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If you guys don't know who or what RIOT is, they're the company that makes LoL. I might be making a broad generalization for the majority of people who play LoL, but from what I've seen, it seems as though most people think RIOT is doing a good job, and are good game developers. Their PR is pretty good, they explain things where they need to, but in my eyes, it's just a disguise for their shitty ass developments and complete failures.
This blog isn't for the purposes of saying LoL is a bad game. I enjoy LoL and its own style compared to dota, but when I see how riot decides to handle things I honestly cannot fathom how anyone cannot be upset with them.
It's been... 2 years? since the game has come out and they have yet to create a replay system. Looking at match history tells you nothing about the game and navigating through players you played against is nonexistent when you log out. You have to spend literally over 300 dollars to obtain every hero (roughly 7 dollars per hero). You can get "IP" to buy heroes, sure, but you typically need 60+ games to get a single tier 3 hero. They have a rune system so you're forced to invest your precious IP into maximizing your stats, WHICH IN ALL REALITY IS JUST A SCAM TO GET MORE MONEY RATHER THAN ADD DIVERSITY TO THE GAME. Their custom game making is UTTER shit and every time I watch a tournament they have to delay the fucking game for like 10 minutes to remake due to an error or whatever. OH AND IT'S ALSO HILARIOUS WHEN PROS HAVE TO REMAKE GAMES CAUSE THEY CAN'T SWAP CAUSE THEY DON'T OWN THE DAMN HERO LOL.
So what are they doing besides sitting on their ass doing nothing? They release a rehashed hero with rehashed abilities from the rest of the pool. Yep, just add in some form of aoe damage, target dmg ability, a skillshot and we're ready to go! Oh, and let's add in like 5 skins cause that's what people want. Skins for the same hero which you can buy for the cheap price of 7 fucking dollars (not including the hero itself). Even when they're so successful that they can even put out a 5 million dollar tournament so that they're not outdone by Dota2 in attracting new players yet they can't add the simplest of functions to their game for some reason even though every moba before it has done it easily.
Seriously, anyone who thinks any of this is fair or reasonable is out of their fucking mind. I like the extreme measures people go to justify spending 300 dollars on this game. Basically in terms of entertainment per hour or saying they played WoW and payed 15 dollars a month. Guys, I'd just like you to know that in Dota you get every hero for fucking free after you buy Warcraft 3 for 20 bucks. In HoN you got every hero for 30 dollars when they released it. The whole LoL business model is set up around attracting as many naive people who have never played a moba in their life and to get them to spend as much money on this game as possible. It's equivalent to a korean MMO in terms of "free" and they want you to grind it out in the same fashion.
 
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Free to Play business model is becoming more and more popular.
People like being able to try things before they pay for them. FTP has essentially replaced demos from back in the day.
I think a big part of the reason people like Riot as a company is that they are very open about a lot of things. They release a lot of youtube videos rationalizing their decisions on changes. They support LoL as an esport pretty heavily by throwing tournament stream links on your login page.
Overall they're just more personably and relatable compared to an uber company like Activision-Blizzard who releases a patch right before a major tournament and don't really give a shit.
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And that's where I'm saying everything they do is for the sole purpose of gaining money. It's really no different from blizzard, just less obvious. They support esports because it gains them attention, yet they don't add benefits for the pros like improving custom gamemaking and a working, functional replay system?
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I've been playing LoL since beta and I can definitively say that the game used to be balanced. Now, they churn out a new hero every two weeks, who manages to be both overpowered (so they sell) and still completely unoriginal (because of their "anti-fun" mentality). Then two weeks later they get nerfed and a new overpowered yet boring hero drops.
Tencent buys Riot -> game goes to shit. They claim they aren't selling power but it's a lie. This isn't even considering the community, which is full of flaming, trolling, 12 year old noobs.
I got a DotA 2 beta key and never looked back. Every time I play LoL now I'm reminded of how shit it has become.
