Dear God. A positive article for League of Legends written by Leonidas? Friends , family , viewers and perhaps readers know that the games that I have no good things to say for are counted in the fingers of one's body,yet they include League. What is next,a positive article for Assassin's Creed? Well I am not completely out of my mind yet. You shouldn't read this article as praise, more like recognition of an impressive achievement from a person that broke a nice vase you had in your house.
Alright let's get down to business. If you had an oligarchy in the MOBA genre , arguably one of the kings would be League. Dota 2 would be the son of the king that conquered the land and Awesomenauts would be the minor lord that lost an eye during a fight and can only see two dimensions. However League stands to have many a difference with his fellow lords. It is a free to participate game with minor tweaks from the original formula.
Why free to participate? Because you can partake in battles and you can buy characters with the ingame currency but it takes time. Essentially you are just participating with what the game gives you. Games like Dota 2 and Strife allow you to pick whichever character you want and only sell cosmetics. Things like skins , voice packs and accessories are the things that keep the game running without changing its balance . Where League changed the formula it simplified like removing the mid shops and tree destroying of the Dota map , as well as creep denying. Other MOBAs have also removed creep last hitting or last hitting in general to make the game more team oriented. Many MOBAs run even further going 2D (Awesomenauts) , third person behind the back (Smite) and even first person shooter (Battle Born) and third person(Monday Night Combat) and don't even get me started on Heroes of the Storm.Meanwhile many MOBAs that follow the same business model as League have shut down their servers.
So how ,in the sea of unique and price friendly MOBAs, League is the King of MOBA Games while answering "D) None of the Above"? From where I am standing I can see only two reasons.
Firstly,it is competent on what it does. I can stand here spewing shit about how much I despise League and the community and all that, but I have to admit that I enjoyed my time in it up to the breaking point. It has a unique cartoony happy style that makes fighting very satisfying. You know that feeling when you scream Boom with every single Darius ulti. Or the "I can smell you" moment as Warwick. Or the kamikaze feeling when you ulti as Nunu in the mid of the enemy team solo.Or when that Poppy is hunting you and you go invis as Teemo in a bush the exact second she enters and she is standing next to you and any skill will kill you. All these little moments make the game very satisfying. And with friends victory or loss you had fun. These are the makings of an OK game. And with the second aforementioned reason OK was more than enough.
That second reason is a quality that truly comes with luck. Time. The same reason why all these cool and unique MMOs come out and 3 months later the servers are empty, while WoW reigns supreme. People will go back to the game they spend the most time and money at. And League really had a lucky strike there. Think back, when League came out and consider its competition. You have the original DotA and HoN,neither of which was free(the DotA mod was free but Warcraft 3 wasn't). Furthermore both of those environments where hostile to newbies, to the point that I was kicked in my first DotA games in "Noob" servers. So all League needed to do was an OK game and open the gates to the noobs. That allowed League a fair amount of time to be the only competitor on the field. It had all the time it needed to grab a fanbase and improve the service it provided. And more and more people came in. The pressure to the other 2 big guys led the mod donations to twiddle and go to Valve for help or open the floodgates for everyone and then sorta give up to try from step one. League took its one chance and managed to change the play field as well as get the WoW effect on itself. For you see new MMOs and MOBAs will come along but people will return to the game they have spent the most time and money.
Oooh well, we can't all be concerned about our mental health. For what it's worth I had fun with it and I don't quite regret the experience. I hate to join the bandwagon, especially when the bandwagon has already reached West, but what made me give up was the toxic community that got me to a bad mood even during wins. Recently I had a nice talk with another Season 1 veteran who told me that it is unfair to say that these people act like that simply because they are inherently assholes, as something, most likely the pressure of the competition, lead them to act in such a way over a game and a few minutes lost. Maybe he is right , maybe I could argue that I have gone through the same thing and acted nice. That I don't know. What I do know is that I am never going back there. *blows smoke as end credits roll*
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