Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It hasn’t been a good week for League of Legends. Between all the ups and downs and incredibly long (multiple hour) queues, Riot’s flagship has been looking less like a MOBA and more like a theme park rollercoaster. North American servers, especially, have been out-and-out unavailable for hours at a time, and players, naturally, have felt quite a tingling in their pitchfork-and-torch regions. To its credit, however, Riot’s gone on record explaining the situation in full.

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PC Gamer have spied that LoL are sounding the alarm, with player passwords and dates of birth having been grabbed. You know the drill, get in there and change your passwords/when you were born, etc.

The best of the best of the e-sports types are flexing their brain-muscles and finger-glands to fight it out at the Intel Extreme Masters, right now. You can watch it streamed over here. Counter-Strikes are being struck, League Of Legends are being made legendary, and Starcraft IIs are being uhm stricken? Anyway, $55,000 is at stake.

I miss pro Quake 3, to be honest. Imagine if there was this turnover in physical sports: no more football this year, because everyone is playing polo now. That would be weird.

I was just watching this League of Legends champion spotlight (below) over at PCG and couldn’t help feeling a bit weird. On the one hand I’m deeply embedded in enough in the general jargon and conceits of gaming to basically know that the guy narrating the Xerath reveal is going on about, but on the other I am aware that I definitely don’t understand the significance of this six minute overview within the context of the game and its other heroes. When alien archaeologists are digging up our fossilised internet from a cold, dead Earth in a billion years time, I wonder whether they will bother to try and decode all the games we played. It’d only take one slip up of inference on Extra-Terrestrial Time Team to imagine that were a culture that did little other than hover over icons to compare the specifications of our virtual equipment and/or skill loadout against another. Hell, maybe that’s precisely what we’ll end up being, if League Of Legends gets any more popular.
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Any day where I have an excuse to make a large number of people watch a Sisters of Mercy video is a good day. You’ll find Andrew Eldritch waiting for you below. While the cane-wielding 80s poison-king has an apparent fondness for text adventures, what we’re nominally here to talk about is the new mode for free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena stalwart League of Legends.

Yesterday saw the much-ballyhooed launch of Dominion, a capture and hold mode which offers a new map and supaquick rounds of about 20 minutes. It’s all described in detail for you by Captain Explanation below.
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A number for you: $5 million.

A context for that number: the total prize pool for the tournaments dubbed ‘Season Two’ of League of Legends.
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The new game mode is called Dominion. It is a capture-point game mode fought on a new map called the Crystal Scar. Riot explain: “On the Crystal Scar players will battle for control of five capture points, holding them to damage their enemies’ nexus. The game ends when one team had seized control long enough to drain the opposing team’s nexus down to zero. Battles last around 20 minutes, and focus on high-intensity, player-versus-player combat.” High-intensity! None of this middle-intensity rubbish, right. No date for it yet, but presumably after PAX and GamesCom, because it’s being shown off to the press everyone at those events.

There’s also a trailer for it around here somewhere. Hmm.
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The League Of Legends noise machine has been loud this week, with a trailer for the new patch (below) which will nerf some of the more popular heroes, but also a big boasting stats release. Here’s what they said: “As of today, 15 million people have registered to become League of Legends players. Each month, over 4 million people log in to play. And on each day, 1.4 million summoners play League of Legends together.”

Four million! That’s even more people than read RPS each month. My startling powers of logic lead me to reason that this means that some of you lot must also play League Of Legends. You have one comment thread: explain its appeal to me.
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