Ok so people would pay for a character to play it and then join a map and be told where to go and what to do according to the community? This happens in all the games?
Yeah, that's right. That's the way the game works.
If you decide to pay real money to buy a character who is only good at one thing, then insist on doing something else with him, people will question your judgement or suggest the right way to play with it, with varying degrees of hostility and profanity. This could range from, "You know, Jayce really isn't an AD carry, he should be going top" to "You fucking worthless fucking noob why don't you kill yourself, fucking terrible carry."
Ok so people would pay for a character to play it and then join a map and be told where to go and what to do according to the community? This happens in all the games?
Again...sort of. In draft mode, you take turns picking champions, but typically when you join the lobby you state your preferred role. If someone has a higher pick than you and wants the same role, one of you is going to be a little sad. Many champions can easily fill two roles. For instance, I've been really enjoying a relatively new champion named Vi. When I go into a match I say "jungle please" and plan on playing Vi. About 85% of games I ask for jungle I get it and play Vi being happy punching things with big mechanical fists.
Ok so people would pay for a character to play it and then join a map and be told where to go and what to do according to the community? This happens in all the games?
Yeah, that's right. That's the way the game works.
If you decide to pay real money to buy a character who is only good at one thing, then insist on doing something else with him, people will question your judgement or suggest the right way to play with it, with varying degrees of hostility and profanity. This could range from, "You know, Jayce really isn't an AD carry, he should be going top" to "You fucking worthless fucking noob why don't you kill yourself, fucking terrible carry."
If someone has a higher pick than you and wants the same role, you will now play a game we like to call, "Asshole dodge chicken."
Fixed that to be more accurate.
Which does raise a valid complaint I have with the game. Some roles, such as support and jungle, are generally perceived as less glamorous. I don't ever want to play asshole dodge chicken, so I just go into support or jungle as needed to flesh out the team. This really frustrates me sometimes, though, because occasionally I'd like to play Singed top or something, but that'l never happen in solo because I don't have the asshole in me.
Doesn't make you an asshole to state a preferred role/lane. I'm like you in that I like jungling and supporting. I think ADC is super boring, but am capable of playing it and will if nobody else wants to. Top I'm just lacking experience because again, like you, I don't want to get into a whole thing fighting someone for it. Mid is my favorite lane to play because Lux lazorz, but I never expect to get it.
Also I think you're onto something with asshole dodge chicken. This should be an official mini-game in chat, person who dodges waits the 5 minute penalty, person who doesn't dodge has to play Heimerdinger NO MATTER WHAT.
Wait so you guys play the game, but you don't even get to play the roles you want because other people take them? Wow this is wow.
It's a team game. Not everyone always gets to play exactly what they want.
People also sometimes heal in MMO's despite not loving healing.
I do SOMETIMES get to play a different role, but I was agreeing that a decent complaint is how much harder it is for me to get to play one particular role over another.
Like Darkewolfe is saying, there are 5 roles and distribution of players who prefer each role is heavily favored towards solo lanes. Part of the fun of the game for me is learning new roles/skills. I started out as a player who only really liked mid, and now I pretty much only Jungle. Maybe next year I'll be a Top main. The point is it's a competitive game and to win you have to be willing to work with your team rather than against it to win. If this doesn't sound fun to you then stick to games you enjoy!
People also sometimes heal in MMO's despite not loving healing.
Usually that's a means to an end.
In a MOBA there is no end other than to play the game
not that I think it's a bad thing
just a bad comparison
Hmm. I think the comparison is still good. Not everyone likes to heal, but we want to do this dungeon (do this dungeon is spending some time playing the game), so Billy will heal.
Not everyone likes to play support, but we want to win this game and support is the only unselected role. Billy will play Sona.
Next game, perhaps Billy will not play Sona. He still enjoyed playing the game, but he sure would like to play solo-mid Ziggs sometime.
Honestly, I'd rather play my non-preferred role in a MOBA than play the fill the bars game in a WoW raid for four hours.
