League Of Legends

Fawe_sl said:

Illaoi is kinda OP... I expect insta-bans soon

Random clip of my lane opponent getting bitch slapped... it's stupid damage.



And another from the same game:





Stats from a different game where I had most damage done & tanked and nearly the fewest deaths on the team too, building full tank.
Pantheon on my team had 2x more kills but I still out damaged...

This champ is braindead easy and just dumb.

Of course, just like with any tank, you still need a team behind you to win. Illaoi is like a new Nasus basically.

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Only played a few matches as her but I do enjoy her she is a really weird champ and some of her power may be people not fully understanding her counter play but she really hits deceptively hard especially with her tentacles out.

Tortfeasor_sl said:

Well, the new Poppy fits right into the tanky meta. She gets super tanky with her new passive and she doesn't really fit into that assassin role like she used to.

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And tanky poppy is a much easier thing to tweak and balance than the murder midget snowballing monstosity she used to be.

Fawe_sl said:

Tons of leaks and speculation on TSM's new support.. from Adrian to Piccaboo, and now Yellowstar. Of the three, TSM Yellowstar seems to be the strongest atm. Fnatic's website has his jersey on sale equiv to Reignover/Huni (whom are also gone from the team) and TSM's site briefly had it available to purchase a TSM Yellowstar jersey. Trolling from 1 team is expected but both teams having such suspicious activity is far-fetched.

TSM Yellowstar? : leagueoflegends

Yellowstar would put TSM over the top imo. The shot calling alone is exactly what they need.

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You have a social reject Dane, a Dane racist against Asians, an Asian with a slightly racist name, Doubelift
NICE.
Ohh and Hauntzer. Nobody cares about Hauntzer.

Waiting for Doublelift to turn Svenskeren into a not a fat fuck.

On paper, Yellowstar would be perfect for them. Moreso then most 'on paper' stats look, because they tend to overlook the shot calling. But, you never know how everyone will actually work together or not. LGD looked like gods on paper, but had a disappointing showing at Worlds.

I just want NA to not be the laughing stock of the professional LoL community. I'd also like SOMEONE to beat the damn Koreans at Worlds. If EU wins Worlds, but at least one NA team has a winning record against the field, maybe makes it to Semis too, that'd be fine with me. At least show some progress. If that NA team is this new TSM with yellowstar, hopefully it'll force the other NA teams to up their game in the process too.

how does a team with two Danes and Frenchman make the na less of a laughing stock? If they were the first na team to win anything relevant then it would just add fuel to the na has to import to win fire.

Because they practice on the NA server, against other NA teams, and are organized by an NA organization? We've had predominately korean teams and 'korean players come to NA and then not do nearly as well as before. Where someone is born seems to overly matter to some fans in this sport, no one says the Spurs had too many Euros or something when they won the championship the other year. It's the team, not the country of origin of the players, that people should be rooting for.
I'm saying that all of the NA teams, as a group, aren't competing on the worlds level. If SKT (the worlds lineup, before players left) had joined the NA LCS, that would force the others to up their game a bit, as they'd be getting practice against the best team consistently. If overall NA players are too weak, it's hard to recruit from within that pool as you really get better by playing against people better then you on a regular basis. No one is in the LCS from pwning bot games.

edit: I mean, if TSM won worlds, sure some people would say that NA only wins if they import.. even though if 3 american players joined a korean team and they won, korea would still get credit for bringing the americans up to their level.. but whatever. The problem is, when LoL esports got big, NA didn't have nearly as much experience in organizing teams in esports, we succeeded at some individual 1v1 games, but not team games. Korea, China and Europe were all ahead of NA in the whole gaming house/coach thing and we had to slowly catch up. But, as a result they've held a skill advantage over us that has been hard to crawl out of.

Yes and no to a couple of your points. People don't talk about the spurs players from a nationality standpoint because a.) The spurs have a long history and won't disappear after two bad seasons and b.) The state's has the only relevant profesional league from a fan perspective. TSM despite being the biggest name in lol exports can disappear if you have a couple of bad splits. If the big daddy can do that then what reason do we have to follow any team. It is a much safer bet to follow the stars.

I also dont buy in to the whole Korean esports infrastructure master race. I used to until I took a look at games that weren't starcraft or league. North American and western teams have won three out of the four major moba championships this year. The only one the east claimed was league. So if the game isn't made by riot it seems westerners and north America can do just fine.

