A nasty League of Legends bug has been discovered, and it's so serious Riot Games has shut down ranked play. According to a statement on the League of Legends status page, ranked matches have been disabled due to a bug related to the Recall spell, which transports the player back to their base after a countdown. Problem is, this bug removes the counter, meaning it's easy to jump straight out of perilous situations and back to the safety of your base, effectively breaking the game.

"Unfortunately, this particular issue can't be mitigated by disabling a specific champion or item so we've temporarily disabled Ranked while we develop a solution," the statement reads. "We will update you all with our progress in 12 hours."

Casual matches are still available to play, but that's a significant amount of time for the world's biggest MOBA to be offline. While you wait, check out resident LoL expert James Chen's opinions on what Riot Games should do to improve League of Legends.

Cheers, VG247.

The Korean exodus has its detractors. Whether by nationalism or more general regional pride, the ubiquity and dominance of Korean players in literally every premier circuit has troubled especially those prone to chanting "USA! USA!" There's no denying that they're deadly effective, of course—Jae-hun "Fenix" Kim's solo quadrakill against Counter Logic Gaming sent the former North American leaders into a multiweek spiral downward. Over in Europe, Fnatic's Huni and Reignover Show (Seung-hoon Heo and Yeu-jin Kim respectively) draws in some of the best ratings the region's seen in its history.

There's also no denying that they deserve the bounties they reap. Even my pitiable little region here in Taiwan, with our severe lack of endemic sponsorships and struggles under China's titanic LPL shadow, can nonetheless attract Korean talents. That, honestly, suggests something fishy going on up north in the Korean peninsula. If esports is the meritocracy we'd like to pretend it to be, then certainly these young and mechanically impressive Korean talents should be reaping the material rewards they can't seem to find back home.

But there's also no denying that the very presence of Huni, Fenix, and all of these others at the top of the western circuits is an unspoken criticism of the general quality of western play. While there's more mechanical equality between individual players than in previous years (Soren "Bjergsen" Bjerg is still the absolute best mid laner in the NA LCS, Koreans be damned), the top of the North American scene in particular is starting to get crowded out. The import players are very much the lynchpins to any one team's cohesion.

TDK's torment

Team Dragon Knights, they of the perpetual visa problems, was a particularly clear example of this. Geon-woo "Ninja" Noh and Jin-hyun "Emperor" Kim's emigration issues forced their new NA LCS team to sub in a wide range of alternatives, ranging from James Lattman to Aaron "Bischu" Kim, and subsequently crashed and burned out of the gates. Their 0-9 start to the summer split was reminiscent of Copenhagen Wolves circa 2013—Bjergsen's professional debut. And much like Bjergsen's debut, Ninja and Emperor's much belated presence is the only thing keeping the team in contention.

But why was this particularly true for TDK? Bischu, Lattman and everybody else they've tried are known players in the North American scene—it's not as if they've taken fresh rookies out of solo queue and told them to try and not feed double digits to TSM. Bischu, in particular, has been in the competitive scene in one form or another since June 2012. While a team with subs certainly aren't expected to take over the circuit's top rankers, their nine-game defeat streak was disastrous even against the likes of fellow rookie teams like Enemy or Team 8. Even Cloud 9, whose season's been likened to a dumpster fire, can at least pull it together long enough to batter TDK around.

Why is it that North American mid-Challenger players can be so easily made to seem like bronze scrubs when directly compared to Korean imports? Part of it can be blamed on North American solo queue, perhaps, where players have long complained of a lack of seriousness compared to its Chinese and Korean equivalents. But it's shortsighted to just leave it as a cultural difference without deciphering why that difference exists.

The fact is, even before the mass exodus, Chinese and Korean Challenger players had more to look forward to anyhow. The seriousness of ladder play is commensurate with the expectations of its top-level players—Korean Challengers, in particular, know that they're actively being scouted by organizations across the world. Same with the top level players of China's Ionia server, though focused more inward towards the region's billionaire sponsors.

If teams and organizations want to know why the quality of domestic players in North America and Europe are so comparatively poor, part of the blame has to go to themselves for not fostering a similar advancement program and environment back home. They default towards two courses of action when faced with roster issues: either to protect the players they currently have in the name of team cohesion (and to not make things worse in the short term), or to recruit foreign players to bandaid over their weaknesses.

Neither, I note, are inherently wrong. The problem is the almost exclusive dependency on just these two options. While the Challenger Series has done a lot over the last year to make the competitive scene somewhat more friendly to the semi-pro level, it's largely failed to bridge the resource and investment gap between domestic western players and their foreign competition, hindering the former's development. The lack of "true" substitute players or coaching and analytical investments for academy teams leaves Korean solo queue the better bet for talent hunting.

Building a battleground

But the problem isn't entirely on the team organizations themselves. It's at least partially the fault of local tournament organizers as well—and maybe on the LCS structure itself.

