What is League of Legends? How does one play? What makes it a great eSports spectacle? I cover some of the basics of the game and sit down with a League of Legends fan for some insight into the community, the game, and its professional players.
League of Legends has caught on fire in the eSports community and beyond over the past year. Riot Games’ title has been featured in the world’s largest tournaments, such as Dreamhack and the MLG Pro Circuit. League of Legends has become so popular that, according to a survey of the playtime of 21 million Xfire users, it is currently the most played game in the world. To throw some numbers around for comparison, World of Warcraft, the great PC MMO juggernaut, had a little over 600 million hours logged into the game from July 2011 to June 2012. Players logged over 1.3 billion hours playing League of Legends in that same timeframe. That’s the equivalent of about 148,402 years.
What draws people to spend that much time on a game? For an insider’s perspective, I turned to my personal friend and League of Legends eSports super-fan Kendall for her take on the game, the pro teams, and the attraction to the game.
Would you consider yourself a big League of Legends fan?
Yeah, I would consider myself a big League of Legends fan. I watch the major tournaments. Occasionally I watch minor tournaments when it is the weekend and I am not doing anything and I usually watch at least one streamer every now and then during the day or a couple times a week.
You also play League of Legends. How much would you say you play every week in addition to watching games?
Probably an average of two games per night, and those usually run about 45 minutes. So about two hours a night.
Could you try and describe what you find so appealing about the game?
I think that I play because I enjoy the strategic aspect of the game. The mind games – because it is a PvP game, you are always messing with your opponent’s head or trying to outguess your opponent. It has – and this is what initially attracted me to the game – a very simple interface, in that you only have four spells, but the ways you can combine and use those spells is where you can shine. For example, I play support the most. So with the support champions, I get a lot of pleasure out of finding new and different ways to use their abilities, either as just attacking the enemy, or defending my own team, or slowing down the enemy, or trying to find different ways to do that which are more creative.
I think that I watch for a lot of the same reasons, so that I can understand different strategies. It’s a fun game for me, and it is a way for me to take my mind off of graduate school, which can be very stressful. It’s a way to sometimes rage, sometimes get extreme satisfaction out of something that isn’t work. Yay escapism!
What are some of your favorite teams or players or tournaments to watch in League of Legends?
Well my boyfriend and I are planning to go to the season two finale of the League of Legends Circuit. We are actually planning on going in person to this tournament, which I think will be quite an experience.
As far as favorite tournaments, the thing is – I suppose it is clear cut, but it is not as clear cut to me because I don’t obsessively look at the tournament circuit – there are games which count toward League Points, so those are the bigger tournaments and you get all of the major teams competing at those. You get to see the big-name teams competing against each other. Those are obviously really exciting matches.
As far as my favorite player, I play support most in the game, so I really enjoy watching Nhat Nguyen play. He’s a pretty consistent streamer and he plays support and it is fun to watch someone play the position that you play. Scarra is a really good AP mid [spell-based hero commonly assigned to the middle lane –Ed.] who I enjoy watching because he explains all of the aspects of his gameplay.
As far as a favorite team, I really like CLG.eu because they are kind of amazing, but I also like TSM.Evo and CLG’s North American team.
Do you think we can expect to see more teams from more areas spring up in the coming years in the eSports scene?
To some degree, League of Legends has very much a global presence already. I think that they are testing a Brazil server right now. They just launched in Turkey; I think last weekend or two weekends ago, they had a Turkish launch. I mean, one of the top teams is from Russia. There is very much a global presence. A lot of it, obviously, is dependent on Internet speed and computer presence. But I think that in a lot of places where there are computers and an Internet speed that can handle it, people that are interested in computer gaming and that type of computer gaming are playing League of Legends.
We talk about how to the game could be improved, Dota 2, and link to the greatest game of League of Legends ever played after the jump!