It was Eons ago that I lost interest in League of Legends. There were a number of reasons why and they were all personal ones. I had finally decided to try ranked matches and after winning my first 4 games in a row as Jungle Nunu anxiety got the better of me and I retired from Ranked undefeated. A fact that I still to this day bring up mockingly so my friends can call me an idiot and laugh at me. Also my win/loss ratio for regular matches was up by 20 thanks to several great matches and a few riding the coattails of a friends skills at playing Poppy. But it wasn’t all good times and I was getting a bit tired of the usual cocky BS that would always come from the opposing teams and my attempts at learning new heroes met with jeers from whatever team was unfortunate enough to be with me as I learned the basics. People needlessly being dicks for to their teams in online games isn’t new but I needed a break. We probably would have won the matches like that if we put half the energy from fighting each other into fighting the enemy team. But despite all this I still enjoyed LoL and since all my friends play it I knew I’d return some day, and that day has come. And my oh my have things changed.

Space Crocodile vs Overpowered jerk champ

I’ve got to hand it to the good people at Riot for being extremely proactive in trying to make players behave better and improve the overall online experience. This is a welcome change from something like any given Halo match on Xbox Live where people call you a faggot or a racial slur constantly, often times said by someone far younger than what the ERSB rating says the game is intended for. Thanks mom! But the PC crowd isn’t the same as Xbox Live and just like back in the days of DoTA 1 on Battle.net you don’t run into bigoted 8 year olds, you run into foul-mouthed and foul-tempered Russians and Brazilians! At least I think the Russians are angry, it’s hard to tell with them sometimes. Anyway I’m getting off point. LoL started by bringing in the Tribunal system where people were made judges to decide weather or not a reported play should be punished or excused. I thought it was a great idea but it seemed like 90% of the time I judged someone guilty and voted for them to be punished. Riot made us all Kira from Death Note. Since I left they also added a system to REWARD people for being nice and helpful in games with those little badges. I’ve managed to get a bunch of props for teamwork but very little for sportsmanship, I’m a bad person. Also I’ve noticed they turned off all chat by default. I’ve yet to feel a strong urge to hear what the opposing team has to say.

So kawaii…..

So it’s been nice coming back after all this time to see a lot of things changed and the overall gaming experience has been made significantly more pleasant. Now all the problems are with you people and your choices of who are the popular champs. Gross fat blob monster Urgot is the most unpopular champ? Unacceptable! Not every champ needs to be a super sexy girl with big hooters, that what you did to comics and that’s why everything’s so samey and uninteresting. I will yield that former ugly unpopular champ Trundle the Troll looks a lot better now with his redesign and his old skins look great now. But why is a little variety so unpopular? Leagues got a lot of champs now and still manage to do a good job with both them and the skins. And on that note they do manage to do micro-transactions right; the things you can only buy with real money aren’t things that are required to win and don’t give you an advantage over other people. It is interesting though that things like runes, which are almost required to be better at the game, can ONLY be bought with the fake currency you can only earn by playing. So good on that. Honestly my biggest complaint about the game is it doesn’t really teach you how to be better. I don’t know how they’d do this and someone as dumb as me requires things to be watered down to be pretty obvious to get through my thick skull. So far the majority of advice I experience on my own during game play is from my teammates insulting me for building something wrong or too early. I wish I could remember what they were mad about be doing wrong instead of just remembering that that person was a jerk and thus would spend the remainder of the match screwing with. Again, I’m a terrible person. The recommended items for characters now does a pretty good job of informing you of what to do if its a champion you’ve never played before by giving you a plan to follow, but doesn’t quite teach you what the champ is built around or how to do it your own way. And again, there is only so much hand holding Riot can and should do, I don’t want the game to go full on Cooking Mama style endless tutorial of course, but I’m very dumb with numbers and stats.

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A lot of this you guys probably already knew, after all LoL is apparently the most popular game in the world. And really thank god for that because I was afraid it was Call of Duty or some equally bland military shooter game played primarily by jerks.  Leagues probably going to be around for a while and it’ll be interesting to see how it goes, and perhaps even more interesting what will be next for Riot. I like what they are doing and have high hopes for them in the future. Hopefully they won’t let me down like so many other developers have.