Pick Order Declared Official Champ Select Rule to Follow

Riot has finally done it. They have flat out, officially said that pick order trumps call order in the League of Legends crap shoot that is champ select.

Will this solve everything? Nope. Will I have more to say on this? You bet. For now, here is the link to the official announcement. If you plan on solo que’ing any time soon I strongly recommend you bookmark the living crap out of the link or at least give it a good read.

This bit from Riot Lyte talking about what’s wrong with champ select is also a valuable read. If you’re like me, however, it will definitely make you sad that so little has been done to address what is clearly an environment with a lot of potential for toxicity.

This announcement probably won’t save you from really determined trolls and ragers, at least not until the good word has been spread around a bit, but it will be worth it if it convinces even one of your teammates that you are in the right and encourages them to not give you grief.

Age of Empires II HD and Me

Just the other day I received quite the blast from the past. I had heard that a new, high definition version of Age of Empires II had hit Steam, and to be quite honest, I was in no rush to pick it up.  What always seems to happen when you are trying to convince yourself not to buy a game? You watch a friend play it, and it becomes all that you want and desire. Now that I been given it, I cannot really say that I find this SHINY NEW HD RELEASE to actually be that impressive, but it has led to my taking a second to think about how the Age of Empires franchise is responsible for who I am as a gamer.

Today, when a game attracts me I can usually give you a couple of quick reasons why it attracts me – except for League of Legends which has led me to simply believe I am a masochist. Back in 1997, a young 2hp did not really have the same motivations that this one does today. He didn’t have a set list of things that he looked for in games, so what was it that first got that crazy kid to play AoE? I had to think on this one for a second. Yes, I have always been a huge history nerd, and even then, I was well on my way to loving Greek and Roman history. This would have sealed the deal, but it was not my young self’s reason for first playing the game.

No, what got me into AoE was a friend of mine named Michael. Michael and I were an excellent pair for each other. He always had the latest and greatest video games and a strong desire to play them. I was rarely the first person to get games, but I was blessed (or cursed) with the ability to sit and watch others play, sometimes for hours on end. AoE had everything my young brain wanted. Ancient civilizations straight out of my history books fishing, farming and fighting for supremacy. There was so much cool stuff to do, so much cool stuff to see, and I would have never experienced any of it if it wasn’t for a friend taking the time to show it to me.

I had to wait a little while, but I soon followed in Michael’s footsteps and made AoE mine. I was found a delightful challenge in putting together an economy I did not always understand to kill units I knew just as little about. Interestingly, my love of this game actually helped drive my love of history. If there was something unfamiliar, or that I did not understand, I was quick to look it up. I am a compulsive reader of manuals and AoE was done in the golden age of manuals. To this day I contend that the AoE book contained more relevant history than my first year university classics textbook did – and that text probably cost me four times as much. The game play and the history helped make AoE amazing, but I do not think those things would have been enough, by themselves, to keep me playing it over and over again. What did that was the multiplayer.

Watching friends play was pretty ok; actually getting to play in the same game as them was absolutely mind blowing. We could chat about how the game was going, bask in awe at our amazing civilizations and share in the numerous humblings we received at the hands of the AI. Rarely did we fight each other. It was much more fun, and less likely to end friendships, if we teamed up to defeat our foes. Sometimes, this would even involve one person packing up and moving their civilization to start closer to the rest of us. Tactically, this was a very poor decision. To us young gamers, it provided us with a sense of security that can only come from surrounding yourself with friends – in a multiplayer game.

I would not say that the AoE multiplayer was overly ground breaking, but a game that was already accomplishing so much probably did not have to include multiplayer capability to sell copies. Look at the Total War franchise. They were built on the strength of all of the unique and cool things you could do by yourself. In 1997, AoE would likely have fit the same bill, but the folks over at Microsoft took the time to throw in the ability to play it with others (which was probably not as difficult as it would be for Total War games but bare with me). The combination of it being an amazing game and one that you could play with your friends made the two features synonymous in my head. For another game to be as good as Age of Empires was it needed to have multiplayer.

