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!

League of Legends: Metagame Shifts?

The IEM Facebook page posted a link to an interesting article which looked a little bit about what happened to the League of Legends metagame during the most recent IEM tournament in Hanover. The sample size is pretty small (only 44 games played total) and the events were certainly not independent. (Moscow 5 didn't lose a game all event so the champions they may favour would have inflated win stats. Is that because the champions are really good or because the people playing them were really good?)

It's an interesting read at any rate, and there were a couple of particularly interesting factoids. Shen was picked or banned in 43 of the 44 games, for example. He was only 5-7 in games where he got to play (he was banned 31 times!) but the article theorizes that people may not have put in enough practice with him since his recent massive buff to really master him. Shen was one of my favourite champions back before he got buffed but never got to play him because just picking him would launch vitriolic attacks from teammates. So I'm happy he's now considered good enough to be frequently banned. (Though it now means I rarely get to play him because he's always banned!)

Sona went 0-9 and Soraka went 1-3. These numbers are really surprising! At the previous IEM in Kiev teams were often banning one of them and first picking the other one because everyone thought they were overpowered. I remember listening to interviews where people were saying Sona was unequivocally the best support and people were trashing Janna as being worthless. Janna went 26-10 this time! She was played 36 times compared to a combined 13 times for Sona and Soraka. Not only was Janna picked way more frequently than the 'best' supports her win rate was substantially higher!

The article doesn't give all the raw data so I'm not sure what people were picking as supports... With 44 games and each time likely having a support each time there should be 88 support choices. We only have 49 between the 'big 3' so what was left? I decided to manually sift through the games and see if I could put together who else was being used...

Janna - 37
Alistar - 14
Sona - 9
Nunu - 8
Taric - 5
Leona - 5
Soraka - 4
Blitzcrank - 3
Fiddlesticks - 1
Galio - 1
Yorick - 1

One game had a bottom lane of Alistar and Blitzcrank! I assigned the 'support' role of that duo to Alistar but I don't really know what the plan was. Those two together certainly have a lot of crowd control and could really lock in a kill when the jungler shows up but I can't really see either one making good use of the farm from the bottom lane creeps. That team ended up losing the game, but there is a replay for it which I'll probably check out tonight while I eat to see what went on.

The last point the article touched on that I found interesting was the advantage that can be gained by picking an 'ambiguous' champion. Support Galio, for instance. The team that picked him apparently won the game pretty much solely on the back of the fact the enemy team 'counter picked' the obviously mid Galio with a Talon. They then took another mid champion (Ahri) to slaughter Talon while they sent Galio down to be support. Having one champion that can be strong in multiple roles (typically jungle and top) and then switching where they go depending on opposing team comp seems really strong. In a format where your whole team has every champion and can trade appropriately at least... When you're like me and don't share champions with anyone else it's not nearly as strong.

Intel Extreme Masters: Hanover

Last weekend was the IEM championship event in Hanover. I wish I'd known since they had a League of Legends tournament streaming and I have to assume the games were awesome. The videos are online though, and can be watched at the League of Legends website. And I tracked them down on Facebook and liked them so hopefully I'll get notification that a big event is going on before it happens!

Unfortunately the very first page you go to when you find the videos is the finals so it's a bit of a spoiler about the previous matches. I decided to just watch from the end since presumably two pretty good teams made it that far. The first game of the finals started off insane! Moscow 5 was in it and started off with a crazy set-up. They had their bottom lane start with the blue buff while their jungler took red. Then their AD carry soloed bottom lane with blue while their support just ran around being crazy. It's the sort of thing that I can't help but feel like could be countered if you knew it was coming but if you have the balls to try it and it works you just win the game. Which is how I felt watching M5 play at the last IEM event! I'm looking forward to watching the rest of their games over the weekend. I should really cancel my cable tv...