ParanoidEngineer said:
I don't suppose whilst we're on the subject of LoL someone could reccomend a hero to start with? I play a lot of DotA (don't hate me) and mainly play carries, junglers or mid heroes. I like the look of Draven (because Destiny plays him so y'know he must be pretty awesome) and Teemo because I'm a sucker for cute bunny creatures.
Draven is hard to start with. Range is not incredible and really relies on catching his own skillshots properly. When done improperly it makes you predictable or not catching them makes you weak. Also has no escapes and requires expensive items in late game. Easy ranged champs would be Vayne, Tristana, Caitlyn. Plenty of escapes and firepower, also easy lasthitters.
holdthephone said:
You're not wrong, but they have to leave some kind of incentive for people to spend money. I've played for a couple of years now and only own about 1/3rd of the cast through IP, which while not very responsible of me, is enough for me to play semi-seriously on ladder. Truthfully, I don't even want the others. But the nice thing about the model is that as a free player, the experience is in no way limited or watered down. I'm still playing the same game and on equal footing with everyone else, I just have less champ options. I don't own every mage in the game, but I don't need to in order to win my games. People who buy or grind out all the champions always struck me as having a short attention span. I main 1-3 champs and change flavors every month or so.
With the ever so swiftly Riot changing a champ from completely useless to broken OP (hi remade ulti Evelynn a while back, DFG+Ult 80% HP nuke), it actually does matter which champ you do not own. Especially in ranked. There are set setups of teams that will stomp everything else most of the time and your favorite picks are not always even remotely viable against them. You're not on equal footing as long as you do not have the same choice as your enemy. Even if you could technically buy your way to it.
What I don't like is how runes can't be bought with money, which means you have to grind them out just to be able to play the game properly at a higher level. I think that's a bigger problem and one I don't quite understand.
The whole concept of buying power- regardless of anyone eventually being able to buy that power is that it disallows you to play the game properly until a certain point many months in. Mathematically, there is one type of Rune/Mastery setup for each champ that is the best. The guy that has all the game's mechanics worked out will always have the upper hand on the dude that just has the regular AD Marks and Quints, Armor Seals and so on. Again there is no diversity, merely one right way, much like items in terms of efficiency, so there is actually no point to the entire system.
Buying champs and the seemingly random costs they have (certainly not ranked by difficulty, fun to play or power) is also annoying. Making champs unavailable and thus not allowing the community to become good with them invites the unexperienced picks. Even after several thousand games, I still encountered people that had not played certain champs at all. It's fairly sad. And even if you did want to, LoL's metagame is so stuck up it's own asshole that you are very limited to the role you pick. You /also/ picked an AD carry? "you #$&$, #&*@ your mother" is the typical response.
Also, what's up with no surrender before 20 mins? Gah!
Thanks for reading, by the way.
People give up too quickly. 4v5s can still be won.
holdthephone said:
Not even just the competitive side. The engine of the game is poor (poor visuals for low framerate, but that's what you get using Adobe AIR I suppose) and has seen and still sees a lot of bugs. Newer champions offer very little variety, as I can see the hook mechanism being recycled a few times now. Most original champions are a complete ripoff or a merger/split of Dota heroes. The game is also tweaked in a way where Mdef and Pdef don't matter as much and are certainly not worth a pure buy (only okay as a side stat). Most characters of the same kind (ranged carry, supportive, tank with AP scaling/magic skills) follow duplicate builds. Proving that itemization is flawed and don't really play well into particular strengths of characters and that item builds are rarely able to be changed much for particular situations. (after all, LoL only has very limited amount of lategame items for each particular stat)
I don't think that's delving deeply into competitive, I think it's core issues, on whatever level you play the game.
It's nice on the eyes to me, but to each his own, I suppose. Some champions are still hideous (Kassadin, Sivir), but hopefully they'll get reworks sometime soon.
Bit too bright imo. Winter map (Riot logic: Snow = pasty flat white on everything) used to kill my eyes.
For the poor performance the game has in terms of FPS, the graphics don't hold up. It's a resource hog and several people complained that the darkening of the map (Noct ult) lagged them or froze the game. I too noticed an FPS drop when that happened. Those arbitrary gfx and a darkening effect on an i7 with a GTX580 should not hinder it one bit. Adobe Flash and it's inbred cousin Adobe AIR have bad performance.
Runes/masteries are mostly arbitrary additions. The F2P model is the only reason they even exist (player incentive). Items, too, fall under a routine instead of presenting actual options to the player. I don't think LoL is terribly deep or interesting in regards that type of customization, so you'd be right, but then I don't think it's a game that relies on those elements to begin with. If anything it relies on those options staying as simple and limited as they are. Certainly much of LoL's appeal is how basic it is, ya?
Which is a mistake, especially on how item reliant everything is. In Dota 2, most skills don't scale with stats at all and even mages gain damage on-hit from gaining their respective stat (example, 100AP would give Annie +100 auto atk damage if it were Dota, but not + on all her spells)
Of course it relies on items, that's the core of the entire game. If item builds weren't important, they could simply be replaced with natural stat growth, like other itemless games work it out. You need items to do anything. There are a lot of items, just not a lot of good ones to choose from. There are literally dozens of items that are mathematically wastes of money and aren't used.
As for LoL ripping off of DotA, I don't see how that's relevant. There's nothing inherently bad about that, is there? Starcraft has some Warhammer influence, but who cares?
Influence != ripping off. Traxex and Ashe being the perfect example. Even funnier is how kids were accusing Dota 2 stealing from LoL, haha.
