The Worst Community of All Time

The worst part about this LoL pullquote is that this is the nicest thing somebody has said to me in League of Legends.

I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve been playing more and more League of Legends, and thus I’ve been exposed more to the utterly terrible community. Until I started burning downtime at work with the LoL Tribunal, I wouldn’t have even believed a community could exist with this amount of hatred. There will always be bigots and racists and assholes, but it still shocks me that the vast majority of my League games include multiple dickwads. Where the hell do these people come from?

My continuing familarity with this genre has helped me find out. This terrible community isn’t a League of Legends specific problem. In general, the larger the community, the worse it is. League has some 30+ million players, so it certainly hits that mark. But there is more to this than size. Other similar games (Defense of the Ancients, Heroes of Newerth, etc) have atrocious communities too, despite being much smaller. A horrid community seems endemic to this genre.

What is it about MOBAs that makes the communities so shit?

First, let’s rename the genre. ‘MOBA’ is terrible, and I can’t bring myself to use it. Multiplayer-online-battle-arena isn’t descriptive, it’s a bunch of Barnum words. I think a much better genre for League of Legends is “multiplayer base defense fighting game”. The base idea of the game has you defending your base, but the actual gameplay interactions are more like a fighting game. I’d have called it tower defense, but that brings to mind a completely different genre. Tactics used in League of Legends are similar to what you might see in fighting games - zoning, area control, counter picks, baiting, mind games, ability combos, etc. The fact that you level up and buy items doesn’t make this game an RPG - nobody plays a role, there’s no story, etc. They’re just implementation details of this fighting game. 

This helps highlight exactly why the game gets so competitive. You spend nearly an hour directly fighting someone - each time you hit them is a victory of you over them, each time they kill a minion is a small triumph over you. It’s really quite personal.

But this isn’t terribly different from other games, at least, not yet. The real reason why League’s community is so impossibly bad is because League makes you compete with your own teammates.

Team of Rivals

You compete with your own team in two main ways. First of all, if you screw up, you really harm your team. In Halo, death means a 5-15 second break and respawning with full ammo and a Battle Rifle. Death in League means that the enemy who killed you gets a sizeable gold and experience bonus, and while you aren’t there, he can farm minions and make even more money. Or he can leave his lane and go bully your team. Death really, really sucks, so that’s why the #1 advice I give to new players is to be a huge coward and not die.

In Halo, one stray grenade or sniper bullet can kill someone. Death comes very easily, so being down one team member for a fight isn’t that huge of a deal: a lucky shot or melee attack can turn a fight in your favour. In League, a 1 player difference is devastating. Plus, as you continue die a second and third time, you’re making that same opponent even more powerful. Each death is taking a slippery slope and making it even slipperier. This effect is very strong: I’d rather play 4v5 (being a member of the team with four players), than 5v5 with one truly bad or trolling teammate.

Furthermore, a player on your team who starts bad never gets enough of a bonus to “catch up”, so bullying him becomes smarter and smarter for the enemy team. They get the same cash bonus for killing him, and he gets easier and easier to kill, so a good enemy team will completely bully a weak player. That weak player will bring down his entire team.

League players are trained to hate and distrust their own team because their teammates can games so much more difficult for them. The only person you can trust is yourself.

You also compete with your own team for the limited resources on each map. Again, this is no difficult from Halo, except that these resources are often permanent. If you steal a kill from a member of your team, in his eyes, you just made him weaker, even though the two of you collaborated in the destruction of your mutual enemy. In most games, kill-stealing isn’t a big deal, since comparative kill scores are just for comparison post game - whichever team kills more matters, rather than who gets those kills. In League, some people absolutely fly off the handle when you steal their kill, even if you didn’t intend to steal it. Limited resources include minions to kill (that’s why one player in bottom lane often picks a healer champion and doesn’t farm gold, so another player gets it all), buffs on the map, and even enemy champions. Individual players often feel that they individually can make the best use of each resource, so if you take a buff another player feels entitled to, he feels that you made him weaker. And if the resource you want is missing? It’s clearly because of your own team who let it get stolen. Again, they’re making you weaker! 

This game design is seen in the League of Legends, Defense of the Ancients 2, Heroes of Newerth and more. It boils down to the game design making you want to hate your team. In League, interacting with your team is of such high importance that having a few bad teams sours the whole experience. And unfortunately, because of the vast popularity of League of Legends, the average skill spread is a chasm. Any given team is likely to have one average player, two above average players, and two below average players. Those two below average players can literally ruin the game - they have a much stronger impact than the two above average players.

