User:Shard/League of Legends Sucks

Some friends of mine got me into League of Legends a few months ago, but luckily D3 came out, so I uninstalled LoL.

Yes, I know I just did an MK review, but this page is called "unfair" and very little about MK is unfair. I figured I might as well talk about something that sucks. That's where League of Legends (LoL) comes in.

League of Legends is a game based off DotA - Defense of the Ancients. This was originally a mod for each Blizzard RTS which spun off its own subgenre called DotA. In DotA, two armies fight against each other, but both armies are even (it turns out LoL fails this rule). Each army gets (usually) five players to fight for them, using powerful heroes ("Champions" in LoL). The champions must then turn the tide of battle in their favor by killing enemy champions, the opposing army's minions, and eventually the other team's base. You always start the game at level 1 and build up to max level (18 in LoL).

If you have never played a DotA, I highly suggest you try one of them, as they have become increasingly popular recently. WC3 has the original good DotA (which is mediocre in terms of fairness for reasons I'll explain later), SC2 has Storm of the Imperial Sanctum and Star Battle, and there are a ton of third party versions like Heroes of Newearth and Lands of Chaos.

Why it Sucks

I won't even talk about individual champion balance for two reasons. 1: There are around 75 champions in the game and analyzing all of them together is a pain. 2: Champion imbalance (of which there is much) is the least of this game's problems. League of Legends fails like most other DotAs because of the mechanics it uses on many of its champions.

Temporary Bans

Wail of Doom and Visions of Regret are good examples of Guild Wars skills that apply this mechanic. Stuns are skills in LoL that prevent you from moving and from using skills (which means you just stop playing for 3 seconds). Personally, I don't think any game should have anything that prevents users from playing it. Game developers make games for people to play them, rather than not play them. It turns out almost every single champion in LoL has one of these, and some even have two. There's even one champion (which I play often) that has an AoE version of it that covers half the screen and single-handedly causes victory in team fights (aka clusterfucks). I shouldn't have to explain why removing opponents from the game is a terrible mechanic to have in a competitive game.

Uncounterable Invincibility

Uncounterable invincibility in LoL is always temporary, but invincibility for anything longer than zero seconds is broken in a game that relies on people being killable. Only a few champions have true invincibility (where the skill actually uses that word in it), however, most champions have skills that grant them an enormous amount of health regeneration and/or life steal, which is invincibility in essence, because trying to kill that person while the rest of their team is alive is always a bad idea. Many of the skills that cause invincibility also have a very short cooldown (like 10 seconds) and do other stuff like slow down enemies, steal health from them, or heal you to full health when it ends.

Stealth

Stealth doesn't seem bad at first glance. I mean, some champs can stealth, but there are items that let you detect stealthed enemies. Here's why stealth is broken in LoL.

• Gold cost for stealth: 0
• Gold cost for stealth detection: 400

See a problem? At the beginning of the game, you only start with 475 gold, and it is absolutely essential that you spend it on items to start your build. Buying detection at the start of the game instead of stat items is like saying "Look, I do no damage and die in 3 hits," since at low levels, even small stat increases make a huge difference. Early game, if you're fighting against a stealthing champ, your choices are to get detection and be useless for 5 minutes, or to hug a turret, or to get ganked by your invisible enemies and die.

The counter argument to this on the LoL forums (which is worse than the Blizzard forums, by the way (I know, it's hard to believe, isn't it?)) is "Stealth is balanced because if you buy detection, those champions are useless." This would be a good counter argument, except stealthing champions don't have this drawback at all. They don't have less health or damage than similar champs. They're quite the opposite - stealthing champs ARE regular champs, but with stealth.

Teleportation

Yup, even Shadow Stepping is in LoL. Some characters have a reasonable teleport. By reasonable, I mean they can't use it until level 6, and even then, it has a 3+ minute recharge. However, some champions have a teleport on a 4 second recharge. Yes, you can pick a character that is impossible to catch and that can get close to an enemy whenever you feel like killing them. Snares and obstacles mean nothing to you. Also, every low-cooldown teleport in LoL does big damage (big = 25% of someone's health) when you use it.