EDIT: There's also issues with the fundamental design of the game. No denying actually makes lanes MORE passive, and encourages you to not attack creeps AT ALL. It also means that pushing towers early can be bad as you are unable to safely farm, making games even more stagnant. The small map (compared to DotA) means that late game everything turns into a 5v5 team fight, but the lack of TP scrolls makes assisting other lanes impossible in the early game. This is why the lane setups are so stagnant and the metagame hasn't changed one bit in the past few years. In DotA you can pull all sorts of crazy lanes like 3-1-1, 1-2-1-1, 2-2-1, or even 4-1-0 with the right team comp. Ability power means that there is no concept of an "early game hero" like DotA. It's just "pick the most overpowered AP carry and wreck face from beginning to end".
The number of design flaws in the game are staggering. But the end result is obvious: there is only one lane setup, and if you want to win, you have to pick the flavor of the month (usually the newest hero because Tencent needs their money and Riot better pay up).
EDIT 2: OH YEAH and the game is even MORE "snowbally" than DotA. Because of the passive lanes and the fact that there are no true late game carries, the team that is behind usually will get farther behind. The only way they can get ahead is if the other team makes a mistake, not through any good play of their own. Enemy Annie wins mid and gets a 10 minute Deathcap? Good luck winning a fight for dragon. Ever.
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Tencent buys Riot -> game goes to shit. They claim they aren't selling power but it's a lie. This isn't even considering the community, which is full of flaming, trolling, 12 year old noobs.
How was the business model different before Tencent bought them?
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On February 28 2012 16:16 WaveofShadow wrote:Show nested quote +Tencent buys Riot -> game goes to shit. They claim they aren't selling power but it's a lie. This isn't even considering the community, which is full of flaming, trolling, 12 year old noobs. How was the business model different before Tencent bought them?
The business model was technically the same, but every single new hero they released wasn't overpowered as hell. You can argue this one one way or the other, but I am convinced that Riot is doing it on purpose. Money makes the world go round.
But really, it's the fundamental design flaws that I extrapolated on above that ruin this game for me. DotA is just so much more interactive.
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I'm actually fine with no denying. In non competitive games there can be just as much action early as dota, and many different ways to outlane your opponent.
But there are other flaws that definitely tunnel the meta into the same game plan and objectives. I think the main reason why in competitive that it's so passive early is because it's just too risky to take these chances against an enemy jungler. Your ward coverage is non existant early on, but then when you go back to buy the ward coverage is just too much. You'll have complete vision of the map and the scripted mobs and timers makes it so you know where your enemy jungler will be making ganking really difficult with summoners up.
They'll never change this though because it'd probably result in an "anti-fun" mechanic or w/e they try to justify it with.
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When the community was smaller, Riot tended to be more involved directly with people via their competitions and "Play with a Rioter."
With the release of DOTA2, they have become more business oriented in order to survive in the field. They are a different form of MOBA compared to DOTA, not necessarily more or less casual friendly.
I personally cannot play LoL anymore because the community disappoints me and ruins most of the games I have played lately. The DOTA2 community has not made me feel any better. I favor individual or small group games over team-based battles currently in general.
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On February 28 2012 16:23 Itsmedudeman wrote:
I'm actually fine with no denying. In non competitive games there can be just as much action early as dota, and many different ways to outlane your opponent.
But there are other flaws that definitely tunnel the meta into the same game plan and objectives. I think the main reason why in competitive that it's so passive early is because it's just too risky to take these chances against an enemy jungler. Your ward coverage is non existant early on, but then when you go back to buy the ward coverage is just too much. You'll have complete vision of the map and the scripted mobs and timers makes it so you know where your enemy jungler will be making ganking really difficult with summoners up.
In non-competitive games all kinds of shit can happen. That doesn't say anything about the actual state of the game. The truth is that competitive LoL is a complete farm fest and boring as hell to watch. This is because pros have realized that LoL is snowbally as hell, so if they get a little bit ahead, there is little chance for their opponent to catch up as long as they play super safely.