While I've read PA Comics for many years, this is the first time I've decided to create a forum post to comment on a particular comment, largely because I feel passionate about competitive games and also because I feel there is a lot of misunderstanding wrapped up in the issue of who has the moral high ground when it comes to how choose to play their games.
There's a lot of frustration surrounding the issue of freedom of choice in competitive multiplayer games. Obviously, no one enjoys being told how to play, yet in a team game compromises often have to be made. Imagine baseball if everyone tried to field the ball at once instead of waiting in designated spots for balls to come their way.That's not to say other players are correct in dicating play styles, but that both perspectives need to be met with a certain degree of understanding.
First all of all, what's meta? One person in the thread suggested "The LoL meta is one gargantuan cargo cult. 'If we do this meta like the pros do, we'll win!" This is wrong. The difference between meta and a cargo cult is that the players espousing the belief in meta are the players getting results, the pros. Meta is a dominant strategy that seems to work well. It's not perfect, because the people coming up with these strategies are just ordinary fallible humans. Meta is a consensus by the the best players, and is changeable simply because it turns out to be wrong, new strategies are discovered, or because the game is patched.
The dominant league meta has been for a long time (with some exceptions), bruiser top, caster mid, jungle, range attack damage carry bottom, support bottom. This meta is not arbitrary, and it's mainly trying to achieve two goals: gold and exp maximization. Because creeps waves spawn every 30 seconds regardless of how fast they are killed, there is a finite amount of income and exp being generated in each lane. Gold and experience are obviously important to winning the game. Having a jungle ensures neutral creeps do not go to waste, letting his allies gain more gold and exp in lanes. A support who only earns gold passively increase the total amount of gold that lane would otherwise earn, instead of fighting his ally for last hits.
It's not the only way to play, but it's pretty solid and successful. Since there are plenty of ways to win though, why should anyone else tell you how to play? Well, they shouldn't.
And there you go. When you say no one should tell you how to play, you're right. Want to do a double bruiser bottom? Go ahead. Want to run a double jungle or ac mid? Go ahead. But do so with this one caveat. Just as someone else should have no expectation of dictating your play, you owe them the responsibility of being a team player.Being a team player means you make your own decisions about who you will play and how you will play them with consideration for what the rest of your team is doing.
If you want to play ADC Sona mid, I'm not opposed to that. But if you've decided on playing ADC Sona mid before you've even entered the match, then you're an asshole. What if one of your allies is still new to the game and the only champ he has learned is Support Sona? Are you going to ignore him completely and go ahead with your build? What if your team happens to already have a lot of physical damage and you could really, really, use more magic damage? Are you going to ignore you team entirely and trudge onwards with your preset decision?
This is all I ask of anyone who plays a competitive team game. Play whatever you want to the best of your ability, but play something with the rest of the team in mind.
People also sometimes heal in MMO's despite not loving healing.
Usually that's a means to an end.
In a MOBA there is no end other than to play the game
not that I think it's a bad thing
just a bad comparison
Hmm. I think the comparison is still good. Not everyone likes to heal, but we want to do this dungeon (do this dungeon is spending some time playing the game), so Billy will heal.
Not everyone likes to play support, but we want to win this game and support is the only unselected role. Billy will play Sona.
Next game, perhaps Billy will not play Sona. He still enjoyed playing the game, but he sure would like to play solo-mid Ziggs sometime.
Honestly, I'd rather play my non-preferred role in a MOBA than play the fill the bars game in a WoW raid for four hours.
When I queue for a dungeon or (training wheels) raid in WoW as a given role, I generally don't wind up having to do a different role. I'm not sure the comparison is apt.
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kaliyamaLeft to find less-moderated foraRegistered Userregular
Ok so people would pay for a character to play it and then join a map and be told where to go and what to do according to the community? This happens in all the games?
Yeah. The sports analogy is again useful, as you have to buy (or grind freemium style) equipment to play. If people aren't coordinating, you're not playing right.
People also sometimes heal in MMO's despite not loving healing.
Usually that's a means to an end.
