[LoL] Some proposed tweaks to ARAM

Due to my dislike of the meta-game and communities in MOBAs I ended up stepping away from League of Legends for a long time. It took the introduction of ARAM (All-Random All middle) mode for me to enjoy them again. Randomized characters destroy the idea of a meta, and it brings the game back to focusing on having a character and fighting enemies rather than placing the importance on arcane jungling routes, last-hit numbers, and team composition.* It is by far my favorite mode because its very design helps reduce much of the stress of being in a typical MOBA game; players can't expect you to know every champion when you had no control over who you got and with the amount of chaos going on things like creep-score have diminished importance.

But for all its perks ARAM still has some points I find unduly frustrating that could deal with a little tweaking.

[MOBAs] AD-Carrying your Weight

The jury is still out on whether I will give Heroes of the Storm a try, but something I keep seeing pop up in reviews and discussions about the game is that because of the experience catch-up mechanism that helps the losing team stay competitive and a general lack of snowballing that it makes a player more reliant on their team and prevents a good player from carrying a bad one.

[LoL & SMITE] A tale of two characters, or, "Who the Hel is that?"

So in the past few weeks two of the bigger MOBAs have each introduced a new female character...well in one case it's a rework of an old one, but given that the character got a complete revamp, I think it counts for the purpose of this post. The characters are Jinx from League of Legends, and Hel from Smite respectively. You see the two show fundamentally different design philosophies; one takes a step forward, the other a step back. Yar, there be satire ahead; and remember, we can be critical of media while still enjoying it. Also, the horse isn't dead yet!

Iran bans female LoL champions?

Honestly I thought it was The Onion I was reading when I came across an amusing article today, which explained that apparently as part of an agreement to hold a League of Legends tournament in Iran, the WGC would have to ban virtually all of the female champions. The only ones to escape are Anivia (being non-human) and Annie (presumably because she is a child). The full list after the break.

My Love-Hate Relationship with ARAM (All Random All Mid)

So the budding craze among the MOBA scene is the new game-mode called ARAM, or All-Random All-Mid. Short version is that everyone picks a random hero, then everyone goes to the middle lane and dukes it out. Originally this came from DotA in which it was just a tacit agreement amongst the players to honor that rule, but now that it's sort of caught fire because of its emphasis on team-fights other MOBAs such as League of Legends and SMITE have adopted it. Both have created maps specifically for ARAM gameplay to help enforce the previously oral rules. Because the game is random and focuses more on team-fighting, I can stand it much more than the traditional MOBA gameplay. I'm not stuck in a lane alone or with a single other person and more or less entirely at fault if things go south. Lower stress = Happier Clockwork. The problem is ARAM is not without is issues...

League of Legends' Person of Color Problem

This post was brought on by a discussion I had with a friend, in which, as a joke, he exclaimed "There are no black people in League of Legends," referring to the character list. While perhaps a crass way to put it, he had a point. But League of Legends is one of the most popular games in the world right now, that had to be wrong. Yet I could not think of a single dark skinned champion to save my life. So I did the responsible thing and did some research, below are the findings and some analysis.

"Professionalism" in gaming Part 2, or, "How intensely do you play?"

A week or so ago when I first thought to write this entry and claimed I would I had some ideas in mind about how each player is devoting a different level of time to the game and views their responsibility towards other players differently. Then the other night I was reading a thread on the World of Tanks forum about XVM (a mod that displays player stats in game, letting you see who on your team has a high win rate and a calculated "efficiency rating") and spotted a comment in there about playing to win. It dawned upon me that in a sense everyone (with few exceptions) IS in fact playing to win, but their criteria for winning and the INTENSITY in which they try to win differs and is one of the prime causes of friction between players of differing levels.

A "Player" first storyline

I know I promised to do Part 2 of the Professionalism post, focusing on player-to-player interactions, but that post is requiring a lot more detail than expected but is coming! In the meantime, I was reading an article on Joystiq about the "5 Worst Raid Encounters in Cataclysm" and Chase brings up an issue that highlights many of the issues I have with Blizzard's story writing.

Playing for fun v. Playing for competition

The long hiatus is finally over, finals have come to an end and I've a few weeks to enjoy the beak...how wonderfully convenient that it should happen to be right before Diablo 3 releases and I like much of the world will try extremely hard tomorrow to crash Blizzard's servers. However we have a day to kill before it releases! In the meantime I have taken up World of Tanks again after some rumblings in the blogosphere had refreshed my memory of it. However since I last took up the game I've found some new trends within I find unpleasant to deal with; namely the game's insistence on keeping a permanent record of everything done.

Sexism in League of Legends

In starting my series of sexuality and video games I’ve picked League of Legends, a rather successful (putting it lightly) MOBA game that is free to play. Let me get out of the way to start that this is not a critique of the gameplay; it is an extremely fun game. The issue I am addressing is how the genders are depicted. For all it does right, LoL is anything but progressive with its depiction of female characters. I’ve compiled a list of all the female characters below, organized into three categories: sexualized, arguable, and not-sexualized.