that the more time players spend enjoying games, the more likely they are to spend on content.
Even if that assumption can’t be backed by data, it certainly breeds goodwill with the playerbase. Why not reward players for spending time with the game?
What are your thoughts? Are you still going strong with LoL or are other games starting to steal your attention. Has Dominion been enough to keep you coming back?
Things have been extremely quiet at Riot headquarters of late. The forums have been utterly devoid of red posts concerning Dominion, the end of Season One, and the beginning of Season Two in the last week or so. This wouldn’t be all that shocking – Riot has always struggled to provide good communication about timing – but we had been hearing about those things and in quantity for the three weeks or so prior.
From the time Dominion was announced until about three weeks ago, Riot was pumping the Dominion hype. We got the Dominion minisite, gameplay vids at the major gaming news outlets, plenty of screenshots, and chances to play the game at several industry events. We saw Rioters play pros, Rioters play Rioters. We got excited.
Next we were told about the end of Season One and the rewards that end entailed. For the first time since the launch of Season One players had something more than just winning/losing/farming IP to worry about. It was a great announcement, and hopefully a challenge a few people enjoyed as much as I did.
This past week, though, it was dead silent. I thought that meant Dominion was on the way. I thought that meant we’d see it before Q4 of this year, which is when every other game I’ve been excited about for the past several years is coming out. Sadly, that’s probably not the case. RiotRara finally posted in the forums today regarding the timing of Riven and the patch that follows her.
Riven, and the changes within her patch, will be coming next week. As we previously announced, Season One will conclude with our next scheduled game update. Therefore we will also be calculating the Season One Ladder rankings and rewards during downtime for this patch.
Additionally, there will be an extra week (3 weeks total) between the Riven patch and the patch to follow. This extra time will ensure we bring you the best content possible in League of Legends.
I can’t imagine “best content possible” is code for anything other than Dominion. Three weeks from next Tuesday is October 4th. I’m not impressed, Riot. Not at all.
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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.