In a MOBA there is no end other than to play the game
not that I think it's a bad thing
just a bad comparison
Hmm. I think the comparison is still good. Not everyone likes to heal, but we want to do this dungeon (do this dungeon is spending some time playing the game), so Billy will heal.
Not everyone likes to play support, but we want to win this game and support is the only unselected role. Billy will play Sona.
Next game, perhaps Billy will not play Sona. He still enjoyed playing the game, but he sure would like to play solo-mid Ziggs sometime.
Honestly, I'd rather play my non-preferred role in a MOBA than play the fill the bars game in a WoW raid for four hours.
When I queue for a dungeon or (training wheels) raid in WoW as a given role, I generally don't wind up having to do a different role. I'm not sure the comparison is apt.
That sort of plays into what I was looking to add. In LoL and the other moba games, for a new player there's no in-game system that forces the appropriate group composition on the champion pick screen. So it's not like there's a AD Carry slot and a Support slot and a Jungler slot, etc, each of which only accept champions that work in that role at the beginning, and if you're the last pick, well of COURSE you have to grab a champion that can do support because that's the only slot left to fill.
And I think lots of gamers at this point are conditioned to expect the system itself to handle that if there are specific roles required to succeed, rather than having to actually talk about it ahead of time with random strangers in order to not inadvertently sabotage the group. So I think you get new players who have no idea that these categories even really exist, as well as people who know the categories exist, but resent being told what to do, and whose argument is basically "the system lets me pick my favorite champion, so there's no reason I shouldn't pick him, even though there's already someone who claimed that role"
Obviously that's possibly oversimplifying things to a large degree, but I wonder if there's design space for a moba game to do that and allow individuals to queue up a champion and check the roles (from the subset of roles that that champion *can* do) they're willing to play ala dungeon finder.
That would probably just lead to people bitching about how long the queue times are for AD carries, though.
The apoLoLogists still acknowledge that the community is terrible and not so much fun. The glittering generalities and "team"speak is hilarious to me. I really don't think most people derive pleasure from games based on fetid screaming and screeching. I think we as a community, or TEAM, if you will, have moved past that adolescent phase.
I very rarely see any sort of screaming in my games. Of course, I'm at the point where everybody, whether they're cursing their luck mentally or not, typically sticks to reasonable decisions that at least mostly fit the concept of "get the most gold and EXP your team can, preferably to the people who need gold and EXP the most."
In my case, I have no need to justify playing with something like "Sure, my teammates are awful people and the other team is shit talking racist insults constantly" because it hasn't happened to me in the past year at least. If it has, it was so minor I forgot it and so rare of an occurrence that it wasn't significantly worse than a random asshole showing up on a Minecraft server, or a spambot posting on a Vbulletin forum. I don't know if I'm supremely lucky, or in some kind of sweet spot in LoL's matchmaking skill curve where I'm above people who abandon games and make blissfully stupid choices and below people who think they can do whatever because of their skill, but I really don't find the community that bad when I play.
EDIT: As for the "queuing up for the role" thing; I'd prefer they never did that, simply because A: I'd rather Riot not explicitly acknowledge that there's one true meta everyone has to run, especially not since they're trying to shake things up somewhat, and B: specifically queuing with a certain champion can result in some really silly team compositions even with the right roles, especially strange support/carry pairings (Blitzcrank with Caitlyn, for instance).
The apoLoLogists still acknowledge that the community is terrible and not so much fun. The glittering generalities and "team"speak is hilarious to me. I really don't think most people derive pleasure from games based on fetid screaming and screeching. I think we as a community, or TEAM, if you will, have moved past that adolescent phase.
Show me a single post where someone has said they like League because of the ass holes in the community. Seriously the community isn't great, but the reason people play it is for the competitive fun. If the idea of a competitive game requiring team work is adolescent to you then I seriously have to ask what's mature.
The apoLoLogists still acknowledge that the community is terrible and not so much fun. The glittering generalities and "team"speak is hilarious to me. I really don't think most people derive pleasure from games based on fetid screaming and screeching. I think we as a community, or TEAM, if you will, have moved past that adolescent phase.