Finally, a poster on the Team Liquid forums found that if a team is 10% ahead in gold earned by the 12 minute mark, they win 95% of games. Think about that for a second. 10% is not much; a bad player in top lane will cause that. And while that’s only one data set, in my experience it holds true. League of Legends is all about momentum, so if one player halts your momentum, you hate them because they’re likely costing you the game.

Inevitable

Sadly, I think that this terrible community is inevitable because of the way League of Legends is designed. There’s really nothing Riot can to improve the community without dramatically modifying the game. Months ago, I suggested that they could implement diminishing returns on killing bad players. This means that a bad player would not impact his team as strongly, but it would represent a massive change to team strategy, which can have unintended side effects on the game.

Riot has a “quit protection” method I absolutely despise. If a player leaves a game, he can’t play any games until the game he left finishes. I like this idea, but it does incentivize the player to end a game quickly rather than just quit if he wants to leave the game (say his friend comes online). As I said above, I’d rather play 4v5 than have a bad player on my team, but this quit protection incentivizes the player to suicide against the enemy team and feed them to end the game quickly, rather than just quitting. If you quit, you should be able to play again, but Riot should simply crush quitters algorithmically. Quit 3 games every 20 games? Temporary ban. (These numbers are just examples, I’d need more data on quitters to know what numbers to pick).

But in the end, I really don’t think there is anything Riot can do. They have an enormous community, far too big to feel tight-knit, and their game is incredibly competitive, both between teams and within them. Short of implementing a co-op campaign mode and removing player vs player, I don’t think they can really do anything about their shitty community other than to survive it.

PS: Riot states that they have systems to prevent players from only punishing those they see in the Tribunal, the 80+ cases I’ve judged have been overwhelmingly “punish” verdicts. I’ve only pardoned three or four times, and in most cases, I see enough foul language in the chat log to be ready to punish before the 20 second timer has finished. 

Some folk on Reddit wrote things like “Well, some players aren’t that bad, so I let one racist remark slide”. I don’t think we should lower our standards as judges simply because the community is terrible in general.

Linked List: How Fan Servers Are Ruining DICE's Game [BF3]

Jon Denton, writing for Eurogamer: 

Worst of all, though, are the multitude of servers run by petty, mini tyrants; people who will kick and then ban anybody in breach of their rules. Or indeed, anyone who happens to not fit into the exact model of game these administrators want. In other words: anyone who happens to be half-decent at Battlefield.

Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes. It’s nearly impossible to play Battlefield 3 now without running into tons of idiotic server rules (“BAN IF YOU ARE BETTER THAN HOST” “BAN IF YOU USE SHOTGUN” “BAN IF YOU USE ASSAULT KIT”). And the 400% ticket matches aren’t just brutal on the defending team, but they suck for anybody who doesn’t have infinite time to burn.

Even worse, you can’t fix this with the server browser filters. You can’t filter for default settings, and half of the servers describe themselves as “OFFICIAL DICE”, when they are anything but. DICE should add a default setting filter into the server browser, posthaste.

I think that Battlefield 3 should support fan servers, but when I hit Quick Match, I want to quickly be matched into a default settings game where I don’t have to put up with custom bullshit like this. I’m glad Jon Denton brought this article to light on a big site like Eurogamer - hopefully DICE will take notice.

So glad Diablo 3 requires an internet connection to play!

EDIT: This wouldn't be such a fucking pain if a queue or auto-reconnect option was implemented. Instead, I have to sit with Diablo 3 at the frontmost screen, pasting my password into the password box and hitting Enter. If I get Error 37, I hit Enter and re-paste. Error 35 leaves my password in the box, so if I paste my password, I have to delete it and paste again. So I have to sit at the login screen and actually read error messages to retry. What a fucking stupid system.

Wouldn't it work better to have a setup that automatically retries?

To be clear, I'm not blaming Blizzard for their server issues. Diablo 3 is a big fucking launch. That said, if the Eastern time zone players like myself had logged in at 12:00AM Eastern rather than 3AM Pacific, maybe the servers would have been hammered less.

But like I said, it's not the server issues that bother me, it's the shitty system to begin with. I shouldn't need to log in to Battle.net to play with my girlfriend in the same room, and I shouldn't have to slave myself to the Diablo 3 login screen; just drop me in a queue or have an auto-reconnect option like most games with server lists (see BF3, Team Fortress 2, etc). This isn't new: it's been done before, I see no reason why it can be done again.

