I took this off another forum and improved it, which should be fine cause I wrote the original one anyway :tongue:
League of Legends
I know some of you will have heard about this already, but here's to those who haven't.
I'm not sure how many of you were into Dota and that kind of thing. It was a custom map in Warcraft where you played in an RTS setting and view, but you only controlled one 'hero'. A typical game would be 5v5, with the ultimate goal to push to the other team's base and destroy their main building. Little monsters automatically spawned periodically and marched down three lanes. As the game progressed, you would have to level up your hero and earn gold from those 'creeps' (you have to be close-ish to them to gain experience, and you need to take the killing blow to earn the gold). Of course, killing an enemy hero gave much more experience and gold, but obviously it was harder. As your hero leveled up, stats and spells would improve.
People found this concept really nice, but they wanted to see what they could do with it if it wasn't limited to the Warcraft 3 engine. League of Legends is one of these remakes, and it's probably most appealing because it's completely free to play. The company that made it is purely supported by the game's community, because the players are given the option to pay real money for certain things - the only extra benefit inaccessible to players who don't pay being 'skins' that make your character look cooler (they deliberately made it so that paying would not change the game fairness at all.)
Gameplay: 5/5
Graphics: 4/5 (you may find it a little cartoon-ish, but you'll get used to it
)
Sound: 4/5
Here's the trailer. In-game, it looks nothing like that, it's just showcasing what some of the champs can do. (Don't worry, there's no excessive dodging/blocking inside the actual game.)
EDIT: Unfortunately, you can't throw your teammates like that. That was a bit of an exaggeration xD
So here's kinda what happens when you start a game (skip this section if you want, read it if you actually want to play, it's got some tips as well xD):
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If you've played Dota, you'll find the scene quite familiar - you pick a "champion"[sup]1[/sup], and start out on a healing fountain; you can see your "nexus"[sup]2[/sup] and protective turrets[sup]3[/sup] branching out in three lanes: one along the top border, one cutting diagonally through the middle and one along the bottom border. If it's not a high-ranked game, your team will most probably send one guy down mid lane, and two guys to each of the side lanes (the mid guy gets more experience and gold cause he doesn't need to share). You click the shop and buy an item to start with[sup]4[/sup], and spend your first skill point on whatever you think seems the coolest. Hopefully you're paired up with someone on a side lane, and if you follow suit you're gonna be sitting at your outer-most turret waiting for the "minions"[sup]5[/sup] to come out. They finally come out, and you'll realise that your team's minions start fighting their ones, and the action begins.
Here's the deal: when you first start off, you're probably gonna die. A lot. While the gameplay itself is simple, you need to get a feel of what's going on. If you're in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, there's a pretty high chance you're gonna die.
So, you've gotta be careful. If you charge forward and just try to kill them right off the bat without thinking, a few things are gonna happen.
1) Your lane partner may or may not help you. If he doesn't, you're extra screwed. If he does, he may die as well. :evil lol:
2) Since you're hitting their champions, you're going to attract minion 'aggro' - while you can easily take them out, when there's 5 of them plus 2 champions hitting you, you're screwed.
3) You're probably going to die. Maybe you'll get lucky, and you'll manage to run back towards your turret without dying, but you'll be on low health and quite vulnerable.
So of course, it's best not to do that. When you first start, you should focus on learning to hit the enemy minions when they're on really low health so that your hit kills them. Otherwise, while you still get experience and level up, you get no money. And that's not very good. So don't just leave your dude to auto-attack and hope for the best, try and learn the timing.
However, you might notice that the other team's champs will sometimes hit you a few times or throw a spell without trying to kill you. This gets annoying, cause it wears down your health, and when you're low enough, they'll jump you and take you out. This gets especially hard if you're a melee champ and they're ranged - they can take potshots every time you move in to last hit. How you deal with that is something else you'll have to learn; it changes with whatever champion you're playing. In general, you should make sure the starting items you buy include some kind of survival or health regeneration to stay in lane. If it really gets too bad, you're gonna have to go back to base[sup]6[/sup], heal up, buy whatever you can, and go back.
As this goes on, players may start to leave their lane to kill someone. If you've pushed your lane too far, you can become an easy target, since they've got quite a lot of ground to chase you with before you reach the safety of your tower. If they're extra-aggressive and quite tanky, they may even dive into tower range to secure the kill. If you see people start disappearing from your minimap... you better start watching out, or retreating to a safer distance from your tower/teammates.
Eventually, it'll reach a point where teams start grouping up, and the big team-fights start. Often, this takes place in the middle of the map, where the teams are fighting over their towers (defending their own one, and trying to push down the enemy one). These can be quite stressful and confusing to you at first, but hang in there!
The most important thing to note is your champ's positioning, if you're slightly out of place it can really affect the outcome. You have to know your champ's role. If you are your team's tank, you need to go in first. If you're the squishy ranged DPS, you have to hang back until it's time to start killing everyone. You're just gonna have to get used to what you're supposed to do, when you're supposed to do it, and where you need to be. Even if the individual champs are less farmed and have inferior items, it's possible for them to win against a less organised team.
