What are your thoughts on League of Legends?

[BlueMoon1991]

I have played it a couple of times but I have never been able to reallyh get into it! Was wondering what everyones thoughts on it was?

[Jama7301]

I like it well enough. I love the meta game and watching the NALCS and Worlds really hammer that home, but after a... dang, 6 year hiatus from playing it a lot, I don't think I can get back into it. I don't want to start back at level 1 and I don't want to dive in with a level 30 account and get blasted for being bad.

[Rynjin]

I don't want to .... get blasted for being bad.

This sums up my opinion on League of Legends. Even if I liked MOBAs (which I don't, really, but they're fun for a couple of games once in a while), the absolutely vile, toxic, cancerous community would still turn me off.

[Lector87]

Don't do it! Save yourself!

Having been hooked on the game for about a year (around 2012-2013?) I can safely say I have never before or since regretted so many wasted hours on such a pitifully shallow experience.

[NRSASD]

It wasn't my cup of tea. A lot of my friends played it back when we were all in college, and I played it with them, but it was never really my thing. As many have mentioned, the community is really toxic in standard matches, but if you're playing with friends it can be a good time.

[McDouggal]

Don't do it.

League has a learning wall, as well as a substantial amount of catching up to the rest of everyone to do when you first start.

This only got slightly better with the removal of runes.

I started playing in 2012. It was my default game for years - if I didn't know what I wanted to play, I'd play League. I still haven't unlocked about 15 of the champions.

If you really want to get into LoL, the best time to do so was 5 years ago.

[Lector87]

Don't do it.

League has a learning wall, as well as a substantial amount of catching up to the rest of everyone to do when you first start.

This only got slightly better with the removal of runes.

I started playing in 2012. It was my default game for years - if I didn't know what I wanted to play, I'd play League. I still haven't unlocked about 15 of the champions.

If you really want to get into LoL, the best time to do so was 5 years ago.

I agree and maintain what I said above - but dang, your profile pic reminded me of how much I loved Leona.

...which is now the name of one of my daughters...I wish I could claim it was a coincidence, but that would be lying...

[Leecros]

I love playing League of Legends with a group of 4 other friends. We just derp around and sometimes we win and sometimes we lose.

However, I've pretty much quit playing if I don't have a full group of friends. People are so obsessed over winning and like many other online competitive games. The idea of sportsmanship just straight up doesn't exist.



I love the meta game

See, I loathe League's Meta Game. I don't hate its existence. Every game that has some sort of strategic or tactical component is going to have a meta.

What I hate is the strict adherence to that meta. If you get a player on your team who takes the meta as scripture and you don't adhere to that meta. Then you're going to get an earful(or a text box full as the case may be). In the same vein, some people stay so strictly on point with the meta that they absolutely refuse to adapt.

At least, that was my experience with the game a couple of years ago. I haven't played for awhile...I log in occasionally just to keep my profile from expiring, but that's about it.

[Jama7301]

See, I loathe League's Meta Game. I don't hate its existence. Every game that has some sort of strategic or tactical component is going to have a meta.

What I hate is the strict adherence to that meta. If you get a player on your team who takes the meta as scripture and you don't adhere to that meta. Then you're going to get an earful(or a text box full as the case may be). In the same vein, some people stay so strictly on point with the meta that they absolutely refuse to adapt.

At least, that was my experience with the game a couple of years ago. I haven't played for awhile...I log in occasionally just to keep my profile from expiring, but that's about it.

I can see that. I should have clarified. I love the metagame Surrounding the game. It's cool to see how different regions develop different metas when on the same patch, ad it's always cool to see when somebody does take a chance and break meta.

Strict adhirance to it is boring, but it's existence is something I enjoy looking at.

[NeoVid]

I played it heavily for years, until I realized there wasn't enough medication in the world to make it possible for me to put up with the community any longer.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Matches take too long, and the necessity of a tedious mechanical exercise (CS) to gameplay was annoying. But mostly it was the time investment. I just play Heroes of the Storm instead, gets me through more matches, which gets me into the game more.

[Vitruviansquid]

I dislike League of Legends intensely, and the reason for it may seem very petty to people who are not fans of the game or the genre.

In League of Legends, it takes way too little time for one player to kill another player.