The LoL Pro League teams in China have an infamously rigorous competitive schedule this year, playing a whopping 44 games and then some over the course of a split. But on top of that's an entire constellation of secondary and third party tournaments too. There's also the LSPL—commonly and mistakenly considered the equivalent of the western Challenger Series circuit, except that the LSPL somehow fosters teams and talent that can legitimately challenge the likes of LGD and Edward Gaming.

If the western team organizations are guilty of not fostering a strong solo queue scene by neglecting the training of domestic candidates, western tournament organizers are guilty of not incubating the premade scene. The NA and EUCS are pale shadows of the competitive rigor of the LSPL, whose tournament schedule and structure mirrors its more internationally renown counterpart. The third party support that gives Challenger-tier teams both a platform and financial incentive to play top-tier League of Legends is largely absent outside of China.

Here, however, there are promising developments. Fantasy platforms like Alphadraft don't just provide greater liquidity and audience incentives to pay attention to "minor" leagues—they're also actively fostering their growth by hosting tournaments to showcase teams (and give people something to gamble over).

But my concerns here are more about the risks imposed by the platforms initiating such tournaments. We've seen what external performance incentives have done to the CS:GO scene—the more money at stake, the more likely that some greedhead's going to try and finagle a deal between the teams to affect the match outcome. This absolutely must be engineered against in the long term—the central cause of Starcraft: Brood War's decline was the image hit caused by Jae-Yoon "Savi0r" Ma's ignoble fall from grace as the central figure in the South Korean matchfixing scandal back in 2010.

Fantasy draft platforms are a bit of a Faustian bargain in this instance, as they bring everything a local scene could want to incentivize and fund its development, except for protection against corruption by externalities and greed. Only strong and centralized oversight can mitigate this problem—but I'm not sure if Riot's the right party to do so. Their recent actions against Renegades co-owner Chris Badawi demonstrated a clear bias favoring LCS teams over Challenger-tier organizations, or basically teams under their control and teams outside. While Badawi's actions are highly questionable, it's nonetheless extremely obvious that poaching and tampering protections overwhelmingly favors the established LCS organizations—at direct and detrimental cost to Challengers like the Renegades. Challenger teams have no such security against LCS teams that want to take advantage of the training and investments they've put into their players, and there are no indication that Riot's going to be implementing equivalent failsafes on their behalf.

Instead, maybe it's time that Unikrn, Alphadraft and Vulcun start talking amongst themselves about establishing a commissioner's office. If Riot won't offer the same level of protection to third-party organizations and unaffiliated teams, then it's up to said organizations and teams to protect themselves—and they can only do so by collective action. Various reasons and circumstances have, according to Unikrn VP Stephen "Snoopeh" Ellis, prevented the formation of a player's union among League of Legends teams and players. But an organized third party circuit is its own political entity, especially with the funding and backing that the fantasy draft companies have already established in just their inaugural year.

The Challenger-level competitors and teams determine a region's long-term viability. It is in everybody's best interest to foster its rapid and cultivated growth. There is no escaping the conclusion that the only feasible way to do so is to establish a strong third-party circuit—and this year, we have the tools and investments needed to do so. Time to see about founding a National MOBA League.

Does League of Legends currently have a Sivir problem? She's been a dominant presence across multiple continents, boasting a win rate that verges on making her ban-worthy. Yet it's hard to immediately identify why this is so.

On paper, she isn't the most intimidating AD carry. Her short auto-attack range is relatively unsafe, and though her poke is pretty good, her overall burst damage is usually outmatched by other options. Were it safety in fights, you'd usually want the long auto-attack range from Caitlyn, Jinx, Ashe or Kog'maw—with a good tank line, it's difficult to trap them with any form of crowd control. Were it raw damage, Vayne, Kalista and Corki offer execution power that leaves Sivir in the pale. Her attack steroids are nothing much to boast of either, compared to the attack speed bonuses offered by other carries.

Yet to analyze Sivir based off her combat stats alone is to miss the forest for the trees. Certain pro players might dismiss her contributions as "just a Sivir comp," but it says a lot about their own ignorance to treat it with such low priority despite its proven success.

Wild Hunt

Sivir's team contributions exist along two fronts: map control and power amplification. The first is easy enough to understand: she deletes waves by pressing two buttons. A couple Boomerang Blade and Ricochet combos later, and the enemy bot lane duo's stuck farming under the turret while she's free to roam elsewhere.

Her wave control is especially relevant in organized play, where two-on-two bot lanes aren't necessarily the guaranteed norm, nor are extended laning phases. Fast and reliable waveclear allows her team to focus on objectives early on and abuse early-game matchup advantages consistently. Either she gets an easy 2v1 lane, or she guarantees that her top laner has the better 1v1 option. In combination with the "sixth-man" pressure from the lane she's pushed up, the enemy team will find themselves regularly split along two fronts, limiting their strategic options.

