I have or had a casual history with League of Legends and the Defense of the Ancients and it's successors (or spin offs) in general but that has recently changed thanks to Alice. I first heard about DotA in one of the World of Warcraft guilds I was a member of where it was somewhat mentioned, and after listening to talk about it, it made somewhat more sense but it was still fairly haze. Furthermore, I was surprised to find out that it had something to do with Warcraft 3. It wasn't until a magazine article (I think) that I found out what kind of gameplay Defense of the Ancients actually had, and even then I didn't try it out until my World of Warcraft subscription had expired and it came up to mind on things I could try out.
So, with that situation I ended up looking it up and I at first was immediately turned off by the fact that the search result that came up for it was called something like “Defense of the Ancients Championship edition” and anything under that were past releases, so I ended up just downloading that. I didn't like the fact that it had the words “Championship” in it because it meant that I would need other people to play it fully rather than having some sort of bot system. Even knowing that I decided to start it up and try it out, I immediately thought it was fun being able to choose a hero and control literally no one but that, and I set out to explore the map a little bit. It wasn't too long until I discovered the enemy minions and decided to farm them, leading up to me messing around with the towers which were fairly easy to take down without any player interference. Since I wasn't really playing with anyone the main purpose of my exploration was to just see what it was like, I ended up really liking the hero I chose because it was a Fel Guard, and I thought they were neat from having spent so many hours in World of Warcraft. The Fel Guard's abilities were also a blast to mess with, I immediately drew the comparison to how it was similar to playing a hero in the normal Warcraft game modes, and that ideal without the addition of having to control things like units, research, and buildings at the same time was really appealing to me, since I loved the hero character aspect of Warcraft, but I was never really good at the normal RTS parts.
Regardless of all of that however, my exploration came to a close after I completely roamed the map and leveled my character out, with giving him the most expensive items. I didn't really feel like going onto the multiplayer aspect of it and that single incursion basically while fun, ended my DotA experience, until somewhat recently.
As someone who follows video game releases fairly frequently, it was very hard to miss the release and launch of titles such as Demigod, League of Legends, and Heroes of Newerth. At least two of them distinctly aim to be the “Defense of the Ancients 2” and those are League of Legends, and Heroes of Newrth. I can't speak on Demigod's behalf as I didn't really look into much information about it, I do know that it's multiplayer oriented with the same style of as DotA though, however the other two titles overshadow it in popularity and how similar they are to the DotA formula. With all of that in mind, the only one I've actually had experience with is League of Legends and that's because a friend of mine Adam also played it and I decided to give it a try.
Actually playing League of Legends was interesting, I was able to draw a lot of similarities right off the bat to how DotA was from the 3 lanes, stores in bases, and of course things like controlling one hero, and uncontrollable minions going down lanes at will. The main difference was actually playing the game with other players be they human or bot, playing as it was meant to be played completely changed my experience with it, and perception of the series in general.
When I first started playing League of Legends the literal only two ways to play were against basic bots which didn't really prove much of a problem to the extent of being unfun, or against players. As a generally antisocial person the first thing I didn't like was the fact that it was a small team based game where coordinating with other people is for the most part very essential, or so I had thought at the time. The next was that because of the item shop and the game had experience and levels, I thought the game was very cut and paste from the start to the finish, to the extent of if someone out levels you, you might as well surrender. That part is probably more of me being a sore loser myself, but it's also true to an extent as I learned later, but it was one of the main deterrences of the game. I also did not like that simply choosing a character that you like would possibly not be the best one for you, because all of the characters have set roles and abilites. With things like item building, and skill orders there is a minimal amount of character customization to an extent, but it's simply not efficient to play a character a less than optimal way. That leads to my final dislike of League of Legends in that right from the start it is a very competitive game not un-similar to World of Warcraft's arenas which I also didn't like. The last reason combined with all of the other reasons brought a quick halt to my playing in the League of Legends, until recently anyways.