Show me a single post where someone has said they like League because of the ass holes in the community. Seriously the community isn't great, but the reason people play it is for the competitive fun. If the idea of a competitive game requiring team work is adolescent to you then I seriously have to ask what's mature.
Not LoL. If we are talking qualia, "not LoL" is the essence of mature.
There are far worse communities than League out there. Hell, there were far worse communities than LoL out there even before the Tribunal and the honor system, which seem to have cut down on the amount of people toxic to the community significantly. As-is, I've got a better chance of experiencing an asshole jumping on to a random TF2 server.
Like, I don't get why people say League of Legends is so awful; it's painting an entire community with a wide brush because of the actions of a subset of the community that, with the advent of Riot's community improvement features, hardly exists at this point. The amount of people I have seen who don't play LoL but believe it to be an entirely toxic community with nothing but absolute assholes in every game is staggering; I've seen less absurd scaremongering when a TV station makes a news report over some fake hacking threat posted on 4chan.
I don't think very many other games had to invent a community court system to punish overly abusive players. This is pretty unique to LoL you have to admit.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
I don't think very many other games had to invent a community court system to punish overly abusive players. This is pretty unique to LoL you have to admit.
I believe you have misunderstood why the Tribunal exists.
The tribunal exists because of the size of the community. It's purpose was stated at first as a means of simply allowing Riot to better deal with the constant deluge of reports they get purely due to the size of the playerbase, without having to hire a massive amount of staff simply to wade through reports or to ignore people unless they consistently got reported dozens of times. The fact is that, yes, it makes the community a better place... but it's existence is almost inextricably linked to the fact League is the biggest game on the planet, not that League's community is particularly shitty.
Not only that, but even if the Tribunal was put into place because the community was shitty, that only says something about what the community was, not what it is; in fact, it gives a strong impression the community is going to improve from before the Tribunal was made, and as far as anybody who has looked into it can tell, the Tribunal has made the community better.
So yes, I will gladly admit that having a player-worked system that is clearly improving the community and helping the developer's deal with the crushing logistical weight of their game's popularity is unique to LoL. But the implication that the Tribunal is somehow an indicator that the community is an absolute hellhole and there is no intent to ever improve it? That's silly.
There are far worse communities than League out there. Hell, there were far worse communities than LoL out there even before the Tribunal and the honor system, which seem to have cut down on the amount of people toxic to the community significantly. As-is, I've got a better chance of experiencing an asshole jumping on to a random TF2 server.
Like, I don't get why people say League of Legends is so awful; it's painting an entire community with a wide brush because of the actions of a subset of the community that, with the advent of Riot's community improvement features, hardly exists at this point. The amount of people I have seen who don't play LoL but believe it to be an entirely toxic community with nothing but absolute assholes in every game is staggering; I've seen less absurd scaremongering when a TV station makes a news report over some fake hacking threat posted on 4chan.
If you use the word scaremongering and then talk about video game communities, your point might be really hard to make.
Is LoL bigger than WoW now? Because I thought WoW was the king of games, well WoW or CoD, neither one had to institute a tribunal due to the beligerence of their playerbase.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
I have just realized that this topic is so much less interesting than Gabe's newspost on his Surface Pro. So I'm going to talk about that.
I have to say, as a graphic designer myself, that I am very impressed by the hardware but very disappointed to hear that Wacom/Adobe/Windows haven't worked together on pressure sensitivity yet. This piece of equipment would be perfect for me, but only if I could get CS 5.5 to play nice with the hardware. That's partially my fault for buying into Adobe's crap, but it's sort of industry-standard right now. I will be all over that stuff when Adobe gets its shit together.
Of course, that is unless I somehow find a monumental cash pile to throw at a Cintiq. Even then I'd still want the Surface Pro just to have a mobile sketchbook.
Is LoL bigger than WoW now? Because I thought WoW was the king of games, well WoW or CoD, neither one had to institute a tribunal due to the beligerence of their playerbase.