League of Silence

In the most recent patch, Riot silenced cross-team chat in League of Legends. Essentially, this means that during a game, you can only chat with your team unless you explicitly opt-in to cross-team chat. They did not provide much rationale for this move, save in the patch notes: “If you enjoy competitive banter, opt-in using the new toggle in the ‘More Options’ menu!”.

Most of these players can no longer speak to each other, because they don’t know how to opt-in to cross-team chat!

Based on that patch note, I infer that they feel the “competitive banter” (an euphemism if there ever was one) is a turn-off to the majority of League players. So Riot Games opted for the “nuke it” approach: they changed this for all League of Legends players, not just new players. Presumably they feel that this will make the game more pleasant, because hey, the community will feel nice if you can’t hear them, right?

I really don’t think that this will help. This is like an angry middle school teacher punishing a class: if you can’t chat politely, you can’t chat at all!

Riot Games is faced with a difficult problem: League of Legends is an extremely competitive game where mistakes are brutally punished. In Halo, if I’m killed, I hand the enemy team a point, and I’m playing in 10 seconds. In League, the guy who kills me gets a huge gold and experience bonus, and he gets to push his lane further and deal damage to my turret, or go and help crush one of my allies while the numbers are uneven. And because of the gold / experience bonus, he becomes more likely to kill me and my allies in the future. In Halo, we’ll still be on equal footing next time we tussle. Dying hurts your entire team in League of Legends, and to a much greater extent than it does in most other games.

This results in teams becoming very unaccepting of mistakes and risks, so when a player dies, they get very angry. This type of chat is the most toxic - you sort of expect the enemy team to be mean to you - and it hasn’t been shut down at all. New or unskilled players are just as likely to be harassed by their own team.

Furthermore, cross-team chat is the only way for a game to be less toxic. If a game starts and four members from each team toss out “gl hf” in the first 30 seconds, the other people are less likely to start cursing. And this might be unique to me, but when I get beaten in my lane by a polite player who I have a nice chat with before minions spawn, I feel happy for them. Sad that I died, but I don’t dislike the guy. But with cross-team chat disabled, he’s just a silent, phantom menace. You can’t be happy for a nameless Morgana.

Finally, disabling cross-team chat for all players with a patch is silly. Changing expected behaviour is something developers should always be careful of. I imagine a large portion of casual players will have no idea cross-team is disabled and will simply assume other players are quiet, or that the chat functionality is broken for some reason. When the game begins, players are shown a small message indicating the change, but in my experience, nobody reads those messages. Players are already chatting, discussing who takes which lane, or getting pregame snacks. If League had shipped with this behaviour it would be more understandable, but disabling it now will only cause confusion.

Riot needs to improve the community of League of Legends, no question. But I feel the biggest issue with the community is being harassed by your own team, not by the other team. This change does nothing to address that, and I feel it will actually make things worse, because you have no chance to connect with the opposing team. This cuts off both “good luck” as well as “screw you n00b”, and it introduces an unnecessary element of confusion to the game and it’s chat interface.

But hey, maybe nobody else can read this, because they haven’t turned on cross-blog chat.

Linked List: Planetside: The 1%

Quintin Smith, over at RPS, with a headline that’s all too apt today considering the original article is eight years old:

I honestly had no idea just how fucked the TR was until the messages starting coming in from our commanders telling every single member of the Terran Republic to quit the game. 

A crazy story about a bug in Planetside that created a very unique situation; I won’t go into any more details, but it’s a great read (and I never played Planetside!). And yes, I’m addicted to these “classic RPS article revivals”.

Why does BattleLog exist?

My BattleLog. Click to embiggen.

Why, oh why, did DICE implement “Battlelog”?

The Autolog seen in Criterion’s Need For Speed was an addictive take on leader boards, showing you actively who beat your times, making you want revenge. Battlelog is … hell, I’m not entirely sure what Battlelog is. At first I thought it was like Bungie.net, a place to check out my stats. And that’s true, it does do that.