If they're the sort of team that needs a long time to ramp up to their power spikes, that's a deadly sort of pressure to face. Tear of the Goddess-using champions like mid lane Kog'maw or Cassiopeia, in particular, are pressed hard to find any sort of relevance—by the time they can afford to do anything but play defensively, their team will often be down the entire front line of towers as well as multiple Dragons.

But other AD carries can do a similar job without being nearly as dangerous as Sivir. Corki's burst and poke can smash through minion waves just as well, after all, and he too is a powerful early-game pick. Unlike Sivir, however, Corki only has his own early game to rely on—he doesn't bring a whole lot to everybody else's kit.

On The Hunt might secretly be the best ultimate spell in the game. It might not do damage, nor does it offer or affect direct crowd control spells, but the powerful team-wide mobility does two extremely important things. Obviously it tips just-barely-infeasible champions into godlike status: the speed boost makes it much easier for champions like Rumble and Maokai to get into position for their spells, and makes even traditionally kite-able champions like Olaf into a real threat in the face of all of the dashes, blinks and Ghosts that litters the game. In a lot of cases, the only reason why a champion isn't "good" is because of their lack of comparative mobility, and On The Hunt is a teamwide solution to that problem.

Related to that is the true secret to Sivir's success: if her wave control can be considered a strategic seal on the enemy team, On The Hunt is an indirect form of crowd control that seals their micro-level tactical options too.

The best way to think about it is as a range extension to her allies' own crowd control effects. Maokai's Twisted Advance, Morgana's Soul Shackles, Gragas's Explosive Cask: it's that much harder to stay out of their radii when Sivir is nearby to bolster their movement speed. Even before the first spell is cast, the enemy team finds their movement options sealed off as surely as if the choke points had been blocked off with Azir's Emperor's Divide.

Sealing Technique

Coincidentally, Azir's exactly the sort of champion you want to run when facing a Sivir-reliant composition. Mass-knockback spells in general are the best tools versus On The Hunt, opening up vital space and movement options when Sivir's team decides to engage. For that, you'd also want Gragas, Janna or Tristana—Explosive Cask, Monsoon and Buster Shot respectively.

Of course, while that opens up your team's skirmish-level options, that doesn't do enough in the face of Sivir's map control—it's nice to have when her team decides to force fights instead, but stopping them from simply out-rotating you is difficult at best.

For that, you want to fight fire with fire.

Righteous Glory's one of the best options you can slap on a tank right now, thanks to the whopping 60% movement speed bonus it provides your team on activation, making it the equivalent of a mid-game On The Hunt. Area of Effect denial, like with Viktor's Gravity Field, pre-empts Sivir's movement options and denies her team critical chokepoints.

And then there's the option of being so inherently mobile that even On The Hunt can't close the gap for her team. Early-game Warrior junglers like Lee Sin and Jarvan are increasingly popular again, thanks to their huge inherent mobility and efficiency in shutting down Sivir early. But the most interesting choice I've seen so far's back home in Taipei's LoL Master Series, where mid lane maestro Westdoor's fallen back to an old favorite.

Global and pseudo-global Teleport effects are the best forms of mobility money—or RP—can buy. Shen can almost literally be in two places at once, counteracting Sivir's dominant map play, and his energy usage buffs have made the classic tank relevant again. But Twisted Fate is an even more interesting option. At first glance, his reliance on Gold Card to set up kills is a relatively poor choice versus Sivir, as she can simply Spell Shield it into oblivion (and give her extra mana for another Boomerang Blade at that). But the real threat from Twisted Fate is information.

Destiny is like having free wards up across the map. No matter what Sivir does, or how fast her team rotates, Westdoor's Twisted Fate means they should never be able to catch the enemy team by surprise. Her wave control advantages are largely mitigated if the enemy team doesn't actually have to choose between pushing a lane or fighting over Dragon, but gets to do both at the same time. Theoretically, Pantheon and Gangplank can do the same as well, thanks to their own global effects—though not Karthus, as Requiem is simply free mana for Sivir.

Threat Level

The big question at the moment: should Sivir be nerfed? In the face of her obvious strengths at the professional level, it's tempting to say so. She has an extremely centralizing effect in the game at the moment—it's hard to say otherwise when she isn't just in every game, but actively sought after in the first couple pick rotations.

But hold that thought. Sivir's centralization might suck for AD carries that are bored of basically playing a support role, but it's hard to say that she's bad for the game. As mentioned, she increases champion diversity for literally every other role, so even if the AD carries are bored, everybody else is having a grand old time dusting off champions that were formerly held back in a Sivir-less metagame.