There are very many characters that are designed to kill other characters in 1 combo to which the other character cannot react. It made the game sometimes feel shallow to me, more like a fight is decided by who can click on the other character first, or who had better mechanics by a few fractions of a second. I have since moved onto Heroes of the Storm because damage values are way lower in that game, and fights feel like actual fights, where you can make your choices and react to the enemy's choices because in HotS, a hero who can take an opponent down to half health in one combo is considered to have a lot of damage.

[Olinser]

I have played it a couple of times but I have never been able to reallyh get into it! Was wondering what everyones thoughts on it was?

I like it and play it quite a bit. There's a regular League thread in the forums here with a list of a lot of people that play of all skill levels, feel free to add me and others if you're looking to get into it.

The basic fundamentals of the game are extremely easy to pick up, but to actually learn the game requires a very long time simply encountering and learning items, champions and their abilities, and that does take quite a bit of time.

[Winthur]

I started playing it as a Zilean laner / Rammus jungle back in Season 1 (ADC/Supp wasn't yet discovered), and finished playing it after reaching Diamond 1 in Season 4 as a support/jungle main. Ended up losing interest due to the friends I started playing the game with dropping off and after frustration with the game design, some developers' changes.

I met some good friends through the game and had some laughs, but in the end, when it became my go-to game for when nothing else was happening, I was also at the height of some depressive states; I quit because even reaching high Diamond felt hollow and I had little drive to log in, and I figured I'd rather be playing my single player backlog or Starcraft. Starcraft never failed to make me pumped after a game, whether won or lost; the only time I was in any way pumped when winning in League was reaching new milestones.

Used to be a regular in the GitP LoL thread and it was (still is) a pleasant place; as I got better at the game I liked writing helpful stuff here and there, but ofc, at this point it's probably outdated. I also remember that I disliked the rampant reworks to characters like Sona.

Really loved Janna, Leona and Alistar; played decent Thresh out of necessity; I played more support than jungle at the end, but still liked jungle Udyr, Lee, Nocturne...

In the end, I think even Janna's cute feet couldn't turn me away from how playing that single map over and over ended up stale and how long the time investment per game was. I also felt like I peaked at the skill level I wanted and realized I didn't feel like pushing even further; the game didn't feel like being worth the grind anymore.

Is it fun? I'd probably not even pick it up if I didn't constantly have at least a duo queue partner to frolic with. But it's satisfying to make plays and it has cute eye candy to look at among both sexes. I suppose it's not the worst, and I think a lot of the criticism regarding the design here is misguided, but I did end up having my own reasons to quit, so my enjoyment of the game wasn't eternal either.

If you feel like it, give it a spin. The game is free and your champion collection doesn't matter; at least back in season 4, there were champion discounts for older champions and there were plenty of solid characters that could kick ass while costing a very affordable price or sometimes being free with Youtube or Facebook subscriptions, like Annie, Janna, Alistair, Tristana, Corki, Kayle, Morgana etc., so I don't think it's that hard to get started aside from having to grind 30 levels before you hit competitive, and the free champion rotation every week is enough to try out new stuff in Normal games.

[Dienekes]

It is the MOBA equivalent of World of Warcraft. Is it the best MOBA? Probably not. But if anyone was interested in MOBAs they probably have or still are playing LoL. So groups tend to form and stay there.

It’s decently fun. And I have sunk far more hours into it than I should have. Chalk full of annoyances though b

[NeoVid]

In the end, I think even Janna's cute feet couldn't turn me away from how playing that single map over and over ended up stale and how long the time investment per game was.

This reminded me of something I hadn't thought of in years. Long ago, I promised to come back to LoL once the Magma Chamber map went live. Did that ever happen?

[McDouggal]

This reminded me of something I hadn't thought of in years. Long ago, I promised to come back to LoL once the Magma Chamber map went live. Did that ever happen?

Nope. It's one of the few memes Riot hasn't killed at this point.

They technically made it for a series of 1v1 and 2v2 matches at an all-star event 2-3 years ago. But it was essentially a reskin of the Howling Abyss.