But I keep getting popups telling me to use the Quick Match button at the top to start a game, which is madness, because I play on the PS3. And I can join Platoons (clans) from here, but I’ll be honest, I have no idea what it does or why I should join a platoon. On top of the mystery, I can search for the “Soldier” of my PS3 friend who made the clan and add him as a BattleLog friend, which is unfortunate because his BattleLog name was different from his PSN ID. I’m not entirely sure why I should do any of this. I mean, I could leave a message in his Battlefeed™ or write on our Platoon wall, but all of this gets in the way from the core Battlefield gameplay of spawning in jets and immediately crashing them. Isn’t that why people play Battlefield?

Need For Speed’s Autolog was great because it was entirely automatic (pun intended). You logged in and it recognized your PS3 friends and did the rest. If I want to see the progress of my PS3 Battlefield buddies in this system, I need to add them separately, which is perhaps the most idiotic thing in the world. And in Battlefield, it really doesn’t matter; no offense intended to my PS3 friends, but I don’t give a damn that they unlocked the TACTICAL LIGHT for their LMG. If I wanted to read useless things people write about themselves, I’d go on Facebook and pore over my real friends, rather than my Platoon mates.

Overall, Battlelog seems half-baked. It should realize that I have never played the PC version and not teach me about the cool Quick Match from browser, it should automatically add my PS3 friends to it, and honestly, it should stick to stat distribution and comparisons, rather than offering it’s own fake mini social network thing.

Why I Hate League of Legends: Part II

My first post about League of Legends was titled “Why I Hate League of Legends”. There’s no space for a Part II in the title, but I alluded to it (“So why do I hate League of Legends? There’s actually a huge number of reasons”), so here we go!

Game Length

Games of League of Legends are long. Quite long. Nothing like Civilization multi-hour epics, but it’s still long. And they feel long. You spend a lot of time standing behind your minions, watching your enemy stand behind their minions. While there’s a lot of mindgames and sniping involved, there’s a lot of waiting around, especially if you die. It’s quite painful.

The Community

I can’t sugarcoat this: League of Legends has perhaps the worst community I’ve ever experienced.

I’ve tried the self-hating Halo community (“Every Halo is better than this one”), the delusional Wii community (“Wii games look just as good as their 360 counterparts”), the hypocritical World of Warcraft community (“Riding skill is too expensive … WTF riding skill shouldn’t be cheap, what a noob game!”), but no community is this bad. I have not played a single game of the League without at least one of my team members being a complete jackass, and this is because the League has no defence against trollish players in the early matchmaking queues.

At higher ranks, naturally players will not want to be banned and lose their carefully accumulated champion list, runes, and experience points, but in the random players queue, anything goes. It’s free and fast to create a new account, so players can act like whatever they want. If they get banned, they can just create a new account and be playing in minutes. Furthermore, there is zero way of actually punishing a troll during a game. So somebody who decides to be a jerk and do nothing (or even somebody who disconnects, never to return) will have a huge impact on your team for the next hour, and there is nothing you can do about it. I don’t know what the best solution to this would be; a vote system could allow groups of players to “banish” new or bad players, preventing them from ever playing. While a disconnected teammate is a typical danger of playing online, the pain is again compounded by both the average match length, as well as the number of teammates. From what I can tell, the preferred mode of play is 5v5, meaning you have four teammates at any given time, all of whom could disconnect if they wanted.

New Player Experience / Matchmaking

The new player experience is a bad one. New players are put into games with a poor tutorial, and very little advice that actually counts. If they play with a friend of theirs who knows the game, they get matched with higher level players who will chew them out and curse at them and make them not want to play. And the new players are inherently weaker than their enemies. Concepts like “feeding an enemy” discourage new players for even trying, because every time they try, the enemy team gets more and more powerful, and they have to wait for longer and longer.

So a new player is faced with poor choices. He can either play alone and be thrown to the hordes (some of which are jackasses who recreate accounts), or play with friends and be demolished by pros. Playing with friends gives you the benefit of advice; playing without them gives you the chance of playing somebody your skill level. There’s a third option: have his pro friends make new (free) accounts so they’ll be matched against lower level players. Best of both worlds, right? Except for those poor players.

Furthermore, the game system itself punishes bad play. Whenever a player dies, the person who killed him earns a lot of gold and experience. Good teams will prey on weaker players, repeatedly killing them over and over. Thus, not only will the bad player simply not be contributing, he will be making the opposing team much, much stronger, making the fight tougher for his teammates.