What needs to be done, instead, is to decrease the current meta's reliance on On The Hunt, and Riot's already doing so. Improved gold gains with Ancient Coin makes Talisman of Ascension a much more feasible option for support players. Even better, the soft cap mechanic on movement speeds makes stacking their bonuses highly inefficient anyhow, so it's not as if Sivir teams benefit even more from having the Talisman available on their side too.

In a rare once-a-year case, I have nothing to criticize about Riot's balance plans... for now. If the lessons we've derived from Sivir's current dominance is anything to go by, the upcoming item rebalances will do a lot to improve the game's overall health.

That thing up there is Tahm Kench, AKA The River King, AAKA League of Legends' latest champion. How does that tiny top hat stay atop his head? How did he fashion a couple of tentacles into a sort of moustache? What abilities does he have? These are all fine questions, but Riot only have answers for the last one.

You'll find the full Tenchian breakdown at this link, but the short version is that he's a tank. A tank whose moveset revolves around his enormous stomach, and of course his enormous appetite. Riot teased The River King previously, and now he totes exists. Good on him. Are you going to give him a try?

DOTA 2 Reborn's kicked off a storm of envy in the League of Legends community, as can only be expected between two games of the same nominal genre. While I usually consider comparisons between the two a waste of time—each has been successful mostly by ignoring the other and doing their own thing—the client-side issue is an exception. As the features and functions offered by the rival game's rework lies largely outside in-game design and philosophy, there are less subjective grounds of direct comparison and criticism. In fact, the lack of functionality's been a sore point for quite a while.

Of course, it's worth recognizing that League of Legends is saddled with a tech debt that DOTA 2 doesn't have. LoL started as an indie release, after all: a small-scale game with a mere fraction of the original DOTA's heroes pool, made on a budget so tight that they had to resort to Adobe AIR as its basic framework. It's honestly impressive that Riot's been able to do so much building off so little. But while I doubt much of the original code still remains after years of revamps (fewer things are coded as invisible minions nowadays), the legacy structure imposes its limitations even unto present day.

If you're wondering why LoL seems full years behind DOTA 2, despite Riot being an absolutely gargantuan and wealthy beast of a company nowadays, it's entirely because of how they started. The tech debt of a Valve-backed project is comparatively much milder, simply because they can afford the initial resources and man-hour investments to future-proof the product. This goes doubly with Reborn, as it's explicitly meant to showcase Source 2's strengths.

But debt has to be paid off eventually—and now that Riot's one of the biggest studios out there with countless hundreds of employees to metaphorically shove at the problem, it's time to do so. And there are three features and updates, in particular, that need to be addressed in LoL 2.0.

Play it back again

Replays, already, please! It's been promised since Year 0, back when DOTA designer Steve "Guinsoo" Feak was a major and public presence with the company. Its basic structure and UI was demo'd on the Public Beta Environment a couple years ago, and there's been absolutely no word of it since.

Riot's excuse was that they wanted server-side storage, which is either a wet dream or nightmare for their recently hired games archivist depending on how she wants to look at it, and thus needed the infrastructure to back it up. Well, the Amsterdam server's up, the American ISPs have been largely negotiated with and their scheduled continental centralization is slated for "Soon."

And we're stuck here waiting, twiddling our thumbs, hoping that the on-switch'll be flipped any day now.

Look, replays are absolutely vital for any competitive game—and given the amount of resources pumped into Riot's esports department, surely they haven't actually overlooked this. Not only does it make for better competitive integrity (video replays catch visual bugs, but being able to examine the code-level interactions is even better—don't be like FIFA with their allergy to video referees), but it makes for better professional play too. Even Riot's extremely well-trained LCS spectators can't catch everything—rewind functions are saved for major fights, so seemingly inconsequential skirmishes that nonetheless set up the results of later interactions tend to get passed over.

True, third-party replay services do exist. But native support makes a big difference—namely, they're not expected to break from patch to patch, and are expected to have Riot's full support and customer service backing their use.

Wax on wax off

To more fundamentally back up a replay system, a sandbox mode should absolutely be implemented as well. And this, too, is vital for the game's competitive development. Custom game modes are not enough—even the basics of something as fundamental as last-hitting are mostly taught and learned inefficiently, with no way to practice the nuances affected by level and income (nothing in the game tells you how to farm against a turret. You're forced to learn haphazardly that it's tower-tower-auto for melee and auto-tower-auto for caster minions, but only at specific ranges of Attack Damage). And never mind specific optimized combos affected by cooldown reduction, how attack speed affects attack-move commands, or exactly how far away a jungler can be from a lane and still be in time for a gank before the minion wave moves out of range.

Team-level practices are similarly sub-optimal in the current paradigm. Practicing optimal wave control is one thing, but the development of micro-level playbooks are largely rudimentary thanks to the lack of good ways to practice. The best way to towerdive, the best timings for laneswaps, exactly how to transition from laning to fighting to take advantage of powerspikes—all of these have level- and gold-dependent nuances that make it very difficult to practice or test on a deliberative basis.