Pretty much, you'll just keep trying to kill them, try not to die, and eventually take down all the turrets in a lane. You'll reach an inhibitor - when you knock that down, your minions will become much stronger. Keep going, and you'll reach two last towers (unless you want to take down another lane's inhibitor) and finally their nexus. Or the reverse will happen, and you'll lose.
And there you have it. There's obviously still other details like 'epic' monsters, wards and map awareness and all that, but you'll see once you get started.
[sup]1[/sup] Unfortunately, you don't automatically have access to every single champion. Every week, there's a rotation of 10 free ones you can play, but you'll have to permanently unlock the champs you want with Influence Points (IP), the in-game currency. You gain IP from playing games; of course, if you win, you get more IP. The "First Win of the Day" system also gives you a really nice IP boost every day.
[sup]2[/sup] If this dies, you lose; if their one dies, you win
[sup]3[/sup] There's 3 turrets in each lane. They're very strong at early levels; I would almost never recommend 'tower-diving' (getting in tower range in an attempt to kill someone), because most champs, especially when you first start, can't survive even 3 shots from the turret. Maybe if you're ranged and you just have to take that one last hit - but be careful, that turret shot will hit you like a truck with no brakes.
[sup]4[/sup] Up the top of the shop window, there's a list of 'recommended' items to build for your champ. These aren't always optimal, but they can give an indication of what you want to aim for. I would suggest reading guides, cause sometimes there's completely different builds that may work better for you. Make sure you include some sort of lane-staying item though, like health potions or a regeneration item. You can also double click an item to buy it to save time.
[sup]5[/sup] The LoL equivalent of creeps. There's a few melee ones, a couple of ranged ones, and a few more minutes into the game a larger melee one in each wave. The ranged ones have less health, but hit a bit harder. These guys are weak individually, but in groups they can take you down quite fast early-game. That being said, if you have some sort of healing ability or regeneration item, you should consider tanking a wave if it gets close to your tower. This ensures your tower doesn't get hurt, and prevents it from being pushed down too quick.
Also, some players like to hide in the 'brush' between your outer-most tower and the other team's. Brush is found all over the map - enemies can't see inside, but you can see out of it. Ideally, you have an ability to shoot something into the brush or see into it, cause if you just waltz in, there may be some people waiting for you...
[sup]6[/sup] You can press the 'b' key by default, you'll port back in 8 seconds. If you get hurt, though, it'll cancel so do it in a safe place, e.g. next to your turret, or inside a brush they won't explore in the near future.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you're keen, you can just sign up here, download the game and start playing!
TL;DR? Pretty much a free, more awesome Dota.
League of Legends
I know some of you will have heard about this already, but here's to those who haven't.
I'm not sure how many of you were into Dota and that kind of thing. It was a custom map in Warcraft where you played in an RTS setting and view, but you only controlled one 'hero'. A typical game would be 5v5, with the ultimate goal to push to the other team's base and destroy their main building. Little monsters automatically spawned periodically and marched down three lanes. As the game progressed, you would have to level up your hero and earn gold from those 'creeps' (you have to be close-ish to them to gain experience, and you need to take the killing blow to earn the gold). Of course, killing an enemy hero gave much more experience and gold, but obviously it was harder. As your hero leveled up, stats and spells would improve.
People found this concept really nice, but they wanted to see what they could do with it if it wasn't limited to the Warcraft 3 engine. League of Legends is one of these remakes, and it's probably most appealing because it's completely free to play. The company that made it is purely supported by the game's community, because the players are given the option to pay real money for certain things - the only extra benefit inaccessible to players who don't pay being 'skins' that make your character look cooler (they deliberately made it so that paying would not change the game fairness at all.)
Gameplay: 5/5
Graphics: 4/5 (you may find it a little cartoon-ish, but you'll get used to it
)Sound: 4/5
Here's the trailer. In-game, it looks nothing like that, it's just showcasing what some of the champs can do. (Don't worry, there's no excessive dodging/blocking inside the actual game.)
EDIT: Unfortunately, you can't throw your teammates like that. That was a bit of an exaggeration xD
So here's kinda what happens when you start a game (skip this section if you want, read it if you actually want to play, it's got some tips as well xD):
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you've played Dota, you'll find the scene quite familiar - you pick a "champion"[sup]1[/sup], and start out on a healing fountain; you can see your "nexus"[sup]2[/sup] and protective turrets[sup]3[/sup] branching out in three lanes: one along the top border, one cutting diagonally through the middle and one along the bottom border. If it's not a high-ranked game, your team will most probably send one guy down mid lane, and two guys to each of the side lanes (the mid guy gets more experience and gold cause he doesn't need to share). You click the shop and buy an item to start with[sup]4[/sup], and spend your first skill point on whatever you think seems the coolest. Hopefully you're paired up with someone on a side lane, and if you follow suit you're gonna be sitting at your outer-most turret waiting for the "minions"[sup]5[/sup] to come out. They finally come out, and you'll realise that your team's minions start fighting their ones, and the action begins.