LoL has been bigger than WoW for almost a year now; as of October, the monthly active players for League is almost triple the max number of concurrent subscribers WoW has ever had. League has over double the peak concurrent players of CoD from the same data, and as far as I know CoD is dropping in popularity with installments now (very slightly), while League is still growing. League has more concurrent users than Steam has people online concurrently, which would include any League players who have Steam.
I'd appreciate if you didn't ignore the rest of my post; the Tribunal was not created "because of the belligerence of their playerbase." It was created because it is simply the most popular game in the world. Not only that, but having more reports, and having a stricter enforced ruleset about what is considered bad behavior, are probably good things, and those would also increase the amount of reports (and the need for a Tribunal or Riot hiring hundreds of additional staff). And just because two big games didn't come up with a nearly inarguably good idea doesn't mean that it isn't helping the community in League become even better.
If you use the word scaremongering and then talk about video game communities, your point might be really hard to make.
What term should I use, then? It's not a bad term to describe people who, not having significant experience with the community, still tell others how toxic it is and that they should stay away for their own good.
Regardless, it's a subjective topic, but all I can do is continue to say that I only seem to hear how awful the community is from people who don't play League, and have had no negative experiences with League, which is probably at least in part due to the fact that they're one of the few games that is actively trying to improve the playerbase and make it more accessible to watch and play for people outside of the game.
LoL has been bigger than WoW for almost a year now; as of October, the monthly active players for League is almost triple the max number of concurrent subscribers WoW has ever had.
Citation needed. I don't care one way or the other but when you're talking about a game whose subscription base only just this past month or two slipped under the 10 million active account line, you're talking about a pretty big fish.
I also want to make sure people aren't letting their admiration for a game color their impression of how strongly it permeates the video game playing base.
Assuming you take Riot's numbers (from various points in 2012) as being accurate, and your own point about WoW slipping under 10 million as accurate (which makes the "max subscribers of 12 million" a reasonable number), this infographic shows just that. League, in 2012, had a max concurrent playerbase of 3 million, 12 million people online daily, and 30 million people online monthly. 30 million being "almost triple" 12 million may have been a slight exaggeration, but 2.5x as many monthly active players than WoW ever had subscribers is still a pretty huge indicator of the gap.
League of Legends is, if not the game that makes the most money due to it's model, certainly the most played and most watched game in the world.
Milski on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
It cites vgchartz for some of the information. I'm gonna have to disqualify the whole thing.
There's an idea that's been floated in some MOBA communities that last hitting is a weird, outdated mechanic that should be done away with. I totally agree and would love to see a game that replaces it with something more fun and strategic.
SMITE still has last-hitting, but it's only for bonus gold. Whenever minions die (whether to a player, tower, or another minion), players in XP range of it get gold.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
I'm not sure if you're joking, truly hate vgchartz that much, or are just using an excuse to stick with your notion of League's popularity, but vgchartz has no information on League of Legends and no information on the Warcraft concurrent subscription, so it's safe to say that those parts of the chart are probably still coming from sources you like, again, assuming you aren't dismissing the LoL statistics because they're from Riot itself.
EDIT: Smite giving bonus gold for last hits still leads to essentially the same thing, though. Giving some gold for being in range is essentially just making the passive gold MOBAs always have location based, with the majority of the gold still coming from last hits. I think Demigod entirely did away with last hits (you could either last hit or have dealt like 20% of the creep's HP in order to get the gold, IIRC), but it was unfavorably received, had a very limited hero pool, and was pirated massively, so it kinda tanked.
I downloaded LoL months ago, but never had the free time to actually give it a try. Now that I've read through this thread, I'm feeling pretty happy about not playing it.
Posts
Yeah, that's right. That's the way the game works.
If you decide to pay real money to buy a character who is only good at one thing, then insist on doing something else with him, people will question your judgement or suggest the right way to play with it, with varying degrees of hostility and profanity. This could range from, "You know, Jayce really isn't an AD carry, he should be going top" to "You fucking worthless fucking noob why don't you kill yourself, fucking terrible carry."
