I have a couple good friends that I frequently join up with to play Twisted Treeline. It’s not a perfect experience by any means, but it allows us to play a draft mode together and the games are relatively short. The best part about TT is definitely game length, but the map leaves an awful lot to be desired in terms of balance.

The time issue actually carries over to Summoner’s Rift for me. I rarely queue for 5v5 unless I know I have an hour to spend and even 3s can take 40 minutes if the game goes long. That’s a pretty long chunk of time to commit to a game, especially if it ends up being a loss. I’m sure we’ve all had games that are going so poorly that there’s no hope of victory but teammates hang on and refuse to surrender. Those types of games make me long for a quicker experience.

DotA had an “easy mode” toggle that could be used with each gametype, granting bonus gold per second and I believe extra gold for towers. It increased the pace of the game by allowing players to passively reach a level of farm more quickly, similar to the way Twisted Treeline generates per-second gold faster than Summoner’s Rift. I actually think it would be cool to have an “easy mode” playlist in League of Legends, a mode in which the XP and gold rewards were tuned so that 30 minutes looked like 70 minutes does now.

That mode wouldn’t work very well on Twisted Treeline. The 3v3 map just snowballs out of hand far too quickly. Games would likely be decided by the first fight (and in some cases, they still are). For Summoner’s Rift, though, I think it would give casual players more opportunity to fire up a game while the baby’s napping, in between classes, or just before heading to bed. Speaking of which…

This is old news, and it’s been sitting in my Instapaper just waiting to be posted. Early last weekend, Morelio confirmed on the official forums that Magma Chamber would be a 5v5 map and no larger, as some have speculated.

Here’s the quote:

5v5, with a goal being to allow more splitting up and skirmishing than SR.

At the outset, I think it sounds great, though one sentence can hardly get at the way a metagame will develop around that sort of map. I would love to see smaller skirmishes instead of the big teamfights we have today. It makes some of the marginal characters, like Nidalee and Swain, much more effective. Who knows if that will actually work.

As for release, I’d bet we’re looking at 2011. I don’t see Riot releasing the map, even for testing, in the midst of the holiday content. Release for testing in January, launch in March, Season Two in June?

I’ve been trying to spend a good bit of time in solo queue over the course of the weekend to see how things feel. There are still a lot of the same problems – bad players have been carried, good players are in brackets well below their skill level, there is so much animosity among teammates that it’s nearly impossible to organize people. My problem is that I want to see the stats that ranked matches provide, but playing the queue as a solo is painful.

I really think Riot should open up the solo queue to allow 3-man premades. There is really no reason not to. Among the queues, solo seems to be taken the least seriously. Even with three people, the chance for your other two players to be atrocious is high enough that it really shouldn’t be much different from the two man system.

I know there are normal games, but the fact that normal stats aren’t being tracked gives players too much flexibility to leave games without consequence. I still want to enjoy a competitive game with my friends on Summoner’s Rift and, unfortunately, the current system doesn’t allow for that.

Alongside the double IP weekend, Riot has released the Winter Games map to celebrate this year’s winter olympics. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s like a flag monster went and puked all over Summoner’s Rift. It’s actually pretty cool – I like to see developers constantly updating their games to fit the times.

The official Riot post for the maps also reminded me that you can actually get quadruple IP this weekend if you’re willing to part with a few of those Riot points. The company is offering its IP boosts for 20% off this weekend, and since the double IP is done passively, you can apply an additional boost for 4x the IP. For those of you keeping track at home, that’s like 500 IP per game. Time to get those rune pages going.

Source: Official Forums

When I opened the announcement forums and saw the words “Twisted” and “Timeline” next to one another I was ecstatic. Finally there was some news about the 3v3 map that we’ve long awaited. You know how this ends, though. There is no timeline, no new information. Just a nostalgic look at how far the map has come (which could actually be a good sign that it’s coming fairly soon).

It’s a fun read, and it does give me hope that we’ll see the new map by the time Spring rolls around. As I’ve said many times on this blog, I primarily play with two friends – we’re looking forward to the map for obvious reasons.

There is at least one more change to be made before the map is quite ready. Here’s the teaser for that change from the original post:

The Twisted Treeline originally envisioned needed a lot of work to bring it in line with the goals of the Design Team. In order to balance it to be on equal footing across the various champion types, to allow for multiple opening strategies, and to keep the game length under control, many different aspects of the map required extensive tweaking from the original design. Ultimately, the Twisted Treeline of today is a very different place than the one that debuted on October 21st, 2009.

And there’s more to come! The Design Team has authorized me to tease you all with the promise of at least one more, game changing feature that they intend to pull from their proverbial bag of tricks. Stay tuned!

Source: LoL Forums