[Leecros]

To my understanding, Magma Chamber got turned into a 2v2 map while the original concept of the map got implemented into Dominion(which was Retired in 2016)


Edit: what McDouggal said

[Silfir]

A couple of years back I played a lot. Not PvP, mind you. I'd play against AI over and over. Never had much issues with toxicity because when the other guys are just machines and you don't have a lot of trouble stomping them everybody generally stays calm. When I tried to play PvP it eventually ended up in the same place you've all been. It was fine as long as I was playing ARAM (before it was institutionalized; I think today even ARAM is no longer a safe haven for casual play. People expect you to be competent with every single hero you've ever bought. Goodness.) I tried it long enough to see myself get emotional and yell at teammates over team chat. "What ... have I ... become?"

This isn't even my main issue with the game. To get into that, I'll provide an example. They recently released a video detailing Annie's backstory. By my best understanding, it shows her being taken in by a foster family of three, and subsequently causing the death of the other other girl, the father and finally the mother. The girl drowns when she tries to hold on to Tibbers to save herself from a raging river, because Tibbers decides to immolate and kill her; the father dies trying to save Annie from a fire that she caused herself and wasn't even a danger to her, and the mother, who was suspicious of Annie from the beginning, confronts her in front of the smoldering remains, and is then immolated herself when Annie can no longer keep her emotions in check (again).

The video is ridiculously pretty, let's get that straight. Extremely talented people spent months of their time making it. That's part of what makes it frustrating. Like ... how am I supposed to play her as a champion now? She clearly doesn't want to fight anyone - she just wants to be left alone! It was an entirely different thing to play Annie when she seemed to be simply a hard-as-nails nine-year-old, who fought on equal footing with eldritch horrors, fluffy blowpipe wielders, majestic ice phoenixes just because she could. I suppose the idea of the video is to humanize her - to show us she's truly a child, and that her powers are more of a curse to her than anything. So if I pick Annie as my player character, I'm not gleefully burning my opponents to a crisp like it's literal child's play - I'm perpetuating the emotional torment of a nine-year-old child who just wanted to be normal.

There's exactly one job that the League of Legends lore is supposed to do, and that's to make me want to play the game. The job of a character's lore is to make me want to play the character. At some point they jumped so deep into the True Art is Angsty (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TrueArtIsAngsty) Kool-Aid that they forgot that very simple thing.

[Forum Explorer]

The gameplay itself is alright. Its certainly my favorite MOBA, but I can't play it constantly without burning out. But that holds true of literally every other video game I've ever played as well, so yeah.

I find that people overstate the toxicity of the game. In the majority of my games people are mostly alright. You might get a couple comments or complaints, but so long as you don't respond, or have an excuse, it usually stops there. That being said, sometimes you get a complete meltdown of toxicity. And that's where everything everyone is saying becomes true.

But on the other hand I've had plenty of games where people are polite, friendly, and downright nice to each other, or games where everyone is basically silent, only communicating through pings. And overall, I'd say the good games outweigh the bad.

[shadow_archmagi]

I prefer Heroes of the Storm because League has too many fiddly bits. If I wanted to manage eight character-building resources, I'd build a D&D 3.5 character.

I've also noticed HotS has an order of magnitude less hostility than League.

Mobas in general have to be played in short doses, because it's easy for them to generate bad feelings instead of good feelings, at which point you've both lost the game, and also failed at playing a video game for fun.

[Joran]

This reminded me of something I hadn't thought of in years. Long ago, I promised to come back to LoL once the Magma Chamber map went live. Did that ever happen?

No, they scrapped it.

https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/features/showdown-magma-chamber-info

They found that the map had performance issues and they didn't want to split the player pool too much, since 1v1 and 2v2 duels don't maintain interest.

As for League of Legends, it's the most immersive community and game experience for a game that I no longer play. I stick around mostly for the eSports and the really slick production and funny Reddit memes. I have a favorite league team, which I follow, I watch the eSports almost religiously, and I visit the subreddit and consume the content on a regular basis.

I used to enjoy it when my friends played it and we were trying to get better, but I simply don't have the time anymore to sink into a 20-30 minute game that I'm not sure I'll enjoy. I've cut things like fighting games and strategy games like Civ and RTS games like Starcraft for the same reason.

Hearthstone scratches the competitive itch that I have in nice digestible 5-6 minute chunks, without needing to train myself for mechanical plays.