Pseudoteleports or Dashing

Most champions have a "dash" - a type of skill that makes them lunge in a certain direction, usually to do some damage. The thing is, these lunge skills allow you to walk through walls. You can walk through walls with any skill that makes your character move. On some characters, it makes sense (ie they jump really high), but on most of them, it's just them spinning or dashing to another spot, and it looks completely stupid when they walk into a mountain. Some champions that would otherwise be balanced happen to have a dash that they can use either to close in on you without you seeing it, or to run away behind a solid wall.

Map Control

Very few champions excell at this type of gameplay destruction, but some allow you to control the entire map. Teemo is a champion that looks like midget with a blowgun. He's already good - he has a speed boost with an infinite duration (I'm totally serious), passive poison damage on all his attacks, and a skill that blinds enemies. His ultimate skill, though, allows him to lay a mushroom near him. These mushrooms last for 10 minutes or until an enemy walks near them, at which point it explodes, damaging them, crippling them, poisoning them, and revealing them on the map. Even if nobody sets them off, they give your whole team vision of the space around them while they haven't been triggered. He can have up to 32 of them on the map at a time.

No standard casting range

In Guild Wars, there are two main ranges, and two minor ranges. They are Spell range, Melee, Earshot, and half-range. Most skills fall into the first two, with some belonging to the latter two. In LoL, every skill, and even each champion's regular attack, have arbitrarily chosen ranges. Some ranged champs have autoattacks that are "more ranged" than others, and there seems to be no reason why. Spell ranges are also inconsistent. Unless you have played this game for a very very long time, you can never know the attack range or spell range of an enemy champ, and you can never know what distance allows you to be "safe."

Carelessness in "Balance" Updates

Riot balances the game worse than Anet would. Here's their thought process:

"Champion A is the least picked and possibly worst champion in the game. Let's lower his damage a little." <-- Actually happened.

"Champion B is already balanced. Let's double the damage on all of her skills." <-- Actually happened

"Champion C is severely overpowered and is by far the most played champion. Let's lower his max health by 1%." <-- Actually happened

"Champion D heals for too much. Let's increase the heal amount." <-- Actually happened.

By the way, Ryan Scott (aka Morello, the guy who did much of the skill balance for Nightfall) works as a designer for LoL. I guess we know why it sucks now. Herp derp invincibility, shadow stepping, and banning people mid-match are perfectly fine.

Constant Server Instability

If you could overlook the balance issues with LoL, you'd be turned away quickly just because of this point. Their network was written by chimpanzees. Every update they do causes the servers to crash, to become slow, or to bug out (make players unable to join games and stuff like that). Sometimes, it lasts for a few hours, sometimes for days. This week, server instability has been going on the entire week. LoL would be half-decent if you could at least play it whenever you want, but they can't even get that far.

A Glimmer of Hope

The only thing good about this game is the concept artwork.

Oh yeah, and 1/5 of the music tracks.

And some people still take it seriously

Despite the fact that League of Legends is a joke on wheels (browsing their forums quickly indicates this), people still hold tournaments for it. It's even been accepted into the WCG game list for this year. They let you ban up to six champions per match (three per team), but considering about 60 of the 80 champions in the game are somehow broken, and most of the champions are clones of each other anyway, the ban process is almost meaningless.

I figured out why it's popular and addicting. In games where you win, you are always winning by a landslide. There is no such thing as an even game in LoL, at least past the early game (which can also be one-sided). While winning, your team is basically in God Mode against the other team, and who doesn't love 1-shotting the enemies as they walk out of their base? It's fun to use a skill and watch their entire team lose 50% of their health, leaving the cleanup for your friends.

At the top I said the armies are supposed to be evenly matched without heroes. People have discovered that in LoL, the south team actually does better if all the players AFK the entire match. It's pretty sad when you can't do a simple copy+paste and make mirrored maps with symmetric pathing.

Addicting? Yes. Fun? 50% of the time. Good? No.

I thought Nightfall was bad, but League of Legends is in its own tier of terrible pvp games. League of Legends made me respect Nightfall a little more.