Competitive DotA will often feature two different team composition strategies (push vs turtle/farm for example) where one team tries to end the game fast and the other team just wants to hang on long enough for their carry to get farmed up. This results in a lot of action as the teams will clash over towers again and again. In addition, the plethora of unique abilities in DotA make for very diverse team fights depending on timing and positioning.
As a spectator sport, DotA >>>>>>>>>>>>> LoL.
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Riot is very transparent with their decisions, and they have a free to play game. Compare them to MLG after winter arena, people don't like paying money to watch a game or play a game. Riot has caused neither, and I think it is great for the community.
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Meh. Personally, I don't like Riot. I think they are fucking lazy I hope LoL just dies so we can forget about it. They don't give fuckall for the balance of the game, they are just focused on shitting out as many heroes and skins as possible because believe it or not they make alot of money off that stupid shit from naive people.
They said they were gonna make a replay system. Still isn't there last I checked. They said they were going to add some other 5v5 map like in HoN/DotA that is much larger. Last I checked again, they still haven't done that. They did add this stupid fucking Dominion game though, like why would I give half a shit about this stupid game mode? add replays already you lazy fucks. It's like they are trying to avoid adressing the things that could make the game better.
Finally the worst part about the game imo is the community. It's like a cesspool that attracts the worst types of gamers on the internet. I have been in games where noyone spoke a word of english, countless times where someone fed on purpose or just sucked horribly. Not just bad, like these kids have fucking brain damage or something the way they play the game. I play my ass off and we still lose the games because these kids still haven't gotten the basics down over the course of hundreds of games. It's downright embarassing how stupid they are.
I could go on for awhile. I stopped playing LoL last year. Wasn't worth all the bullshit. Even duo-queueing with a good friend couldn't save it for me, still got screwed by teammates. Then I get stupid emails from Riot temp-banning me for the dumbest shit. 3 people on my team fed the other team to hell and went afk so I go afk too, fuck it. Got an email about it, ROFL. Bming some kid who just ran towards the other team all game and fed them to hell? Theres a temp ban and an email for that too. It's a fucking joke. Not the mention Riot was like "fuck this shit lol, we will just let the community do our jobs so we can sit on our ass more" and created the Tribunal, which just allows these same idiots to judge you for the most unimportant shit in the world. I'm not saying some people don't deserve temp bans, but it gets abused so much, or it just ends up going to some sheltered admin who has never seen a curse word before. If your gonna ban for profanity, then remove the filter for it. Makes no damn sense.
I hope Riot finds something else to make that isn't trash. This psuedo pay/free system it has going on is horrible. Either you pay the bullshit price for a new hero or you grind games for like weeks trying to obtain the stupid amount of IP to buy it. Then there are runes which give you an advantage, oh hey, heres more grinding for you!
Well, thats my rant anyways. The longer Riot keeps all this up, the more I hope they go bankrupt. Horrible gaming companies deserve to go under and I hope the people that actually play and like LoL to move to a MOBA worth playing like DotA2 that actually has a company behind it that gives a shit.
On February 28 2012 16:37 mastergriggy wrote:
Riot is very transparent with their decisions, and they have a free to play game. Compare them to MLG after winter arena, people don't like paying money to watch a game or play a game. Riot has caused neither, and I think it is great for the community.
F2P does not mean better. Not the mention the term is a bit ambiguous when applied to LoL. Yes, it is free in terms of money. It isnt something like TF2 though where you can just pick up and play. It requires quite a hefty time investment, especially if you ever want to be competitive at it with all the heros/runes/rune pages to buy.
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On February 28 2012 16:13 Uranium wrote:
I've been playing LoL since beta and I can definitively say that the game used to be balanced. Now, they churn out a new hero every two weeks, who manages to be both overpowered (so they sell) and still completely unoriginal (because of their "anti-fun" mentality). Then two weeks later they get nerfed and a new overpowered yet boring hero drops.
Tencent buys Riot -> game goes to shit. They claim they aren't selling power but it's a lie. This isn't even considering the community, which is full of flaming, trolling, 12 year old noobs.
I got a DotA 2 beta key and never looked back. Every time I play LoL now I'm reminded of how shit it has become.