It was also around the time I started playing AoE that I think my parents realized they had a gamer on their hands. My parents have not always been super thrilled with my gaming, but they actually facilitated a great deal of my multiplayer shenanigans. My dad always had an old computer or two lying around that my friends could use. His work in I.T. ensured that we were among the first to embrace the internet and hook our computers into a LAN. When I had friends over, my parents gave up their computers, basement and sanity to allow three or four young boys to wage war for hours on end. When a friend who could not come over wanted to play, my parents would give up phone access for hours while my dad helped to enter in IP addresses until a dial-up connection with my friend was forged and games were underway.

In their own way, my parents were also helping to shape the way that I gamed. They knew that they couldn’t get their son to give it up entirely, so they made sure that at least he was getting some socialization out of it and was not so wrapped up in it that he had no time for friends. Thinking back to it, there is a pretty big chance that I could have turned out a lot worse for wear had my parents and AoE not teamed up to ensure that most of my gaming was done with friends. I will always be thankful to my parents for teaching me, possibly without their even thinking of it that way, that it was better to game with friends.

When AoE II arrived the first thing I remember doing was begging my good friend, Andrew, to come over and play it with me. My ulterior motive: to get him to buy the game so we could play it together.Good guy that he was, and remains, Andrew was quick to get the game and we were soon playing it together. My greatest accomplishments in AoE II were rarely done on my own. They almost always came from Andrew and I making some heroic last stand or developing some crazy strategy together. Despite all of the fancy new game play mechanics, graphics and history to explore it was still the opportunity to play the game with friends that brought me the greatest joy.

Today, the love of multiplayer games is very much alive in me. I would much rather watch League of Legends than solo que, but the minute a friend or two of mine comes online I am immediately good to play all night. Even in shooters I always look for games that have Co-op before all else. Left for Dead has become the standard by which I judge most shooters simply because I never have a better time than when I am killing zombies with some good friends. It is rare to find me staying in all night to game by myself, but I have been known to round up a group of people with the sole purpose of not leaving my basement until several games of Heroes of Might and Magic III have been played out. For a game to really keep me interested, or even just get me started, it must have some kind of decent multiplayer.

I admit I have only played a game or two of AoE II HD since I got it. The “changes” that they made to it were just enough to prevent people from accusing them of having not done anything to it. They were looking for some money and the way they decided to get it was through nostalgia. What I wasn’t expecting was that I could actually get more out of that nostalgia than actually playing the game. I look back on all of the hours I spent playing those games of AoE and AoE II, surrounded by friends and family, and I have no regrets. Nor can I be too mad at Microsoft for putting the game out there again. At the very least, it is now a lot easier to play online than it ever was before. Kids these days who complain about lag should have to try playing on a dial up connection. You do not know lag until you have done that.

I came into this article ready to badmouth AoE II HD and rip Microsoft a new one for what I viewed as being a shameless cash grab, but instead I want to end this piece by giving my thanks to both the game and the company that first made it, all those years ago. Without the Age of Empires series not only would I have not become the gamer I am today, I would not have become nearly as well rounded an individual. Playing AoE with others built me some of the strongest friendships I have, and my love of games like it continues to help me build friendships to this very day. I will always be glad that I would rather play games with friends than alone in my basement. Age of Empires and Age of Empires II convinced me that good games should always have a good multiplayer function, and that is something that I would gladly play a $20 re-release to be reminded of.

 

SPECIAL SHOUT OUT: I should probably stop making this sound like I bought AoE II HD when I was actually given my copy by my good friend, Shierra, who I now owe an even larger thank you to! If you’re not above a little profanity and general insanity with your gaming, you should check out his streaming adventures by going through his Twitter here. I can be a pretty awkward guy on stream, but Shierra has none of those problems. I am glad that our solid love of gaming, and occasionally drinking (Root beer) while gaming, has brought us much closer together.

 

 

Calling the Shots

Ok, this is a positive rant which means it’s going to be really disjointed, but it feels so good to get it all down.

Today was the first game, that I can remember, where I actually stepped up and took a solo que team to victory. You guys know that I love to talk champs, and strategy and all of that good stuff. That’s all fine and dandy with awesome bloggers such as yourself; it’s a whole other game trying to convince randoms, on the fly, that you know what you’re doing. More often than not, I don’t even bother trying.