Well to be fair, both League & Starcraft are both HUGE in Korea where any other MOBA has shit for players. I bet if you put the amount of hours & players in korea playing DOTA instead of League they would win DOTA championships too but apparently koreans just don't really give a shit about DOTA.

That was more of a hit at the Chinese who were included in his comment along with Korea. I just think it's a false assumption that Korea would win at any game if they only tried. We have two games they are good at, league and sc. That doesn't mean if they played dota they would be Gods. One Korean team made it to the international this yea. They were top twelve I believe but that was it.

This might come off as wierdly racist - and I mean it to be the furthest from that. More of a cultural comparison. Starcraft and League literally have mechanically ideal ways to play for huge stretches of the game, and this is something that fits the more rigid style of Asian learning repetition and even social expectation of what your role might be in society. Western and more American culture reward creativity and doing something no one else has done. Doing something that everyone else thought couldn't work will make you live on forever. The design of League and Starcraft create spaces where innovation is hard because the developers have an iron fist on balance numbers and they have clear notions of what is and is not allowed to happen in the context of the game. Both games heavily reward extreme mechanical precision. Dota, and CS:GO are much more player run spaces. The drafting mode for competitive Dota 2 creates an environment where this creativity can be expressed before a Dota game even starts that league can't mirror. Entire strategies exist that work entirely based on pick and ban order. Its in these niche parts of the game that the west has pulled ahead. We see players who are absolute Experts on very specific heroes. And two that have had a major influence on Dota 2 are Broodmother and Meepo. The Broodmother we see played so often now was entirely because of a Russian pub star approaching some Russian pros saying - this is how i play brood let me teach you. We have Notail and Weehaa - on arguably the two strongest teams - they both have incredible Meepo control. Meepo practice can really only be ground out in solo Q. You can't possibly practice him enough inside of a practicing drafting environment to master him, which is something the Asian practice environment lacks in their own words currently.

This is one small way I think league's paywalled cast creates a bummer environment at all levels of skill. Players might never even try a champion they would really love because of the cost benefit associated with making such choices. I think solo queue league might be way less rigid if players had more exposure to the entire cast equally vs only those who are proven winners in the LCS. The fact you can't freely use these oddball counter picks on a whim is in contrast to Dota.

Doesn't come off as racist. It just comes off as wrong. If the Koreans cared about dota, they would own dota.

League dominates the genre, so that's the game the Koreans are playing. Really no more complicated than that.

What heroes change a League game like Brood/Meepo?

Well the question would be does Riot want heroes that drastically changes the way the game is played ? Everything so far points to "no".

I remember a long long time ago you had 6 Turret + Tower Damaging Grenade Heimerdinger.
The game went from LOL to "Tower Defence", you put 6 Turrets just outside Tower range, bought Aegis (which boosted your turrets) and lobbed grenades until the Tower went down.
It was just insanely powerful (and annoying). It got nerfed into the ground.

There also was a Deny mechanics, that was removed from Gangplank.
Then there was Runeglaive Ezreal which changed the entire face of the game (Nerfed instantly).

The only champion remaining like this is probably Nasus due to kit scaling, but it's not as radical game changer like Old Heim was.

Commander Vimeseh_sl said:

Yes and no to a couple of your points. People don't talk about the spurs players from a nationality standpoint because a.) The spurs have a long history and won't disappear after two bad seasons and b.) The state's has the only relevant profesional league from a fan perspective. TSM despite being the biggest name in lol exports can disappear if you have a couple of bad splits. If the big daddy can do that then what reason do we have to follow any team. It is a much safer bet to follow the stars.

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I was only using the spurs because it was the first team that came to mind that had 2 euro 'stars' on the lineup for awhile and also were succeeding. There's plenty of other foreign players in the NBA/NFL/etc.. but it's irrelevant to the fans. LoL is still too new that people like the individuals more then the team most of the time. There are 'fanboys' of TSM and CLG, because they are the two oldest and most successful NA organizations. I'd say you were partially right, for the wrong reasons. In any sport, a team could do well for a year and then suddenly tank. Coaches leave, Players retire/traded/get older/etc.. and a championship team goes to mediocre from one season to the next. Some fans are fairweather fans, but there's still alot that keep rooting for the organization itself due to a history of rooting for the team. I grew up in S.Florida, so I still root for the Marlins/Dolphins when I watch, even though they've generally both been terrible for awhile now. In comparison, LoL esports has only existed for about 5 years, and supremely popular for about 3 now. There hasn't been time to build up a history between a fan and most organizations, with a slight exception for TSM and CLG.