Combine sandbox and replay, and what do you get? Like a decade's worth of Christmas presents to every pro team across the globe, all at once. Imagine an eleventh-person catbird seat for a coach in command on a per-session basis, setting relative experience and gold values, starting conditions, and matchups. Imagine being able to set up specific fights and positions to test approaches and tactics!

Imagine that a DDOS was just a nuisance, and a savestate can be made of a game to be returned to on a later basis. It would actually be a damn shame if the server-side replay storage wasn't designed with this specific feature in mind, given just how often DDOSes have affected the Challenger Series teams—and, indirectly, who's had a chance to make it into the LCS.

How do I shot skills

For the preceding two features, I discussed mainly on the basis of competitive play. They cross-apply to players of all skill levels, of course, but it's admittedly less obvious why an account level one newbie would even care about fine-tuning and rewatching their plays.

But replays and sandboxes set up the infrastructure for something that League of Legends desperately, desperately needs. The last feature I want is not, by any means, the least: a massively retooled tutorial.

It's been said ad nauseum: unless you want to distill it to Heroes of the Storm's simplicity, MOBAs aren't easy games to get into. While the esports aspects and streaming culture's successfully raised an unmatched player population, that really only makes it even more daunting for the new player to enter the fray. Fighting versus bots is all well and fine, but bots don't give step-by-step instructions on the whys and hows of good warding, ganking, or itemization.

A sandbox and in-game rewind function, though, greatly expands the scenarios that can be scripted to teach newcomers. If a newbie were to play a one-on-one fight on Howling Abyss versus a ramped-up AI, the ability to rewind and show them how the fight would play out with an entirely different item set or skill level sequence would be vastly more educational than the current Ashe-only Thornmail-building joke that's currently used to teach the basics.

It's not hard to imagine an entire range of single-player missions and challenges too. "Here's a level 6 Nocturne—help your ally and gank the mid laner!" Or with higher difficulties, "Shurima's under siege—pull a Froggen and defend your nexus alone against a swarm of super minions with Azir, while the enemy team harasses you!" Heck, they can monetize this and fulfill a largely unwhetted appetite for League of Legends lore too by designing IP/RP-unlockable scenario packs with this specific objective in mind: to vastly expand the tools and means of teaching players, and make it fun to do so.

There are plenty more things that can be added to an upgraded LoL. Opt-in voice chat to replace Curse Voice, two-key authorization to protect accounts that can often be valued at hundreds of dollars (guilty as charged—look, I really liked the new Lux skin, and I'm collecting Sona's), among countless other little things and small tweaks. I'd especially like a mobile app to spectate games, bet IP on outcomes, and manage runes and other account settings. But the three above? They are a level-up for LoL itself. They mature it in a way that no other updates really will. More so than itemization fixes. More so than new champions or skins.

They would make League of Legends itself, in and out of game, a much better experience.

Riot Games is teasing what appears to be a new League of Legends Champion known as The River King. On the outside, he looks like just an overgrown catfish, but he deals like the devil and he'll swallow you whole.

That description doesn't come from any official source, but I like to think that it fits with the tone set in the trailer, which was transcribed by the good folks at the League of Legends Wiki. "Boy, the world's one river, and I'm its king. Ain't no place I ain't been. Ain't no place I can't go again," the River King says to the gambler. "And the price is a minuscule thing. See, I got hungers that ain't easily fed. But those finest tables? They ain't never got a seat for me. So I need men, like yourself, to let me in."

I don't want to spoil anything for you, but I will say that this story doesn't take place in Georgia, and this gambler doesn't appear to be the best there's ever been. The Wiki contains a few other details as well, which may or may not be important: A Rift Scutler turns up, the River King has the same accent as Twisted Fate, and Twisted Fate may in fact be the gambler in question, a theory that's also come up in the LoL Reddit. The River King also appears to be wearing a hat, although the image is hazy and it could be... well, I really don't know.

I'm sure we'll find out soon enough, and we'll let you know when we do. Until then, speculation ahoy!

At the start of the 2014 LCS series, Riot Games said it would donate all fines collected over the course of the season to a worthwhile charity. Today it announced that those fines totaled $31,850, all of which has been donated to The Trevor Project, a charity that provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services for LGBTQ youth.

"For the first major donation, we wanted to see the money collected from the 2014 make a difference to one cause," Riot said in the announcement. "When we sat down and thought about what was meaningful to us as a community, one cause resonated with most of us—the fight against harassment and discrimination."

And while the fines are the result of bad behavior among League of Legend players, Riot emphasized that the majority of the LoL community is firmly against abuse: Games in which players used homophobic slurs and exhortations to suicide were reported a significantly higher rate than those that included simple F-bombs.