Tonight, circumstances were different. I was on my main support, Thresh, (I’m not a newly recruited fanboy; I’ve been playing him since the night he hit the PBE) and my ADC and I were winning our lane hard. Like, hard to the point that the other team was raging at their own ADC kind of hard. Problem was, our other lanes weren’t doing so hot. My team was going, one or two at a time, and feeding the other team’s Nid and Zed. This wasn’t looking like it would be a huge problem, until my Draven joined in. At this point I was on my favorite support, it was late, I had been losing all night, and I decided enough was enough. There was no way I was losing this game.

If you have ever tried to call shots in solo que you know that it is not an easy task. Thankfully, I had a few things going for me. My stat line was awesome. I was clearly making my plays and my team knew it. Second, if my team didn’t know I was making plays Draven quickly told them. When the guy with all the kills has your back it is a lot easier to convince people you know your stuff. I was also making sure that I was filling my role to a tee. I had wards down everywhere, and I frequently came and lantern’ed people out of trouble. Finally, I did my best to keep a level head. Even as the kill count began to take a turn for the worst I didn’t yell or rage (though my gosh I was tempted to give a few of our players a piece of my mind). All of these factors definitely contributed to what was to follow.

I knew I had them when I asked someone to check dragon and Kha Zix did. In my experience, it is always demanded that the support go and do this – whether it is convenient or not. Now, I actually had our mid laner checking things for me and putting wards down. Then the question became how to turn the game in our favor. Thankfully, this wasn’t overly difficult. If we could group up and keep Draven alive I knew we could grab victory even though I was nervous because all of our other lanes were behind in CS.

I explained myself to my team bluntly. “If we do not group up and stop fighting 1 v 5, we are going to lose this game. So let’s push up our lanes, group mid, and get ready to fight.” I was waiting for someone to tell me off, but not a word was spoken in reply. Before my very eyes my team began to do what I told them to. Soon, we were grouped up mid and started catching out our opponents who had become so used to picking us off that they, themselves, seemed to have trouble grouping.

As we grouped and fought I did not hesitate to ping or shout out a call. When the other team sent everyone to chase us around bot I stopped our Kha from backing and got him to take the top turret. When my hooks picked apart the other team in the mid, I sent people on to inner turrets and into the jungle to clean out camps.

I honestly was not entirely convinced our team was strong enough to win, but somehow, making the right calls at the right times seemed to magically produce teamfight wins. Our squishy Renekton suddenly became invincible. Our Kha and Diana could lock up the enemy team for days and our Draven could smash them all away. I am not even convinced I actually did anything useful in fights for the last 10 minutes. What I did do was keep the team focused, gave them objectives and let them focus on their own play and not what was happening around the map. It was never as clear to me why teams have shot callers. The pressure of constantly trying to think of what to do globally can actually hold back a lot of people’s individual play.

I am sorry if this is coming across jumbled or crazy; I am still quite high from the win. It is an incredible feeling to have four complete strangers actually listen to you, unquestioningly, and come together to secure a victory. I don’t know if this is something I would try and do on a regular basis. Usually in solo que I defer to anyone else who seems to be making ok calls. Tonight, I had a lot of things going for me that made me very motivated to take control. I also had a number of factors that encouraged my teammates to listen to me.

I think that, regardless of whether I try to take control of a game in the future, just knowing that I can do it is a great boost to my confidence. I know it’s just a game, but come on, if you can convince people in something as crazy as LoL to listen to you then real life should be a piece of cake

Five Champions Everyone Should Learn

I have been around League of Legends long enough to take a look back at how I started playing the game. I realize now that I would not have hated getting some advice on which champions might be best to learn to play first. With that in mind, here are five champions that I think everyone, regardless of skill level, cannot go wrong knowing how to play.

Click on the names of any of the champions below to be taken to Mobafire’s info and list of guides for the champion. Mobafire is not the best site for guides, but they are decent for those who are looking to get started.