The game that steps around this the best is Starcraft 2. Even if you ignore the campaign, the game features a series of single player Challenges, which put you in situations to teach you specific skills (unit counters, worker micro, etc). Furthermore, the game is divided into five leagues (Bronze, Silver, etc). But on top of that, there’s a hidden player rating that underlies the whole system. Thus, if I’m a superpro player and I try to play 3v3 (I normally play 4v4), I’ll be matched against other superpros.

Now, according to two or three of my friends, most of this goes away when you start playing Ranked games, or are just in the high ranks. People are attached to their characters, their rank, and possibly the money they’ve spent, so are less likely to let the Internet Dickwad Theory take over. But that’s many games away from where most players are at, such as myself.

My Proposals

Honestly, my suggested fix for League of Legends is an uninstall, but so many of my real friends play it (and only it), I must consider alternatives. So, I propose some fixes for the League. Riot Games should:

• Crack down on foul language. Put a strong, strong word filter in place, warn players who use foul language. On the second cursing attempt, remove their chat privileges for five games, including whispers and out-of-game chat channels. A small icon could be shown next to this player’s name so people will be aware they are muted if a friend tries to contact them.
  • Consider the “broken windows theory”. In short, the idea is that maintaining things in good condition keep conditions good. In short, people act like jackasses in the League because people act like jackasses. People play and experience this horrible community, and feel that it is okay to brutally curse out new players, creating a community bred from this type of behaviour. Clamping down on it will make the new player experience a million times better, because at the very least they won’t be cursed at a bazillion times.
  • Theoretically, Riot could loosen the restrictions as players increase in level. I don’t like double-standards, but this could be more like “You’ve proven yourself responsible this long, now you can use a bit more language before getting banned”, so a great player won’t be banned for accidentally dropping some foul language.
• Halve match time. Honestly, I don’t have many good suggestions on how to do this without totally throwing the game out of whack and rebalancing every character, but there is no reason games need to go on as long as they do. Perhaps a hard-cap timer? Or let both teams Nexuses lose health, forcing more aggressive play? Furthermore, League games feel slow. Riot could cut the pre-game 60 second timer down to 10 seconds (more than enough time to buy your item(s)).
• No minimum Surrender timer. In a 5v5 game, your team cannot Surrender no matter how bad it gets until at least 20 minutes have passed. This is an idiotic restriction, and I cannot find any logical reason for it to be in place. The game of League of Legends I played today was an obvious loss from the start as the other team had a ten kill lead by ten minutes, and one of our teammates had disconnected; why make me waste 20 minutes of my life waiting for the Surrender timer to appear? May as well give the winners their points and let the losers go home early.
• Implement diminishing returns on killing bad players. “Bad” could be defined as a lower level, or a player who is doing extremely poor that game. Simply put, a single bad player shouldn’t be a nearly unlimited source of gold and experience, so he won’t drag down his entire team quite as much.

Good Ideas

The worst part, to me, is that there’s a lot of great ideas in League of Legends. The bits near the end of a 3v3 game are pretty good, when it’s basically a straight up PvP game with minions and turrets acting as minor hazards. A lot of push & pull is involved, and there are a lot of strategic choices to make, which I enjoy. The first ~45 minutes are brutal, but the last 10 are usually pretty good unless it’s a one-sided battle, at which point it’s a total waste of time (see above). There’s an extremely wide variety of characters to play, so most play styles are somehow represented.

But in the end, I just hate playing League of Legends. The worst part is the community, because fixing that would take care of a number of other issues socially. Games would be more enjoyable, experienced players would mentor newer players more, and everything would be better. But alas, the community is the only thing that isn't in Riot Games's direct control.

Post Publish Addendum: the legendary Tycho partially agrees with me. In fact, the most recent Penny Arcade comic is all about intentional griefing, but the money quote comes from Tycho's news post: "The communities of DOTA, HoN, and LoL are notorious, even among gamer communities, for being noxious hellholes". I love those guys. Now, they like League of Legends quite a bit more than I do, but at least I'm not alone in seeing it's flaws.

Why I Hate League of Legends

I despise unfair competitive games. I wish I had the guts to refuse to play them, but I get drawn back every now and then. I’m going to counter this by ranting, then referring myself to this rant every time somebody asks me to play League of Legends.  

Now, by unfair, I don’t mean asymmetric, so allow me to clarify. An asymmetric game is where players have different options at the start, such as the ability to pick Zerg, Protoss, or Terran. Asymmetric design can go further than that: do I attempt a 4-Gate rush? Stalker rush? Cannon rush? Wall off and go for Carriers? Another player can still be Protoss, yet have a completely different strategy than me. Maps can also be asymmetric as well. I’m down with asymmetric.

