A truly legendary League of Legends

By: Cody Hood

Azir, the emperor of a long-lost country, jumps into the enemy team to send his phalanx of soldiers into battle. Darius, a general of a city-state named Noxus, a tyrant country, raises his axe in anticipation.

The emperor falls, and the rest of the team is sure to follow, with Darius’ team backing him up. The general jumps four other times, each one landing the killing blow. The crowd explodes in excitement for Cloud 9’s win against Fnatic, and the first pentakill of Worlds.

League of Legends just ended the first week of the 2015 Worlds competition, so it’d be an optimal time to review the game itself. Released in October of 2009, it’s developed by Riot Games and is one of the biggest MOBAs (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) in the market right now, next to DOTA 2.

It’s free, but cosmetic changes like skins will cost money, depending on the quality of the skin. It’s a top-over game that features various fictional characters that come from different backgrounds, ranging from a little girl that controls fire to the manifestation of death.

The gameplay is very simple at the core. You kill bad guys, you get money, you buy items and you finish the match by destroying a structure called The Nexus. It’s not that easy, though, as champions controlled by other players are trying to take down your towers to get to your Nexus as well. The game has a surprising amount of depth to it, with each champion having certain mechanics to learn in order to bring out his or her true potential.

There isn’t much of a story to League of Legends anymore, as Riot Games has unfortunately removed it for the time being to have a big reboot sometime in the future. The basic premise, though, is that the League of Legends is designed to solve political disputes. Those disputes are solved on battlegrounds called The Fields of Justice.

There are a total of 126 champions in the game at the time, giving a player plenty of variety to play as. A major con to that, though, is they’re not all readily available at the start of the game. You earn in-game currency called Influence Points, which you use to buy the ability to use champions. Some are placed on a rotation each week, though, allowing players who haven’t bought them to use them on the playing field and test them out to see if they enjoy the champion.

The absolute biggest con of League of Legends is the community. It’s possible to meet nice people, sure, but the most notable players are the rude players, which are also called toxic players. They degrade and harass, and will sometimes even cause the game to be heavily tilted in the enemy’s favor because they leave the game or intentionally run into the enemy to give them gold, experience and map pressure, while degrading their team’s morale.

Bad games can be shifted worse by players who yell at you for messing up the tiniest thing, often making the game hard to play for long spans of time. If played with the right mindset, the game can be played for fun, but those toxic players can easily make a once fun experience into an annoying experience while people are waiting for the surrender button to be available. There is a mute button, but actions can be stronger than words.

There is a ranked version of the game, though, unlocked at level 30. Players can play to be placed in a certain rank, where they have to play 10 promotional matches to determine the spot that the player will be placed in. Then they can continue playing the game to get a higher rank. Players are quite sadly more toxic there and will sometimes lose games for their teams on purpose to just be mean.

While there’s a break in Worlds, everybody is taking a good rest besides the professional players, who are practicing to become the best of the best, dreaming to be able to hoist that beautiful cup into the air and take their names as the 2015 world champions. There are promising rivals and trials to overcome, but in the end there can be only one.