Pantheon

Ares, himself, come to dominate the Fields of Valor. Pantheon has an excellent group of abilities that allow him to succeed wherever he is placed. He can poke with his Javelin Toss (Q), stun with his W, damage with his E and hop around the map with his ultimate. It can take a little bit of practice to land his “Mandrop” on actual human targets, but when you do, you will feel a god. He tends to be a little bit squishy in the early and late game, so content yourself to poke with your Javelin Toss, until your opponent is low health, before going in for the kill. Later, you will want to build some defensive items so you can survive fights. You will mainly see this champion playing in a solo top lane, but he can also thrive in the jungle or the mid lane. I would not first pick him for support, but he can fill this role better than a lot of other champions – if he absolutely has to.

Lulu

Sometimes the biggest enemy you will face in LoL is the frustration that the game can cause. What better way to combat this than by playing a constantly cheerful Faerie Sorceress. Seriously though, this little lady can be a major annoyance to your opponents. Her Q is a skill shot, but it is fairly simple to learn and does a lot of early damage. Where Lulu really shines is with the crowd control (cc) she brings to the fight. She can slow, knockup and turn opponents into squirrels and cupcakes. Her ultimate is great at taking yourself or a teammate and making you very tricky to kill in a team fight. With so many different things she can do it can be difficult to remember to use all of Lulu’s abilities, effectively, in a fight. Keep working at it, and you will be rewarded by being able to play one of the best sources of CC  in the game. Lulu is considered to be one of the best support champs, but she can also be used in the mid or solo top lanes.

Diana

I do not want people accusing me of not including any assassin style champions. Assassins can be tricky to play, because they are so squishy, but are also the most fun when you can absolutely blow up anyone on the other team with a few abilities. Diana gives you a taste of what it is like to be an assassin without being so squishy that you cannot survive fights. With a ranged poke, a shield, a slow and a powerful dash, Diana has everything an assassin needs to succeed. Her Crescent Strike (Q) can be a little difficult to land when you are starting. I have been advised to aim slightly behind the target you are trying to hit so that it passes through them and can’t miss as easily. Even if you do not land the Strike, you can still dash to the target and brawl with them the old fashioned way! Diana will most commonly be seen in the mid lane but can also be used as a solid jungler or solo top.

Nunu

There is very little that this ambitious Yeti cannot do. You can run him everywhere except ADC, and no one will judge you for doing it. Not only that, there is a great chance you will beat your opponent. Nunu’s only problem is that all of his damage is limited to his Ice Blast (E) and ult. Both can do tons of damage, but his ult is easily to interrupt and he does not have much else to offer when those abilities are down. With that said, there are many creative ways to build Nunu that can overcome this. Instead of focusing on building AP, you can build him tanky or even as a bruiser who takes advantage of his attack speed buff to beat enemies down. Nunu may not be the most exciting jungler in the world but he might just be the safest. His Consume (Q) functions as an extra smite that also heals you. If you are looking to start learning how to jungle Nunu is a very good choice, especially if you are looking to avoid those embarrassing “I just died to my jungle creeps” moments. No one will ever say that Nunu is a sexy pick, but he will give you a solid champ that you can plug into almost any role your team needs filled.

Kayle

One of the best all around champions in the game. You can build her AP, AD, both, whatever you want and she still does great damage. Reckoning (Q) is one of the heaviest hitting single target spells in the game, and it slows opponents as well. What makes her combat style truly unique is her E (Righteous Fury) that allows her to attack from range instead of just being a melee champ. Oh, and you cannot forget her ult which makes you or a teammate immune to damage for 2 seconds or more. No matter how you build her, Kayle will need some attack speed items to succeed and will be somewhat week in the mid game until you build those AS items. Just be patient, keep farming and you will eventually be able to buy the items you need to turn her into a late game killing machine. You cannot go wrong learning Kayle. She is most commonly seen in the mid or top lanes, but you can also run her as a support. Once you get the hang of her, you can even take her in the jungle.

The above are five champions that, in my opinion, you can’t go wrong learning how to play. Now would be a great time for you to stop reading and go try out some of those champs. I won’t blame you, because I still think trying out new champs is one of the best things in LoL, and it is a lot more fun to just play than listen to someone tell you why to play something. If you DO find yourself thinking, “why the heck did he choose these guys and not those guys,” then by all means, read on!

