Monday, April 30, 2012

Akali

So my intention for a while was to run Ahri as my main champion on League.  I really liked her from what I have played, she is a little slow out the gates but has a nice damage output in late game, especially if she can get fed and get geared, Rabadon's is a godsend with her.

The problem is one of the others in our group already plays Ahri as main.  This is fine when he plays someone else, but left me without a champion.  So I used the IP boost that was just given out and got the IP to purchase Akali, intending to use her as a backup.

I sat on her for a day or two, having no reason to use her.  A buddy of mine started playing yesterday, and I decided since it was just beginner bots I would pull out Akali to get a feel for her before I plunged into harder bots and PvP.  My first game I went 18-5-0.  Granted it was beginner bots, but it was also my first game with ever with her, and I did better than I usually do with any champion.  Also, notice the no assists.  There was no assists for me, if I came after you, you died, no ifs, ands, or buts.

I intended to use Akali as a backup, but if she plays this well tonight on intermediate bots and PvP, she may very well become my main.

Friday, April 27, 2012

Picking a Champion

So it seems that a lot of people face a similar problem that tends to hold them back when it comes to League of Legends.  I see this a lot in the team I play with and I have experienced it myself until here recently.  It is the inability to pick a champion and stick with them.

LoL offers many champions, and they are constantly adding to the number.  To many people playing the game, it is hard to pick one and stick to them.  This holds you back, for obvious and less obvious reasons.

The biggest screaming reason you should pick a champion and maybe a backup in case your main gets taken is skill.  Until you play a single champion main, you are not going to build up the skill with that Champion to be any good, especially if you are trying to climb ranks and escape ELO hell.  Only practice is going to give you that skill and you are not going to get that my switching champions every match.

The other major point is optimization.  Each champion has a different set of runes and a different mastery setup to optimize that champion to be the best they can.  There is no easy way to pick a champion to play than to try them out till you find one you like, but once you do, stick with them, get better.  Check out MOBAFire, they have lots of guides for each champion to assist you with how to play that champion, written by people that play the game a lot more than me, and odds are, more than anyone reading this.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Rage Quitting

So a couple of nights I ran into the worst kind of person to meet in LoL besides a feeder.  We had on our team a rager.  Now the story here requires a bit of a background to really make full sense.

I don't play a lot of League of Legends, I enjoy the game but my main game is WoW.  Here recently I have been playing more because a lot of my friends have started playing regularly and have formed a psuedoteam that plays every night.  For a long time they played vs bots to learn the game and develop the skills you need to be able to go head to head with other players.

Recently however, they made the switch to PvP.  We have been playing 2-3 games a night, mostly losing, but the point was to have fun, and for most of us, to hone our skills at the game and become better players.  Not so much for one of our team mates evidently, who had started to complain about us going to PvP, wanting to just farm easy bots.  However, the rest of us were enjoying the increased challenge and length of the PvP games.

Early into our second game of the night, the notification pops up saying he has died again.  We are all talking on Skype and you can hear his headphones hit the table as he tosses them off.  He suddenly starts to rage across text chat, since no one can hear him on Skype anymore.  Another death quickly follows and he leaves the game.  At this point for the game he was 0-9-0, having fed the team up to this point.  It wasn't something he had done intentionally, we all know him in real life, its not the kind of person he is.

Now the problem here is this.  For those of you who haven't played League before, when someone leaves a game in progress, the servers don't pull another person in to fill the spot.  The champion that they were piloting just runs back to base and sits there.  This puts their team at a disadvantage since they are permanently down a person now.  If your facing bots, that can be covered for.  When you are in a game with player opponents, in a match your are already struggling with, that is the end of the game for your team.

Rage quitting a game is worse than just about anything else in the game.  You are guaranteeing that your team is going to lose, abandoning your friends to something that you could have helped them with.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Hello Everyone

Hi everyone, I'm going to make this quick.  I don't have a lot that I want to post today, just a little about myself and a hello.

This is going to be a very random blog, with observations from life, WoW, LoL, and anything else I happen to be doing at the time.  I spend a lot of time playing games and even more researching the games I play.  I get very lucky with that at my full time job, since I tend to have a lot of free time to be able to spend on the internet, and a very nice boss that doesn't stay on me about what I do as long as I get my job done.

I tend to be very completionist when I play games, which is OK on console games, where you beat the story line, do your achievements, and done.  Not so much on games like WoW, where I want to do all of the achievements on each spec of each class.  Most of my time is spent on WoW, with a sprinkling of League of Legends and other games.