3 June 2013 | |
iTZKooPA
League of Legends has its first lengthy cinematic trailer after spending what feels like years on top of the world. The addicting leader of the MOBA pack saw the release of ‘A Twist of Fate’ after the culmination of last week’s All-Star event. The Shanghai audience was treated to the four+ minute trailer of the Card Master known as Twisted Fate and numerous pals from the original launch group and beyond.
The trailer is pure battle, featuring various abilities on display for each hero. There’s little to now lore explained, despite the game featuring a healthy amount of backstory. Take a gander as TF dukes it out with Fiddlesticks. Ezrael fending off the shadows and Annie unleashing Tibbers! Certainly gets the adrenaline flowing.
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10 April 2013 | |
iTZKooPA
Google suggestions agree!
Sadly, the gaming community at large sucks. Not the community that attends Penny Arcade Expo or DragonCon. They’re amazing. Of course there’s plenty of overlap there. It’s when the illusion of anonymity sets in that everything degrades. The adverse impact of the Internet is that many people act as if there are no repercussions to the vitriol that they spout. I’d like to think that most of them do it as a form of fantasy. That is they troll not to express opinions, desires and state of mind that they suppress from everyday life but for kicks, putting people on the tilt or shock value.
The immature behavior isn’t limited to run of the mill players, drunk gamers or, as many will joke, teenagers. I’ve seen my friends do it and hollered at them for adding to the toxic environment. I’ve witnessed drunk gamers be incredibly supportive of lacking teammates instead of flexing virtual beer muscles. And the bans against various pro gamers in League of Legends have been well documented.
Heroes of Newerth’s MilkFat knows what I am talking about, labeling these players as “dicks” in a recent interview.
This vitriol has ruined more than one game for myself and many others. These days I limit my Xbox Live play to a Facebook group that a friend started to avoid trolls. I partly left League of Legends for SMITE due to the player atmosphere. I rarely touch online shooters unless I find a server cluster with a community culture I click with. The fact of the matter is that I value my time and experience more than I did previously. When I game I game to relax, to get away from the day and decompress. Listening to put downs, racist comments and the like is not what I call fun. Continue Reading
19 March 2013 | |
iTZKooPA
Five million. That’s certainly impressive no matter what way you shake it. Riot Games, creator of League of Legends and that’s it, has become a household name thanks to its wildly successful F2P multiplayer online battle arena. Now the number one eSports community, the firm is celebrating the fact that it routinely maintains 5,000,000+ concurrent players at any given time. That’s up from two million just last October.
The developer didn’t boast too much in its short post. However, it did leave players with one important reminder:
Good luck, have fun, and please have mercy on our servers.
If only all the players would simply have fun…
EVE Online may hold the record for most users on one shard while World of Warcraft maintains its status as the premiere subscription title. But the F2P genre, be it MOBA or MMORPG, continues to make inroads on the long-standing records. Makes sense, seeing as the overall subscription market has seemingly plateaued.
15 February 2013 | |
iTZKooPA
Harlem Shake - Shazbot! Edition
Everyone needs a little break from the day now and then. There’s few better ways to relax, unwind and recharge than to flip through a few YouTube videos, which is exactly why some of the most ridiculous acts ever caught end up going viral. The latest craze? The Harlem Shake. This one may have already jumped the shark – thanks Dr. Oz – but game developers need a break as much as anyone.
Developer after developer have jumped in on the action to entertain fans and bust out some sick dance moves complete with props.
If you’re up for some laughs you’d better stick around and go beyond the cut. Where we’ve compiled all the zaniness in one neat little package for you! Fear not, each video is only ~30 second long.
If you come across a developer Harlem Shake that we haven’t covered, then by all means please leave the URL in the comments and we’ll embed it right quick. Continue Reading
10 December 2012 | |
iTZKooPA
Last week, Riot Games made headlines across the eSports community by banning a pro gamer. After coming to trial in its Tribunal penal system nine different times, the pro gamer, IWillDominate from Team Dignitas, was permanently banned for repeated harassment. After suffering from eight previous punishments, the player clearly wasn’t getting the picture. The ban and entire Tribunal system itself wouldn’t be possible without Big Data.
Big Data, the idea of using massive amounts of data to spot previously unknown trends, recently came into common use as computer power and storage has dramatically increased and costs reduced. Popularized by Moneyball and Obama’s reelection campaign, Riot Games has rapidly introduced the practice to its own information for every possible advantage and Slashdot has the inside scoop.
“We were a scrappy startup and wanted to get our game out the door. Analytics wasn’t an afterthought, but we didn’t have many resources for it initially, and so started with one mySQL instance, running queries and downloading them to Excel,” Livingston told Slashdot.
Let’s put into perspective how much data Riot Games is generating and sifting through. Player activity “creates more than 500 GB of structured data and over four TB of operational logs every day.”
14 November 2012 | |
iTZKooPA
“OP!” It’s a call every MOBA player is familiar with. Often levied on new champions, gods, avatars, what have you, the fist-shaking declaration is nothing new to gaming. Certain weapons in FPS games, rush strategies in RTS titles or pixel-perfect combo links in fighters, the cries of “overpowered” have been with gaming since Lawrence Taylor crushed quarterbacks in Super Tecmo Bowl. Likely before. The derisive comment is simultaneously a cry of agony and complaint against imbalance. Yet, in the case of today’s popular massive online battle arena titles, it’s often misplaced, misdirected and inaccurate.
Be it League of Legends, SMITE, DotA 2 or Heroes of Newerth, champions aren’t natively OP at release. Once the rage subsides, think on the points after the jump. A combination of them is likely the cause of your avatar’s recent demise, not a game designers inability to get things right. They may feel OP, but they aren’t. Continue Reading
31 August 2011 | |
Mordil
Continuing with giving you a teaser of photographic content to keep you thirsty for more as we polish off the content we have for you to grasp onto until release dates happen, here is Day 1 of PAX Prime 2011.
Day 1 was filled with a busy schedule as we ran as a pack of wolves with delicious prey to each booth to meet our appointments, ultimately in the end missing a few. Our schedules booked all day, we found only little downtime to meet with our old friends at Hi-Rez Studios and Riot Games, creators of Global Agenda and League of Legends .
Beararms managed to hop on a DDO station as we were in the area for an appointment, to recreate his infamous D&D character, Adam Grizzlys, visually. Along with a surprise of Batman: Imposters booth babe, and the bright lights, we Lorehounds managed to see a ton of things this year in one day. Continue Reading
9 February 2011 | |
iTZKooPA
There’s a really good chance that you missed this bit of news from last week. I did, and I tend to follow companies that develop games I enjoy so much. Tencent Holdings, predominately a Chinese Internet service company, has acquired a majority stake in Riot Games, the creator of the F2P battle arena game League of Legends. Tencent reportedly paid $350 million to buy out other venture capitalists and put itself in a great position to soak up all of Riot’s money as it continues to innovate its genre.
Obviously, I believe that Riot Games has found a winning formula. The company releases new content weekly, be it champions or the occasional map reskin (which is entertaining for some reason). It levies the new champions against skin sales to generate revenue. A scheme that has cleaned the moths out of many a friends’ pockets. It employs daily rewards for the first win to keep us coming back and has an incredibly deep universe for a game that has no open world. It’s no shock that a company was willing to pay nine figures for a piece of that action. Considering its growth – the company has been on a hiring spree since LoL launched in late 2009 – the profits haven’t peaked yet.
If only I had $351 million… Continue Reading