So what was I looking for when I made my list. Naturally, I wanted to provide you with some champions who can make a solid impact on your match. It’s no fun to play champions that cannot get kills or leave you feeling like you did nothing all game. I wanted to include champions that you will have some fun playing and are reasonably powerful, but this is not the only thing I looked at.

League of Legends is as much about filling roles as any team game. I know it might not seem this way at the beginning, but trust me, you will see the meta (how the pros play the game) style of game play begin to creep in as early as player level 20. One of the biggest things I looked at in determining what champions to recommend was whether or not they can fill, successfully, multiple roles. They may not always be considered orthodox picks for those roles, but they can do the job well enough to not cost you the game just by picking them to fill a certain spot on the team.

I also tried to consider the skill required to learn and succeed at the champion. A champion like Cho gath fits a lot of my criteria perfectly. He fills multiple roles, he is extremely difficult to kill and he can absolutely dominate a game. This all sounds very good, but it does not take into account that he only really succeeds if you can land his Rupture (Q) knock up ability.

For those of us who have been around the game, and have developed a good understanding of how people behave in certain situations, it can be fairly easy to predict where your enemy is going and actually land Rupture. For someone who is just starting out, landing Rupture can be a huge frustration. I would like to tell you that the LoL community will be cool with you missing the majority of your skill shots, but that is really not true. This list also strives to provide you with a bunch of champions who are fairly easy to use and will not leave you the victim of frustrated teammates.

One final note, my list does not include any Attack Damage Carries (ADC’s). I have nothing against ADC’s. They are a crucial part of the game. If you are looking to play LoL so you can kill champions from far away, while doing tons of damage, this is the role for you. There are  two main reasons I left them out. First, ADC champions often do not fill other roles well. Learning ADC can limit what roles you will be able to play, which can be a problem when someone else on your team locks in the ADC role before you can call it. Secondly, ADC champions do a lot of damage but are often fairly easy to kill. When you are just starting the game, playing an ADC can lead to quite a few deaths and quite a bit of frustration. If ADC is something you want to learn you should definitely go for it but those champs were not included in this list.

If you made it to the end, thank you for hearing me out. I hope you are able to find some success with these champs, no matter how far along your journey into LoL is. Also, big shout out to @i_Murf for giving me the idea to write this post. If you want to see what other brilliant ideas this gentleman can come up with, check out his blog here. If there are some champs that you think should be on this list, and you are curious why I didn’t pick them, let me know and I will try my best to offer an explanation. I believe I have a good reason for all of my choices/exclusions, but I have been known to simply forget that a certain champ even exists, so it never hurts to check!

Are You Having a Bad Day?

While I am always trying to figure out ideas for new posts, I can never resist writing about new developments in my favorite League of Legends topic – player behavior. LoL can be a nasty, brutish affair. So I hope you understand why I like to keep up to date on what Riot is doing to try and make us act better.

Riot’s latest effort at improving player behavior just hit the beta environment. If you want to read the post from Riot Lyte, and you should because the man writes a nice post, you can do so here. The basic gist of the change is that Riot is working on developing an automated system of “Behavioral Alerts” that will notify you when you are misbehaving. The logic behind this feature is that letting players know they are being bad apparently increases the chances of them changing their ways by about 7.8%. Riot figures that if they provide feedback faster, in the form of automated notifications, that rate will hopefully increase.

I do not believe this is the worst idea. My general expectation of people has always been that they know what it means to behave badly, and so if they continue to do wrong, they must be doing it intentionally. LoL has taught me that this view is only somewhat correct. There are certainly people who misbehave for the fun of it, but there are also a lot of people (young and old alike) who actually have no idea that their behavior is less than acceptable. Viewed in this light, I think being quicker to let people know that they are being bad will probably make a difference, to the tune of similar numbers to what Riot has been seeing from the Report Cards.

My problem with the report cards has always been that some people, despite seeing a report card full of evidence, still do not appreciate why they were reported and punished. The brief notification that you can see above provides even less supporting evidence to convince a player that they were actually in the wrong. If a report card can’t convince them to behave, a message that is roughly the size of two tweets probably won’t encourage them to change their ways either.