I also dont buy in to the whole Korean esports infrastructure master race. I used to until I took a look at games that weren't starcraft or league. North American and western teams have won three out of the four major moba championships this year. The only one the east claimed was league. So if the game isn't made by riot it seems westerners and north America can do just fine.

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If the total prize pool for DOTA, over the course of a year, and the popularity of the game was similar to LoL, I'd bet they would start to be a bigger competitor in that game. Yes, the invitational has a big prize pool, but with less players overall, big endorsements are harder to come by as well. I've not heard of something like an LCS for that game either, but I admit I don't pay attention to it at all. Or, maybe it's just not popular in Korea at all, so they have no player pool to draw from. If it's not popular, there's no reason for the big organizations to throw re
In any game that is popular in korea, they have dominated. That's an accepted fact. I hope it changes in the future, but they were far ahead of the rest of the world in the esport world. We are just starting to catch up. I grouped China in there, but their edge on NA is much smaller, and depending on the game they don't really have an edge.

Fawe_sl said:

I don't play Dota so not sure how extreme those heroes change the game, but plenty of LoL champions warp the game around them:

Nasus: He's a ticking time bomb. Hard to play around. Do you deny him early with frequent ganks or do you try to win other lanes and end the game quickly? Can be very oppressive.

Tryndamere: Split pushing machine. Changes the entire team-fighting dynamic and forces attention.

Tahm Kench: Team fights completely altered.

Shaco & Evelynn: Stealth champs that completely change your vision plans. Must play a lot more passive. Completely alters laning phase. And now Season 6 doesn't even allow you to see them when you're at 6 items late game.



Again, maybe none of this is as extreme as your 2 examples, but these champs do change how a game is played simply by existing in the game. Everyone is affected in some way. There's probably a few other champions that you could make a case for as well.

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Having played both a ton, league has nothing on par with meepo or brood for game effect. Nasus and tynd are pretty much weak versions of what every dota 1 position hero becomes after a certain amount of farm. Eve is closer, but she is a pale version of dota stealth heros that are mostly perma invis until ether you dust for them or they eat your face. Brood is actually one of those stealthy types, although that isn't the sole reason a game will center around her. league champs being more vanilla is not really a bad thing because it's a design philosophy to not let any champ be too outside the box as far as league is concerned.

EmiliaEQ_sl said:

Well the question would be does Riot want heroes that drastically changes the way the game is played ? Everything so far points to "no".

I remember a long long time ago you had 6 Turret + Tower Damaging Grenade Heimerdinger.
The game went from LOL to "Tower Defence", you put 6 Turrets just outside Tower range, bought Aegis (which boosted your turrets) and lobbed grenades until the Tower went down.
It was just insanely powerful (and annoying). It got nerfed into the ground.

There also was a Deny mechanics, that was removed from Gangplank.
Then there was Runeglaive Ezreal which changed the entire face of the game (Nerfed instantly).

The only champion remaining like this is probably Nasus due to kit scaling, but it's not as radical game changer like Old Heim was.

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there have been tons of champs which made the game revolve around them. Most have been nerfed/homoginized.

atm, just trist probably? Due to charge working on towers. Even Nasus as a time bomb isn't really that game changing. plenty of champs can do similar.

I would almost say the average "game effect" of a League champ is higher than that of the average dota champ, but dota has much bigger extremes as well. Champs like TF, Shen, Eve, Rumble, Donger, Soraka, Blitz, Thresh, Karthus, etc. all have significant impact on decisions you at leastshouldmake during the game. But yes no League champ has as crazy a design as Meepo.

I think Trynd/Nasus just fall in to the same category as Master Yi, Yasuo, Riven, even Vayne to some extent, and their answers are all similar. They feel like alternates of the same strategy rather than representing distinct strategies.

It's the hard role/lane forcing that Riot has embraced as it's design philosophy. There's no way the games can be as diverse because the champs are created in smaller design spaces.

Both moba's but hugely different dev choices. If you are a MtG player, Dota2 is Vintage and LoL is Standard? Disclaimer: not making a value judgement, I've played both etc etc