Again...sort of. In draft mode, you take turns picking champions, but typically when you join the lobby you state your preferred role. If someone has a higher pick than you and wants the same role, one of you is going to be a little sad. Many champions can easily fill two roles. For instance, I've been really enjoying a relatively new champion named Vi. When I go into a match I say "jungle please" and plan on playing Vi. About 85% of games I ask for jungle I get it and play Vi being happy punching things with big mechanical fists.
almost always the second one
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
Fixed that to be more accurate.
Which does raise a valid complaint I have with the game. Some roles, such as support and jungle, are generally perceived as less glamorous. I don't ever want to play asshole dodge chicken, so I just go into support or jungle as needed to flesh out the team. This really frustrates me sometimes, though, because occasionally I'd like to play Singed top or something, but that'l never happen in solo because I don't have the asshole in me.
every time I played people would fight over it
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
Also I think you're onto something with asshole dodge chicken. This should be an official mini-game in chat, person who dodges waits the 5 minute penalty, person who doesn't dodge has to play Heimerdinger NO MATTER WHAT.
pleasepaypreacher.net
It's a team game. Not everyone always gets to play exactly what they want.
People also sometimes heal in MMO's despite not loving healing.
I do SOMETIMES get to play a different role, but I was agreeing that a decent complaint is how much harder it is for me to get to play one particular role over another.
Usually that's a means to an end.
In a MOBA there is no end other than to play the game
not that I think it's a bad thing
just a bad comparison
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
Hmm. I think the comparison is still good. Not everyone likes to heal, but we want to do this dungeon (do this dungeon is spending some time playing the game), so Billy will heal.
Not everyone likes to play support, but we want to win this game and support is the only unselected role. Billy will play Sona.
Next game, perhaps Billy will not play Sona. He still enjoyed playing the game, but he sure would like to play solo-mid Ziggs sometime.
Honestly, I'd rather play my non-preferred role in a MOBA than play the fill the bars game in a WoW raid for four hours.
Are you saying different people enjoy different things? SHUT UP AND HAVE FUN THE SAME WAY I'M HAVING FUN!
Report'd.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
You get out of this thread and think about what you've done. Out! Now!
There's a lot of frustration surrounding the issue of freedom of choice in competitive multiplayer games. Obviously, no one enjoys being told how to play, yet in a team game compromises often have to be made. Imagine baseball if everyone tried to field the ball at once instead of waiting in designated spots for balls to come their way.That's not to say other players are correct in dicating play styles, but that both perspectives need to be met with a certain degree of understanding.
First all of all, what's meta? One person in the thread suggested "The LoL meta is one gargantuan cargo cult. 'If we do this meta like the pros do, we'll win!" This is wrong. The difference between meta and a cargo cult is that the players espousing the belief in meta are the players getting results, the pros. Meta is a dominant strategy that seems to work well. It's not perfect, because the people coming up with these strategies are just ordinary fallible humans. Meta is a consensus by the the best players, and is changeable simply because it turns out to be wrong, new strategies are discovered, or because the game is patched.
The dominant league meta has been for a long time (with some exceptions), bruiser top, caster mid, jungle, range attack damage carry bottom, support bottom. This meta is not arbitrary, and it's mainly trying to achieve two goals: gold and exp maximization. Because creeps waves spawn every 30 seconds regardless of how fast they are killed, there is a finite amount of income and exp being generated in each lane. Gold and experience are obviously important to winning the game. Having a jungle ensures neutral creeps do not go to waste, letting his allies gain more gold and exp in lanes. A support who only earns gold passively increase the total amount of gold that lane would otherwise earn, instead of fighting his ally for last hits.
It's not the only way to play, but it's pretty solid and successful. Since there are plenty of ways to win though, why should anyone else tell you how to play? Well, they shouldn't.
And there you go. When you say no one should tell you how to play, you're right. Want to do a double bruiser bottom? Go ahead. Want to run a double jungle or ac mid? Go ahead. But do so with this one caveat. Just as someone else should have no expectation of dictating your play, you owe them the responsibility of being a team player.Being a team player means you make your own decisions about who you will play and how you will play them with consideration for what the rest of your team is doing.