"As a community, you find these words hurtful and unacceptable and so do we," Riot wrote. "We know that harassment and its consequences goes beyond just words in a game—and that s why the work of organizations like The Trevor Project is so important. We hope that this money will be able to boost their work creating a safe and inclusive environment for all of us, regardless of sexual orientation."

Riot has rolled out a number of measures to combat "extreme toxicity" in League of Legends over the past year, most recently an automated system of punishment for players who engage in abusive in-game behavior.

There are hundreds of TV stations in Seoul and one of them is devoted entirely to fishing, but it s still strange to flick through them and come across two channels of esports. You thumb past a K-pop video and an episode of Vampire Prosecutor¹ and suddenly your TV screen is full of League of Legends or StarCraft II or FIFA. It s especially odd watching FIFA since more recent games in the series have become so similar to actual televised soccer that there s a second of confusion where you think the new season s players have even more terrible haircuts than usual before you realize they re digital.

The steps that lead South Korea to have this level of acceptance for competitive gaming read like something out of an alternate history novel. While early consoles were widely available there, sometimes thanks to local manufacturers creating clones of them², in the 1990s the games themselves became more restricted. While violent PC games were sometimes censored—even StarCraft had to be modified and sold in two different versions, one rated Teen and the other Adult—console games were hit harder. Not because they were more violent, but because they were more Japanese. In 1994 the Korean government banned mass media from using the Japanese language, and the delay caused by localizing massive JRPGs meant they were beaten to the market by pirate copies and illegal imports. They were the most popular genre of console game in South Korea, and yet it wasn t worthwhile selling them there³.

Where consoles struggled, PCs caught up the slack. They were helped by the South Korean government s massive investment in telecommunications and internet infrastructure. The country now has some of the fastest internet in the world, making online gaming an attractive lag-free proposition even in its infancy. And those esports channels wouldn t exist if it weren t so cheap to get a TV station up and running in Seoul. Now Korea has esports arenas and prizes valued in the millions, but even so the audience is still mostly casual, switching loyalties from team to team as their fortunes change. It s a large niche, but it s still a niche, and nothing compared to the audience for mukbang, for instance—videos of people eating, which are massively popular on streaming service AfreecaTV and earn a living for some of the people making them⁴.

Competitive gaming is a large niche, but it s still a niche, and nothing compared to the audience for mukbang.

While esports is a bigger deal in South Korea than it is in the west, it hasn t resulted in the paradise of mainstream acceptance for video games outsiders assume it has. Education is incredibly important in Korean culture—another reason the PC is so prominent, as you can pretend it s totally being used for homework, Dad—and gaming is seen as an impediment to young people s study habits. The Youth Protection Revision bill, passed in 2011, bans players under 16 from online games between midnight and 6.00am. It s colloquially known as the Cinderella law, and its purpose is to prevent kids from neglecting schoolwork because they re up all night playing MapleStory or World of Warcraft⁵. Even though the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism created an organizational body called KeSPA, the Korean e-Sports Association, gaming remains as mistrusted by the government and media as it is anywhere else.

On Twitch, where the audience is made of people who are already video game fans, League of Legends is the most-watched game. But on YouTube, with its much a broader audience, League of Legends is number five. Number one by a gigantic margin is Minecraft. According to Octoly s figures there were 3,900 million views of Minecraft videos on YouTube in April. Number two on the list, Grand Theft Auto, had 1,390 million monthly views. It s not hard to see why the YouTube audience watches Minecraft in overwhelming preference to other video games. They don t watch it for competition, but it to see people playing the same way they do, experimenting with mods and co-operating to build amazing, extravagant things. The feats of exceptionalism they re interested in are when someone builds Minas Tirith or the Starship Enterprise or all of Westeros.

'Video games are like sports' can be a useful analogy for explaining our hobby to people who don t play games, but in the long run it does a poor job demonstrating why games matter. It s the games you can t really compare to something that already exists that can convince people to take them seriously. When parents worry about what their kids are playing, when governments change their mind about censoring games again, when the media ham-fistedly covers the latest controversy, the competitive side of games won t convince them to take a more serious look. Showing them the cooperation required to work together with a group of friends to make castles in the sky is both more honest to the average person s experience of games and more likely to win them over.

Personally I d rather be watching the K-pop channel than Minecraft, though. At least until someone uses that game to create mermaids being turned into sushi or post-apocalyptic warlords in outfits this fabulous.

¹It s about a prosecutor who is a vampire, not a human who prosecutes vampires. That would just be silly.

²In the Yongsan Electronics Market there s a place called Video Game Alley where I found a Samsung Gam*Boy for sale, Korea s equivalent of the Sega Master System. Samsung followed the Gam*Boy with the Super Gam*Boy, which ran Genesis games, though it was later renamed the Alladin Boy after the popular game based on the movie.