EDIT: There's also issues with the fundamental design of the game. No denying actually makes lanes MORE passive, and encourages you to not attack creeps AT ALL. It also means that pushing towers early can be bad as you are unable to safely farm, making games even more stagnant. The small map (compared to DotA) means that late game everything turns into a 5v5 team fight, but the lack of TP scrolls makes assisting other lanes impossible in the early game. This is why the lane setups are so stagnant and the metagame hasn't changed one bit in the past few years. In DotA you can pull all sorts of crazy lanes like 3-1-1, 1-2-1-1, 2-2-1, or even 4-1-0 with the right team comp. Ability power means that there is no concept of an "early game hero" like DotA. It's just "pick the most overpowered AP carry and wreck face from beginning to end".
The number of design flaws in the game are staggering. But the end result is obvious: there is only one lane setup, and if you want to win, you have to pick the flavor of the month (usually the newest hero because Tencent needs their money and Riot better pay up).
EDIT 2: OH YEAH and the game is even MORE "snowbally" than DotA. Because of the passive lanes and the fact that there are no true late game carries, the team that is behind usually will get farther behind. The only way they can get ahead is if the other team makes a mistake, not through any good play of their own. Enemy Annie wins mid and gets a 10 minute Deathcap? Good luck winning a fight for dragon. Ever.
In response to the overpowered comment, I hear what your saying but I feel that they almost need to make them overpowered now because it is much better to relase an overpowered champ that everyone wants, than to relase a shit one than patch it later. For example Yorick is debately one of the best solo tops in the game, when is the last time you saw yorick in a game, chances are for me at least not very often. When yorick came out he was weak and most people considered him useless imo that stigma stuck with him and only the people who really look deeply in to champs see the potential in him, but everyone else saw that he sucked when he came out and despite the patch they still believe he sucks.
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HoN players mostly hate S2, too.
Being free to play (with optional purchases) does this to a big portion of your fanbase automatically, really.
It really is an awful model when the heroes cost that much to purchase.
And yeah, the trend of making new heros as flashy as possible (and typically OP) to ensure they get purchased is probably a real one. Certainly feels like it is in HoN.
Complaining about idiot teammates is not really something these companies can control, though. Rating systems can always be abused, and it's amazing how terrible a person can play one game, and fantastically the next. All while believing it's someone else's fault 
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If you look at it the way you people do, then yes, it's a shitty game. But it's a fun game, everyone can play it. My younger brother was surprised to see that 80% of his new friends played this game (including girls, when's the last time you saw casual gamer girls on the internet). The skins are a bonus, you don't have to pay for it. And you get more IP when you're not level 30. It takes quite some games to master a champion, so I don't mind not having all the champions.
I like to watch proteams battle it out in LoL, since I think it's exciting and clear what happens. Dota2 has a darker art style, I really dislike that. LoL is more cartoony, which makes it more fun (for me).
You think of it in a professional way, you want more options and more tactics but you forget the fun part. For me it's fun to sit there with 4 noob friends of mine and just play the game and lose or win horribly, I don't care.
I know this blog is about RIOT, but since all your points are how RIOT build LoL I just wanted to shine some light on why LoL is as successful as it is. I don't have the feeling that they're greedy assholes, I do think the champions they release are getting less thought out, but if they would take twice as much the time for a champion I think it would already be better.
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You're completely blind dude and pretty much confirm what I believe to be brainwashing done by RIOT to newcomers to mobas. Even if it IS free the point is it shouldn't cost 20 dollars to get 3 fucking heroes. There's no way to even try a hero except wait for a random week in which it might be free to play. So you're casual, maybe you play this game like it's minesweeper, then you play it a bit more and are actually decent, what now? You want to try a hero or role you haven't tried before, too bad, drop 7 dollars on a hero you have no idea if you want or get out. Maybe you want to compete or get better? No runes? Sorry, can't play that hero on an even footing.