If you want to play ADC Sona mid, I'm not opposed to that. But if you've decided on playing ADC Sona mid before you've even entered the match, then you're an asshole. What if one of your allies is still new to the game and the only champ he has learned is Support Sona? Are you going to ignore him completely and go ahead with your build? What if your team happens to already have a lot of physical damage and you could really, really, use more magic damage? Are you going to ignore you team entirely and trudge onwards with your preset decision?
This is all I ask of anyone who plays a competitive team game. Play whatever you want to the best of your ability, but play something with the rest of the team in mind.
Yeah. The sports analogy is again useful, as you have to buy (or grind freemium style) equipment to play. If people aren't coordinating, you're not playing right.
That sort of plays into what I was looking to add. In LoL and the other moba games, for a new player there's no in-game system that forces the appropriate group composition on the champion pick screen. So it's not like there's a AD Carry slot and a Support slot and a Jungler slot, etc, each of which only accept champions that work in that role at the beginning, and if you're the last pick, well of COURSE you have to grab a champion that can do support because that's the only slot left to fill.
And I think lots of gamers at this point are conditioned to expect the system itself to handle that if there are specific roles required to succeed, rather than having to actually talk about it ahead of time with random strangers in order to not inadvertently sabotage the group. So I think you get new players who have no idea that these categories even really exist, as well as people who know the categories exist, but resent being told what to do, and whose argument is basically "the system lets me pick my favorite champion, so there's no reason I shouldn't pick him, even though there's already someone who claimed that role"
Obviously that's possibly oversimplifying things to a large degree, but I wonder if there's design space for a moba game to do that and allow individuals to queue up a champion and check the roles (from the subset of roles that that champion *can* do) they're willing to play ala dungeon finder.
That would probably just lead to people bitching about how long the queue times are for AD carries, though.
In my case, I have no need to justify playing with something like "Sure, my teammates are awful people and the other team is shit talking racist insults constantly" because it hasn't happened to me in the past year at least. If it has, it was so minor I forgot it and so rare of an occurrence that it wasn't significantly worse than a random asshole showing up on a Minecraft server, or a spambot posting on a Vbulletin forum. I don't know if I'm supremely lucky, or in some kind of sweet spot in LoL's matchmaking skill curve where I'm above people who abandon games and make blissfully stupid choices and below people who think they can do whatever because of their skill, but I really don't find the community that bad when I play.
EDIT: As for the "queuing up for the role" thing; I'd prefer they never did that, simply because A: I'd rather Riot not explicitly acknowledge that there's one true meta everyone has to run, especially not since they're trying to shake things up somewhat, and B: specifically queuing with a certain champion can result in some really silly team compositions even with the right roles, especially strange support/carry pairings (Blitzcrank with Caitlyn, for instance).
I get tired of always going bot.
When I try to go top (even when two people already called bot), it's "GO BOT, YOU FUCKING NOOB". We end up losing because the jungler blows.
Fuck the meta.
Show me a single post where someone has said they like League because of the ass holes in the community. Seriously the community isn't great, but the reason people play it is for the competitive fun. If the idea of a competitive game requiring team work is adolescent to you then I seriously have to ask what's mature.
Like, I don't get why people say League of Legends is so awful; it's painting an entire community with a wide brush because of the actions of a subset of the community that, with the advent of Riot's community improvement features, hardly exists at this point. The amount of people I have seen who don't play LoL but believe it to be an entirely toxic community with nothing but absolute assholes in every game is staggering; I've seen less absurd scaremongering when a TV station makes a news report over some fake hacking threat posted on 4chan.
pleasepaypreacher.net
I believe you have misunderstood why the Tribunal exists.
The tribunal exists because of the size of the community. It's purpose was stated at first as a means of simply allowing Riot to better deal with the constant deluge of reports they get purely due to the size of the playerbase, without having to hire a massive amount of staff simply to wade through reports or to ignore people unless they consistently got reported dozens of times. The fact is that, yes, it makes the community a better place... but it's existence is almost inextricably linked to the fact League is the biggest game on the planet, not that League's community is particularly shitty.