Maps can be massively asymmetric (Lockout, left) or nearly symmetrical (Blood Gulch, right). Images taken from Halo Nation wiki, click for link.

Now, Sirlin defines fairness as “Players of equal skill have an equal chance at winning even though they might start the game with different sets of options / moves / characters / resources / etc.”, which seems pretty solid to me. I like that.

What I despise are unfair games where players have different sets of starting options due to seniority/time invested/money spent, with League of Legends being a prime example.

My friend’s characters are more powerful than mine, simply due to his number of wins. Right at the start of the game, before we’ve even moved, he might generate more money, move faster, be tougher, and faster. I hate playing League of Legends with him, because the game auto-matches me against foes of his calibre. Thus, even if I’m secretly a League of Legends master (I’m not), I’m still at a huge disadvantage simply because all five members of the opposing team are permanently more powerful than me, no matter how well I do. I don’t mind them being more skilled: I play Starcraft with him all the time and play more difficult enemies because of it. I do mind them moving faster, even if we pick the same character.

I foresee the atrocious League of Legends community rushing over here and mocking me mercilessly for whining over a 5% Movement Speed difference, so let me preface this by stating that this is mostly a matter of principle; I don’t truly think I lose due to a bunch of 5% differences adding up.

Some games straddle this line pretty well. Team Fortress 2 has rewards both for playing often & spending money. However, most of these items are sidegrades from a class’s standard weaponry: they may be slower and more powerful, or have a new effect but be weaker, or be totally different. While a pro TF2 player might have more options than me, they aren’t inherently better, which is about the best compromise you can come up with. 

(Cover My Ass note: this is assuming all options are balanced. I’m not nearly pro enough to tell whether one of the Scout’s guns is just definitely better, they all seem to have pros & cons).

My Karthus (left) vs. Other Team’s Karthus (right)

If this hasn’t become apparent yet, I much prefer the Starcraft model to either the Team Fortress 2 (sidegrade) model or League of Legends (upgrade) model. Pro players receive recognition (and the possibility to become truly professional), high leaderboard ranking, and the knowledge that they’re pro. But they have no ingame advantage over another player. The upgrade model just rubs me the wrong way, even if it’s a relatively minor difference. I prefer fair games. They may have uneven situations, and imperfect matchups, but at least my opponent doesn’t deal 4% extra damage and move 5% faster just because he’s played six hundred more games than I have (see appendix).

So, why do I hate League of Legends? There’s actually a huge number of reasons, but unfair gameplay is the number one reason. Every time I lose, I always wonder if it would have been different were we equal. When we win, I wonder how many members of the other team had weak Summoners like me. I don’t think that levels or out-of-match growth should have any place within a multiplayer environment. Somebody who has played more should be better than me due to her own experience and knowledge, not just because I start with weaker armour.

Appendix: League of Legends Runes & Masteries

If you don’t care for specifics, move on. I’m going to look at a League of Legends Summoner to see what sort of difference can exist between a level 1 Summoner and a level 30 Summoner, aside from skill. This is not meant to be LoL theorycrafting, and is most likely a terrible build. 

A Summoner’s growth is divided into two areas: Runes & Masteries. I’ll briefly look at each of these in turn. 

Runes are like gem slots in Diablo or Torchlight, only they apply to your character. You receive Rune Slots every level or so, which can be filled with a variety of Runes. Furthermore, you can only have up to 9 Runes of a certain type. A level 30 Summoner has 30 Rune Slots. A very simplistic, easy math example might involve a level 30 Summoner with 9 Critical Hit Runes (total 8.37% to Critical Chance), 9 Dodge Runes (total 6.75% Dodge), 9 Cooldown Runes (total 5.85% cooldown reduction), and 3 Movement Quintessences (total of 4.5% movement speed).

Masteries are basically like World of Warcraft style talent trees, save for the fact that the trees are not class specific. A level 30 Summoner has 30 Mastery points, which can be spent among the three trees as desired. Let’s burn some points, shall we? I can increase my critical strike percentage by 2% with three points, increase ability power by 0.6/level for three points, reduce ability cooldowns by 3% with four points, ignore 6 armor per attack with three more points, increase attack speed by 4% for four points, increase critical strike damage by 10% with 3 points, and spend another point to increase all damage by 4%. Moving out of the Offense tree and into Utility, I can increase health & mana regeneration by 4% with three points, greatly improve one of my spells with another point, increase my mana by 5% for four points, increase my mana regeneration by 3 for three points, increase movement speed by 3% for three points, increase experience earned by 3.5% for three points, and finally, reduce ability cooldowns by 6% for three points.

