League of Legends: Season 3 Launch

A big patch went out last night and Season 3 has finally started today. Lots of stuff changed in the patch; most importantly the new league system went in. As Snuggles pointed out in the comments to my post on the subject Riot claims to have put in some rules to prevent the abuse I was talking about. Apparently you'll earn significantly fewer points if your hidden matchmaking rating is far below where it 'should' be for your current league. This will stop people from scumming their way to the top which seems good. On the other hand it now really seems like there's nothing new with this system. It's likely to be the same as the old one in terms of ranking up with the need to win 2 out of 3 every now and then.

And yet, the new system still makes me want to play. I got seeded into the silver tier, Ashe's Dawnbringers, division 2. Robb is silver tier, Ashe's Dawnbringers, division 1. That dog won't fly! Must grind away and catch up!

Also interesting and possibly terrible is they added badges which get displayed in your league summary. There's one for being new to the division (joined it within the last 14 days), one for being on a hot streak (won 3+ games in a row), and one for being stuck in the same division (100+ games in the same division). That last one seems odd to include. It's interesting information to have and likely means you've really reached your equilibrium point, but it also seems like a negative thing (you aren't good enough to advance) and people normally don't take too kindly when you point out their flaws.

The patch had some other interesting changes in it. In particular...

• Queue dodging in ranked has a shorter timeout, but you lose league points when you do it.
• Annie has a new model. Woo!
• Shaco got nerfed. He was actually played in a big tournament recently and I guess they needed to put a stop to that. When the invisible assassin guy is good enough to beat pros you know he's going to be stomping terrible players. 
• They put in a cheap AP+AC item. In that same tournament I frequently saw teams taking entirely physical damage dealers and I guess this is a way for actual AP casters to survive mid in the early game?
• They slightly nerfed the big health items. Again in that tournament all practically anyone was buying was giant's belt and things that build out of giant's belt. The S3 changes to the way penetration works seem to have convinced people to just build health now. I wonder if they'll manage to find a balance...

All in all, very interesting. There's another big IEM tournament this weekend. I wonder if it's on the new patch or not. I feel like the tournament started before the patch came out so I'd imagine they're playing on an old patch tournament server. Still something I'm going to pay attention to this weekend regardless!