Not only that, but even if the Tribunal was put into place because the community was shitty, that only says something about what the community was, not what it is; in fact, it gives a strong impression the community is going to improve from before the Tribunal was made, and as far as anybody who has looked into it can tell, the Tribunal has made the community better.
So yes, I will gladly admit that having a player-worked system that is clearly improving the community and helping the developer's deal with the crushing logistical weight of their game's popularity is unique to LoL. But the implication that the Tribunal is somehow an indicator that the community is an absolute hellhole and there is no intent to ever improve it? That's silly.
pleasepaypreacher.net
I have to say, as a graphic designer myself, that I am very impressed by the hardware but very disappointed to hear that Wacom/Adobe/Windows haven't worked together on pressure sensitivity yet. This piece of equipment would be perfect for me, but only if I could get CS 5.5 to play nice with the hardware. That's partially my fault for buying into Adobe's crap, but it's sort of industry-standard right now. I will be all over that stuff when Adobe gets its shit together.
Of course, that is unless I somehow find a monumental cash pile to throw at a Cintiq. Even then I'd still want the Surface Pro just to have a mobile sketchbook.
LoL has been bigger than WoW for almost a year now; as of October, the monthly active players for League is almost triple the max number of concurrent subscribers WoW has ever had. League has over double the peak concurrent players of CoD from the same data, and as far as I know CoD is dropping in popularity with installments now (very slightly), while League is still growing. League has more concurrent users than Steam has people online concurrently, which would include any League players who have Steam.
I'd appreciate if you didn't ignore the rest of my post; the Tribunal was not created "because of the belligerence of their playerbase." It was created because it is simply the most popular game in the world. Not only that, but having more reports, and having a stricter enforced ruleset about what is considered bad behavior, are probably good things, and those would also increase the amount of reports (and the need for a Tribunal or Riot hiring hundreds of additional staff). And just because two big games didn't come up with a nearly inarguably good idea doesn't mean that it isn't helping the community in League become even better.
What term should I use, then? It's not a bad term to describe people who, not having significant experience with the community, still tell others how toxic it is and that they should stay away for their own good.
Regardless, it's a subjective topic, but all I can do is continue to say that I only seem to hear how awful the community is from people who don't play League, and have had no negative experiences with League, which is probably at least in part due to the fact that they're one of the few games that is actively trying to improve the playerbase and make it more accessible to watch and play for people outside of the game.
I honestly don't understand the Teemo hate. I know it exists out there, but I don't get it.
But I DO feed off the hatred. This is Teemo's real power.
-edit-
Besides, Teemo is fun
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Citation needed. I don't care one way or the other but when you're talking about a game whose subscription base only just this past month or two slipped under the 10 million active account line, you're talking about a pretty big fish.
I also want to make sure people aren't letting their admiration for a game color their impression of how strongly it permeates the video game playing base.
I still loved the game so much that I have most champions on my account.
Assuming you take Riot's numbers (from various points in 2012) as being accurate, and your own point about WoW slipping under 10 million as accurate (which makes the "max subscribers of 12 million" a reasonable number), this infographic shows just that. League, in 2012, had a max concurrent playerbase of 3 million, 12 million people online daily, and 30 million people online monthly. 30 million being "almost triple" 12 million may have been a slight exaggeration, but 2.5x as many monthly active players than WoW ever had subscribers is still a pretty huge indicator of the gap.
League of Legends is, if not the game that makes the most money due to it's model, certainly the most played and most watched game in the world.
SMITE still has last-hitting, but it's only for bonus gold. Whenever minions die (whether to a player, tower, or another minion), players in XP range of it get gold.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
EDIT: Smite giving bonus gold for last hits still leads to essentially the same thing, though. Giving some gold for being in range is essentially just making the passive gold MOBAs always have location based, with the majority of the gold still coming from last hits. I think Demigod entirely did away with last hits (you could either last hit or have dealt like 20% of the creep's HP in order to get the gold, IIRC), but it was unfavorably received, had a very limited hero pool, and was pirated massively, so it kinda tanked.