³This was exacerbated by worries about the potential for games to cause epileptic fits in children. Remember the mass hysteria over Pokemon Shock when an episode of the anime was blamed for Japanese children suffering fits? A similar outcry occurred in South Korea when a boy experienced a fit while playing Street Fighter II, and again it was primarily Japanese games and consoles that lost sales because of parental concern.

⁴Mukbangs or eating broadcasts are livestreams in which someone eats a large meal in front of a camera while interacting with viewers via chat. Mukbangs are incredibly popular and their hosts, or Broadcast Jockeys (yes, BJs for short), receive fan donations that can add up to a lot. In Korean culture meals are traditionally a social activity and it s often difficult to order food for one in a restaurant because everything is served with the expectation of communal eating. Modern lifestyles and work habits results in a lot more people eating at home alone and so the mukbangs restore a sense of the social to dinnertime.

⁵To sign up for online games in South Korea you need to provide a Korean Social Identity Number and phone number so that your age can be verified. Punishments for getting around the system, say by using your parents ID without permission or buying one from the thriving black market, can result in up to two years imprisonment and a $9,000 fine.

League of Legends is nominally a free to play game, but you wouldn't know it by how it's designed. This isn't a Penny Arcade-esque joke about its skins and cosmetics—that part of how it's structured is perfectly fine, and a laudable accomplishment on part of the company's artists and conceptualists that new champions and skins sell as well as they do.

But the runes, though. And rune pages. It's long past time that they were reworked from the ground up.

Currently, it costs 6300 IP to buy a new rune page, and roughly that to max out on one kind of rune. The same cost of a newly released champion, and equivalent to days of hard grinding. Though it is entirely possible to play with only the two default pages given freely to each account, that still tallies up to an exorbitant cost just to fill one page. Even if you're reusing certain runes between multiple pages, and the same two pages for literally every champion, the total time for a new player to fill both pages and a decent stable of champions is incredibly steep. A barrier to entry that affects not just newbies, but everybody who can't afford to dump whole hours into the game on a daily basis.

Using time invested as a content gate is perfectly alright in a progression-based game, especially single-player RPGs, but it hardly makes sense for a competitive lane-pusher. Inherently, it rewards repetition of play over skill—level one trades decided not by tactical feats of ingenuity, or even cunning customization choices, but whether or not a player can afford a beneficial rune loadout to complement the matchup.

There's also the issue where, as they are designed now, runes are almost pointless anyhow. The statistical and practical value of each optimized almost instantly, no matter how often they're updated, so that every role and every champion has a pro- and analyst-certified best kit. The point of customization is lost due to how the current system is designed, again making it so that it's more a matter of who's invested enough time to buy full power, rather than who's the better player.

That can't stand. The customization system for League of Legends is one of its more interesting facets, standing in contrast to other MOBAs. The adjustments and tweaks it offers a playstyle can turn losing lanes into winners, weak points into strengths, or at least get your mage closer to that all-important 40% cooldown reduction maximum. But it needs to change to make it work as intended, and I have a few ideas for that.

True Mastery

First thing is: make it easier to access. The new Champion Mastery system, currently just a cosmetic addition for hyperfocusing on specific champions, is ideal for these purposes. The only form of progression-style play that should be encouraged in a competitively driven game like League of Legends is progression in skill and familiarity—which is why I'm not making a big fuss about the time needed to reach account level 30, as it'd take that long to get over the burden-of-knowledge hump in the first place.

But what then? An extra emote and a fancy banner or champion icon overlay is a fairly dismal award for the time invested. An extra rune page, though, would actually be commensurate with the effort invested—and would leave the newbie player enough IP to actually use the page by picking up a set of runes, armed with extensive champion practice to know what set to pick up in order to either complement their strengths or offset the weaknesses they've experienced.

Speaking of picking up rune sets: the current rune tiers are a joke. Tier 1 sets might be enough for low-level play, and cheap besides, but their usefulness quickly expires. And Tier 2s are at an awkward spot—too expensive for their value, and sitting at a level range where you want to be saving up for Tier 3s anyhow. The tiered "progression" is nonsense and wasteful, especially since they finally removed the Rune Combiner this season, after years of having it be a way for trolls and phishers to seriously mess up a hijacked account.

Better, I think, to have individual runes be more expensive, so long as they level as your account levels. Or, even better: a lot of veteran players have complained about the lack of an IP sink. Being able to upgrade old or rarely used rune sets from Tier 1 to Tier 3 via IP would be a good way to do just that.

Heck, in keeping with the cosmetics monetization theme, they can even bling them out with a dual RP/IP option. Gold, crystal or rainbowed rune sets—no statistical bonuses for "upgrading," but for the opportunity to show off a decked out page on-stream.