Alice and I had been playing Warcraft 3 lately and playing a bunch of the skirmish mode against bots which I found fun, it also reminded me that I really liked the hero units of WC3 and it gave me the idea that maybe we could try League of Legends out, to at least so we could experience it together. So of course, we went on to try it out; after doing a few things to set up like tutorials, looking up the free champions and so on, we ended up inviting Adam and then we got started. Since the last time I played, and something I'm thankful for, is that the developers decided to create a Coop mode where it's 5 players, no more no less which I thought was kind of lame but I got used to it, it sets you up with random players of course if you don't have enough, against 5 bots which even on the lowest difficulty level are much smarter than basic bots you can use in custom games. We started out on the highest difficulty of which there are only two so there's not much of a choice, but we ended up doing that because Adam made the game and he decided that was a better choice.
In any case, I started off as Maokai simply because I wanted a character who could go into a lane with Alice, and she was forced to start off with Annie even though her first choice was Lux but someone took that before her and she wasn't familiar with the lock in process. In the actual game we ended up not doing fantastic but we started off fairly well which surprised me, not in that we couldn't do it, in that it happened that way on it's own. However the thing that really messed us up was when a bot from another lane came to assist the ones in our lane and we didn't expect that, resulting in us quickly getting wiped out in our lane. The bot that did this in particular was also a much higher level than us. This particular event is something that I found out happens in every game, but back onto the main topic, despite being underleveled after having our lane wiped out, we ended up pushing two lanes and assisting the middle one mainly where by then I had gotten used to using Maokai as a fight starter and using him to root enemies who are in a good position for all of my teammates to quickly turn and burn them down. At the same time however, I was disappointed in being killed instantly by a single champion such as Ryze or Annie, I'm still unsure of the cause of that especially as a tank character, but it doesn't bother me so much anymore. We ended up winning the match even though we personally didn't do as good as we normally could do when first stepping into different types of games such as Call of Duty, or Left 4 dead, which was new for us, and kind of a disappointment for me because again, I'm a sore loser.
Like I said I was somewhat disappointed in our performance but I was encouraged with Alice being with me too, I enjoyed most of the game except towards the end where things seemed too powerful to even hurt because of being underleveled, but overall, I enjoyed it a lot more than I would alone that's for sure. Alice also had similar thoughts on the game, and wanted to learn more about it, leading up to me agreeing with her, it's been a few days since then, while we haven't been playing League of Legends constantly because of other matters to attend to in our lives, we do play it quite a bit.
I've learned a few things since then the main thing is that Adam showed us a website where we could see guides of characters which I normally don't like doing, and I still don't but I realize that a lot like with World of Warcraft reading, as the game is very copy and paste from game to game, it's important to have a general idea of what your character's role is, and what items to get. I know I could probably get the same information from looking up literally all of the items and knowing what a specific character could use more of or is good at and then improving those ways, but I personally don't really want to spend the time to do that, nor do I enjoy the game as much as I do as opposed to something like World of Warcraft where I did do tests, and experiments with different items and specs (which cost tons of gold) to see what works out the best. That isn't to say I don't enjoy League of Legends, I'm still in the process of getting to the point where I would really like it, here's a few things I've noticed about the four characters I've played so far :
Maokai
-Good at using saplings like greandes to mess the enemy up
-Good at rooting
-Not good at everything else
-Former main champion, stopped using because I don't know how to play him even with guides because no guide is very specific and I wanted to be a better supporter
-Because I like Maokai as a character, I possibly will go back to him someday and by then I should know more about the game
Warwick
-Good 1v1
-Very high regenerative ability
-Very good movement
-I would probably play him some more just for fun to see how he can be in a lane without jungling
Zilean
-Good passive
-Good at setting up kills
-Ultimate seems useful in theory but because it completely immobilizes the champion who dies and then raises them without full health at which point unless they're in a situation where they won't be focused they will die, in most cases except for team fights it seems to have very limited uses
Soraka
-My new main champion
-Good at healing
-Bad at damage
-Bad at escaping without summoner abilities
-I've only just started playing Soraka yesterday but with Alice as an Ashe I feel like as long as we're good at the start and we don't let the enemy outfarm us we'll do good in the end
With all of that said my general view of League of Legends has changed dramatically from playing with Alice, and while my dislike of it did come up now and then, it hasn't ever completely shut me out of wanting to play the game, and I do feel like I could enjoy the game more as I learn more about it. So in the end, I want to learn more about it, and from what I've seen, that'll make the game us better at the game, and in general it'll remove the idea that something we don't know is causing us to not do as well as we could be doing.
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