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Netherlands45349 Posts
People like RIOT because they made a fun game to play with friends and its free, in fact alot of people who are more ''serious'''LoL players often criticize RIOT in alot of there decisions.
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Well, the game is FtP and lots of fun compared to that price. So, I guess that makes it head and shoulders over mediocre games that cost money.
Like someone wrote above, they also do alot to promote tournaments big and small, and make a big deal of linking streaming pro's and such.
I get that people who have played this game for a while can get angry about the inherent greedy nature of micro-transaction games... But the thing that makes Riot so likeable is that skins and champs are voulantary. There's no champ with astronomical costs that is objectively better than others, everything comes down to individual skill(and in a non-proffessional enviornment everything is viable :p). So a new player can just pick up a few good cheap champs and have a blast for months without any investment beyond the time he/she plays the game.
Riot are awesome promoters of eSports and do a really nice job of showing off a FtP model that stays clear of the "free to play, pay to win"-concept like some do and instead focuses on how much investment you want to put into the game and rewards you for that.
My 2 cents.
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100% agree with this. I played LoL for some months about....a year ago now at this point. The game itself is very entertaining and a great spectator sport (I still enjoy watching pro competitions) but I eventually felt forced to quit because I felt like I couldn't play anything other than AP characters because that's all I had runes for (and even then, I still felt like my list of playable AP characters was limited, excluding the fact I didn't even own most of them). Even if money wasn't an issue and I could just magically spend the hundreds of dollar to own all the champs, the amount of time to grind out rune pages just felt ridiculous. Factor in money being an issue, the semi-casual player is essentially pigeon-holed into specializing into one champ which frankly just didn't feel fun to me after a while. (It's also very contradictory to the whole "team game" feel.)
Not to mention the ridiculous "balance" patches that make that one champ you play top tier for 2 months to being garbage tier for 4-5 months.
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On the other hand the free to play model allows you to choose if you want to pay or not. I haven't given a single cent to RIOT and still, i've been playing their game for almost two years and enjoying it. I don't play a lot but as time goes by I now have tons of runes/quints/8 rune pages and about 30 champions. And obviously I don't play the 30 of them.
To me the valid points on which you can blame them are mostly about the competitive scene :
- no replay, they want a competitive game, they need replays (although they have added a pretty cool observer mod/tourney UI)
- new OP champ every two week, this is pretty bad for competitive play, it changes how the game should be played too often, dota took a better approach at this removing new champs from -cm until they were considered fine
- not much creativity when creating champions, a lot of them look the same, but still there are some who are really well designed and fit the competitive aspect (lee sin comes to mind) not enough of those unfortunately...
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On February 28 2012 18:06 Itsmedudeman wrote:
You're completely blind dude and pretty much confirm what I believe to be brainwashing done by RIOT to newcomers to mobas. Even if it IS free the point is it shouldn't cost 20 dollars to get 3 fucking heroes. There's no way to even try a hero except wait for a random week in which it might be free to play. So you're casual, maybe you play this game like it's minesweeper, then you play it a bit more and are actually decent, what now? You want to try a hero or role you haven't tried before, too bad, drop 7 dollars on a hero you have no idea if you want or get out. Maybe you want to compete or get better? No runes? Sorry, can't play that hero on an even footing.
Lol wtf man? You sound so bitter. XD
If it's free you shouldn't give a shit if it costs $20 to get 3 heroes. I started playing LoL very casually, and between playing about 3 games a week and a few weekend when I played with friends for extra, I ended up with thousands more IP than I knew what to do with. You make it sound like it's impossible to get IP and you will be forced to spend real money. That's flat out false. Also, I hit level 30 and didn't have any runes at all for a while... and you know what? It didn't matter, cause I used skillz to win.
As for the original topic: I think LoL's demographic is a large reason why people don't care. With so many casual gamers, ask yourself how many people really will miss replays if they haven't ever played a game that had them? Or how many people will really be critical of the fuss and bother of getting a tournament game started if they've never seen another game played competitively? You are comparing it to your experience in other games, which makes you dissatisfied, but many people have nothing to compare it to.
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