League of Legends Referrals!

Riot just rolled out a new refer-a-friend system yesterday. I'm not really sure what the differences are between it and the old system to be honest. For the most part it looks like you just get small amounts of in game currency if a friend signs up through your link or enter your name (Ziggyny) and plays enough to hit level 10. There are some pretty substantial rewards further down for getting a lot of referrals but that seems like a bit of a pipe dream I would think.

Sthenno commented on yesterday's post that the ability to play with bots could prompt him to give the game a spin in order to understand the game better for watching. (MLG announced LoL will be played at the next big event, knocking Halo out of their rotation!) There are two ways to play with bots. The first is to click the play button and go to the Co-op vs AI selector. This will pair you up with 4 other humans to play against 5 bots. You can select if you want to go up against beginner level bots or intermediate level bots. (They're constantly patching in AI for new champions so you can be up against a pretty wide selection of enemy champions.) These games give xp and ip the same as a normal game against humans, at low levels. There are penalties that get applied as you gain xp (max level is 30 and penalties start kicking in at level 10) but it's still something.

The second way is to create a custom game. One of the options when you're forming the teams in a custom game is to add a bot to either team. This is how I ran my test yesterday. I added 4 bots to my team and 5 bots to the other team. These games have the same xp/ip as the Co-op vs AI penalties assuming the teams are balanced. The plus side here is you don't have to play with strangers if you don't want to. There's no pressure to win and you get some xp/ip at the end of the game.