So, to summarize, my level 30 Champion has the following bonuses:

• 10.37% Critical Chance
• 10% Critical Damage
• 4% Extra Damage
• 6 Armor Per Attack Ignored
• 4% Attack Speed
• 4% Health & Mana Regeneration
• Improved Ghost or Teleport spell
• 5% Max Mana
• 3 Per 5 Seconds Mana Regen
• 6.75% Dodge Chance
• 14.85% Cooldown Reduction
• 7.5% Movement Speed
• 0.6/level increased Ability Power
• 3.5% Experience Earned

So, it’s not like a level 30 World of Warcraft character versus a level 1, but those bonuses are fairly significant. Add in the fact that a typical League of Legends match runs over half an hour, and even small percentages start to add up. This is mostly a matter of principle; this sort of difference shouldn’t exist.

Slow Death

There is one thing that's been stuck in my craw about this generation of games. It's more bothersome than DLC, more restricting than an online pass, more of a hassle than DRM, more pervasive than minigame compilations, and it's ultimately sort of sad: local multiplayer is dying a slow death.

I don't always game, but when I do, I want to game with people. My girlfriend and all of my closest friends are nerds and love playing games, but we only sometimes play videogames together because only a few good games let us. Instead, we choose to do other social activities, like watch bad movies, or play D being able to play with friends who've moved away is amazing.
But who the hell is going to care about tweeting when someone is next to you?

Every now and then, some developer sends along a great local multiplayer game that restores my faith, only for the wait to be even longer for the next game.

Like I said, it's dying a slow death.

Phat Lootz

Just a quick Sunday note here. One of the games I’ve been enjoying on my PS3 whilst the PlayStation Network is dead is Dungeon Hunter: Alliance.

I’ll be honest, it’s a pretty average four-player top-down hack & slash RPG. Honestly, any four-player local co-op games get by my wrathful critic gaze pretty easy. I gather some friends and a bag of chips, we kill monsters or the Covenant or goombas or each other, a good time is had by all, and I spend less time nitpicking menu loading times.

The biggest issue is often the loot system; when a piece of slick armour drops, who gets it? Sure, there are usually class distinctions (does a warrior really want some smelly robes?) but problems can sometimes happen. Play enough of these games and you’ll see that melee classes always get the brunt of the loot, simply because they’re right up where the loot gets dropped.

Now, 99% of items will just get picked up and sold, but the guys in front typically get more loot than the mages in back, creating a wealth inequality. This could cause resentment in the guy playing a ranged character, or cause him to be less effective as he runs around trying to snag a fair share for himself, and all sorts of unhappy things like that.

In most friendly groups, people do leave stuff for the ranged players to pick up, but I still bet that rogues and warriors end up with the lion’s share.

In Dungeon Hunter, each piece of loot is randomly determined to be for a certain player. So an item might drop, and only I can pick it up. Now, it seems to be totally random, so my warrior might be assigned robes and staves. But in a four-player game, each player gets exactly 25% of items.

Not only is this great for ensuring all players will have enough loot to sell, but it also encourages players to trade and help each other with their inventories. Every now and then I’ll hear a call “Ooooh Rob, just picked up a sweet two-handed axe you might enjoy” and I’ll start to get excited. Every now and then we stop and scroll through our inventories, looking for what we’ve picked up that could benefit other players, and then we trade them around. But at the end of the day, you’re still guaranteed an equal share of magic items to sell.

Weirdly, Gameloft didn’t apply any sharing system to gold, so the melee characters are often carrying ~4x the cash of our mage, but without the item sharing system, he’d have even less. That said, with three distinct classes and gold being nearly useless beyond buying potions, there isn’t much incentive to cheat your friends, or even online random players, so Dungeon Hunter doesn’t actually need some sort of crazy Need Before Greed system like you may see in MMOs.

I can imagine how the implemented loot system would help regulate online play by ensuring that you get some sort of reward, without going through all the time and hassle that a more fair system would put you through.

Hopefully we’ll see similar systems return in future hack & slash games, as I really like how this system works. Maybe Diablo 3 can have something more fair than “first come, first served”?