Actual Options

The second thing to do: make customization meaningful. And this bit is more challenging.

Part of the problem with cookie-cutter builds is sheer inevitability. When runes involve hard and static values, like flat Attack Damage or health points per level, they have a hard and static corresponding in-game value, measured by their equivalents in item-based bonuses. Contrast those values with the stats that are most relevant to the roles they play, and the actual range of viable options quickly narrows.

You can't really keep pro players and analysts from figuring out best-value sets, but you can make them more situational, so that the hard value calculations are set aside and it becomes a matter of tailoring to strategy instead. In continuing with the earlier article of applying lessons from other games to League, Splatoon's gear customizations include bonuses based on the phases of a match—early-game out-of-the-gate bonuses versus last-chance bonuses.

Applying that to AP or AD-per-level runes, where you gain comparatively more or less based on how close or far you are from level 18, helps augment based on overall team playstyle, and whether they want to play a patient or aggressive strategy. Threat detection too, basing stat bonuses on how many allies or enemies are close to you—or aren't. Conditional runes like that could tailor themselves towards poke or pick strategies, or further strengthen all-in brawling compositions that want full-fledged wars over Dragon and Baron.

Either way, decoupling champion modification from hard statistical value shouldn't be impossible—difficult to design, yes, and worth a very long test run before implementing publicly. But when the whole point of customization is to make the champion play to personal stylistic preferences, it's a design space worth developing.

Riot Games has suspended League of Legends commentator Martin "Deficio" Lynge for failing to report ongoing negotiations with the Copenhagen Wolves over an offer of a job with the team. Riot said in a statement that his failure to disclose his contact with the Wolves "showed poor judgment in navigating this conflict of interest."

The matter came to light as a result of allegations that Lynge had discussed the strategy of SK Gaming with Wolves head coach Karl "Dentist" Krey prior to a match between the teams. Krey had told his players that Lynge was feeding him information about SK's plan, but a subsequent investigation determined that no such conversation had actually taken place, and that Krey had only boasted about having inside information "in the interest of shoring up his authority with the team."

However, the investigation also revealed that the Wolves had offered Lynge a management position following the conclusion of the 2015 season, and that there had been "ongoing conversations" between the two over the previous six weeks—conversations that Lynge failed to mention to Riot.

"Although it s not unusual for Rioters to be approached with offers from LCS organizations, it s important that the organization and Rioter let us know as soon as an offer is made to raise awareness around potential conflicts of interest," Riot said. "In this case, we believe that [Lynge] showed poor judgment in navigating this conflict of interest. Over the course of our investigation we found evidence indicating that [Lynge] had begun speaking with several active LCS players—contracted and free agents—about their future and the possibility of working with them on the Copenhagen Wolves. These conversations influenced—or had the potential to influence—player decisions on where they chose to play, and affected the competitive integrity of the LCS."

Riot declared that Lynge's actions constituted tampering, and that while it's inevitable that he'd have relationships with various pro players because of his own status as a former pro, "his unique position as a shoutcaster and representative of the EU LCS meant that his actions were inappropriate and a breach of the trust that the League and Riot places in him."

As a result of the lapse, Lynge has been suspended from broadcasting until week four of the current LCS season, and will not cover any Copenhagen Wolves games for the indefinite future. He will also be prevented from joining any LCS team for the remainder of the 2015 season and all of 2016, and on top of that, "be subject to internal disciplinary measures which by law are confidential."

"Our goal is not to mandate that all Rioters approached by external organizations report their conversations to us. In the case of esports, however, where crossing the line in terms of competitive integrity can be so easily done, making us aware of the job offer would have allowed Martin (and us) to sidestep the almost inevitable conflicts of interest that came up," Riot said. "Reporting firm job offers doesn't challenge the Rioters' position—whether or not they choose to take up the offer—but it creates transparency in a competitive environment where we ask for total neutrality from Rioters."

In a statement of his own on Facebook, Lynge said he made "poor decisions" and failed to take the matter as seriously as he should have. "Throughout my career as pro player and shoutcaster, I have always been close with a lot of players and I value these relationships very highly. This will not change but I have had to learn the difference between talking to a player as friends and talking as a Rioter," he wrote. "It is 100% NOT okay to give opinions on career choices and to share your own potential future plans as a Rioter, as it can impact a player s decision making. While I never intended any harm, I definitely didn t act in the professional manner that I expect from myself and as Riot expects from me." He added that Riot has been supportive throughout, and isn't trying to force him to stay on as a broadcaster.

Krey, the Wolves coach, was also suspended until week four, for obstructing Riot's investigation and being complicit in the tampering. Because Riot found no evidence that Lynge had actually shared information regarding team strategies, however, the result of the SK Gaming/Copenhagen Wolves match—which, by the way, the Wolves won—will stand.