The cynic in me is also convinced that this message will be used by those who are negative just for the sake of being negative to help avoid punishment. If, after a delightful game of verbally abusing my teammates, I received a notification telling me that I am being bad and might be close to getting in trouble I would probably tone it down for a game or two. Then, I would be right back to my old ways or, perhaps, I would even return with an added vengeance to make up for the previous games where I actually had to pretend to be a decent human being.

This system will never actually change the behavior of the truly negative or toxic players. Instead, it is a band aid designed to help turn a few players, who truly do not understand common decency, away from the dark side. Honestly, if Riot wants to focus on those players who don’t know that being negative is bad, I would rather that they try and tackle this problem preemptively and not wait for the player to rack up reports first.

If the LCS (professional League of Legends) has taught us anything it’s that Riot can put together some pretty awesome videos and written materials when they want to. Could you imagine if they invested that same effort into creating a campaign to encourage players to be nicer gamers?  There are so many cool things they could do to encourage people to be good, and I bet the returns would be at least equal to what they’re getting from the Report Cards and Behavioral Alerts – with the added bonus that the player wouldn’t need to be reported a bunch first. Think of it as kind of being like Yoda and Obi Wan teaching Luke why the Light Side of the Force was the way to go long before Luke even thought about heading to the Dark Side. Awkward Star Wars analogy: Check.

It does kind of make you wonder if pro players would agree to take part in such a campaign or if a lot of them are actually textbook offenders who can’t be bothered to promote anything other than winning and pwning noobs. Maybe the problem is that no one ever told them they could be like Yoda or Obi Wan.

I do love that Riot is willing to try new things to make this game better, and I do believe that Behavioral Alerts will have some positive impact. What I am tired of is Riot giving us the standard line that most players are good and neutral and a lot of the negativity we get is from people who are just having a bad day. I understand that in a game with millions of players you are much more likely to run into someone who is having a bad day, but I am not entirely convinced that is the only reason why I feel like I am constantly being exposed to negativity.

So what I want to do is run my own little social experiment, and I would appreciate it if all of you would help me. The next time someone rages at you in game, I want you to ask them if they are having a bad day. Here, let me even provide you with a line you can use:

“Hey, Riot says that most negativity in LoL comes from people who are having a bad day. (Insert player name), are you having a bad day?”

Optional additional question only to be used if you want to add troll value and ruin the validity of the whole experiment:

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I am not entirely sure what to expect from actually asking ragers if they are having a bad day. My guess is that most people will say something along the lines of “I was having a good day until I had to play with you, you ####,” but maybe that’s just me. My plan is to actually keep track of the number and composition of responses. I doubt that either Riot or myself will be able to use the results to prove, conclusively, that we are right, but at the very least, I expect to get a few hilarious responses that will be worth sharing.

It is  reassuring that Riot is continuing to work on developing better player behavior in League of Legends. While I do believe that the new Behavioral Alerts system will have some impact, I would really like to see Riot do more than simply find another way of letting negative players know they are negative. Whether they know they are negative or not, we are still the ones that have to play this game with them. Until Riot comes up with a way to get negative players out of OUR games, or reward us for being in THEIR games, nothing Riot puts out to deal with negative players will truly satisfy me. At least now I have a question to ask my fellow LoL’ers while I wait for change to come.

 

Incredible LoL Raps

I cannot say that I am always, or even frequently, a fan of rap, but the League of Legends raps put out by Badministrator are just awe inspiring. Regardless of how you feel about the rhythm and beat, the lyrics are incredibly relevant and awesome.  Check out the song below, and you will see exactly what I mean. Before you know it, you will have Badministrator’s whole channel on repeat. Check him out on youtube or on twitter @VisixOnYoutube

Kind of makes you wonder why we don’t see some more content from Riot like the song above. This game isn’t all about penta kills and new champs. A lot of it SHOULD be about having fun and treating each other with some respect. Songs like this one promote that in a way we can all nod our heads to.

Protatomonster’s Top 5 Plays of the Week – Featuring Thresh and Karma

Happy Friday to everyone. If you’re getting yourself psyched to play or watch some League of Legends this weekend, check out this week’s awesome Top 5 Plays from Protatomonster. I am a huge fan of Thresh and Karma, so I could not resist sharing this.