Here's the deal: when you first start off, you're probably gonna die. A lot. While the gameplay itself is simple, you need to get a feel of what's going on. If you're in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, there's a pretty high chance you're gonna die.
So, you've gotta be careful. If you charge forward and just try to kill them right off the bat without thinking, a few things are gonna happen.
1) Your lane partner may or may not help you. If he doesn't, you're extra screwed. If he does, he may die as well. :evil lol:
2) Since you're hitting their champions, you're going to attract minion 'aggro' - while you can easily take them out, when there's 5 of them plus 2 champions hitting you, you're screwed.
3) You're probably going to die. Maybe you'll get lucky, and you'll manage to run back towards your turret without dying, but you'll be on low health and quite vulnerable.
So of course, it's best not to do that. When you first start, you should focus on learning to hit the enemy minions when they're on really low health so that your hit kills them. Otherwise, while you still get experience and level up, you get no money. And that's not very good. So don't just leave your dude to auto-attack and hope for the best, try and learn the timing.
However, you might notice that the other team's champs will sometimes hit you a few times or throw a spell without trying to kill you. This gets annoying, cause it wears down your health, and when you're low enough, they'll jump you and take you out. This gets especially hard if you're a melee champ and they're ranged - they can take potshots every time you move in to last hit. How you deal with that is something else you'll have to learn; it changes with whatever champion you're playing. In general, you should make sure the starting items you buy include some kind of survival or health regeneration to stay in lane. If it really gets too bad, you're gonna have to go back to base[sup]6[/sup], heal up, buy whatever you can, and go back.
As this goes on, players may start to leave their lane to kill someone. If you've pushed your lane too far, you can become an easy target, since they've got quite a lot of ground to chase you with before you reach the safety of your tower. If they're extra-aggressive and quite tanky, they may even dive into tower range to secure the kill. If you see people start disappearing from your minimap... you better start watching out, or retreating to a safer distance from your tower/teammates.
Eventually, it'll reach a point where teams start grouping up, and the big team-fights start. Often, this takes place in the middle of the map, where the teams are fighting over their towers (defending their own one, and trying to push down the enemy one). These can be quite stressful and confusing to you at first, but hang in there!
The most important thing to note is your champ's positioning, if you're slightly out of place it can really affect the outcome. You have to know your champ's role. If you are your team's tank, you need to go in first. If you're the squishy ranged DPS, you have to hang back until it's time to start killing everyone. You're just gonna have to get used to what you're supposed to do, when you're supposed to do it, and where you need to be. Even if the individual champs are less farmed and have inferior items, it's possible for them to win against a less organised team.
Pretty much, you'll just keep trying to kill them, try not to die, and eventually take down all the turrets in a lane. You'll reach an inhibitor - when you knock that down, your minions will become much stronger. Keep going, and you'll reach two last towers (unless you want to take down another lane's inhibitor) and finally their nexus. Or the reverse will happen, and you'll lose.
And there you have it. There's obviously still other details like 'epic' monsters, wards and map awareness and all that, but you'll see once you get started.
[sup]1[/sup] Unfortunately, you don't automatically have access to every single champion. Every week, there's a rotation of 10 free ones you can play, but you'll have to permanently unlock the champs you want with Influence Points (IP), the in-game currency. You gain IP from playing games; of course, if you win, you get more IP. The "First Win of the Day" system also gives you a really nice IP boost every day.
[sup]2[/sup] If this dies, you lose; if their one dies, you win
[sup]3[/sup] There's 3 turrets in each lane. They're very strong at early levels; I would almost never recommend 'tower-diving' (getting in tower range in an attempt to kill someone), because most champs, especially when you first start, can't survive even 3 shots from the turret. Maybe if you're ranged and you just have to take that one last hit - but be careful, that turret shot will hit you like a truck with no brakes.
[sup]4[/sup] Up the top of the shop window, there's a list of 'recommended' items to build for your champ. These aren't always optimal, but they can give an indication of what you want to aim for. I would suggest reading guides, cause sometimes there's completely different builds that may work better for you. Make sure you include some sort of lane-staying item though, like health potions or a regeneration item. You can also double click an item to buy it to save time.
[sup]5[/sup] The LoL equivalent of creeps. There's a few melee ones, a couple of ranged ones, and a few more minutes into the game a larger melee one in each wave. The ranged ones have less health, but hit a bit harder. These guys are weak individually, but in groups they can take you down quite fast early-game. That being said, if you have some sort of healing ability or regeneration item, you should consider tanking a wave if it gets close to your tower. This ensures your tower doesn't get hurt, and prevents it from being pushed down too quick.
Also, some players like to hide in the 'brush' between your outer-most tower and the other team's. Brush is found all over the map - enemies can't see inside, but you can see out of it. Ideally, you have an ability to shoot something into the brush or see into it, cause if you just waltz in, there may be some people waiting for you...
[sup]6[/sup] You can press the 'b' key by default, you'll port back in 8 seconds. If you get hurt, though, it'll cancel so do it in a safe place, e.g. next to your turret, or inside a brush they won't explore in the near future.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you're keen, you can just sign up here, download the game and start playing!
TL;DR? Pretty much a free, more awesome Dota.
