User:Shard/Unfair

Some friends of mine got me into League of Legends a few months ago, and for some sick reason, I'm still playing it.

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
Invincibility in LoL is always temporary unless you pick Mordekaiser, a champion that literally cannot die unless you try to get yourself killed. This is because his skills give him a shield whenever he does damage. Those skills also cost zero mana and recharge in just a few seconds. Vladimir is another champion that is especially unkillable. He has a skill that makes him invincible and immune to ALL effects for 4 seconds. Did I mention it also steals life from people around him? Did I mention it also snares enemies near him? Yes, it's a life stealing snaring AoE DoT with invincibility. Ten second recharge.

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. 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.
 * Gold cost for stealth: 0
 * Gold cost for stealth detection: 400

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 then 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."

Report Player
In LoL, you can report someone for being bad (it's an actual option in the report window - "Unskilled player"). I made it a personal rule to always report Mordekaisers and Katarinas. Mordekaiser is the champion that can't die - not even in a 1v5 fight. Katarina is a champion so easy to play, all you need in order to win is a working keyboard and a flight of stairs to throw it down, letting the corners of the steps press the keys for her skills.

I looked up any answer to why they would do this (and many people who play asked). The popular theory is that they use those reports to improve matchmaking. I don't buy this for two reasons:
 * 1) Matchmaking in LoL could be improved by improving their random number generator. Skill really has no correlation to win ratio in LoL, so putting completely random people together is fine.
 * 2) Matchmaking is easy if you have a device that does computations such as addition. What do they call those again? Even in a ladder system where rank doesn't matter, simply putting more experienced people together makes sense.

It turns out that Riot (the company developing LoL) has a shitty support team (surprise!), but also implements a system called the Tribunal, which allows players to look at reports and decide if a reported player should be punished or not. If you know me, you know that I have zero or negative faith in voting systems because when the voter pool is stupid, you get Bushes to be president. Luckily, I meet the requirements for judging player conduct in LoL, so I signed up for it to make sure some idiot doesn't get to do it instead of me.

=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. The game is so bad that the developers even let you ban champions of your choice in certain matches. Between you and the other team, only 4 champions can be banned, which leaves over 60 more broken ones left to pick from.

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.