I hope you're not too attached to the lore behind League of Legends, because it's about to be chucked out and replaced with something new. As the rest of LoL has changed over the years, Riot Games say that the original lore has held them back, leading to "creative stagnation, limiting the ways that champions, factions and Runeterra itself could grow and change". So the lore's being updated to give Riot more freedom, allowing them to tell (hopefully) more interesting stories, and to give their characters better justifications for battering each other across a series of lanes.

The full details are here in a massive blog post by Tommy Gnox and LoL's narrative team, but I'll quote the relevant parts explaining why LoL's previous backstory is is being altered to allow Runetarra to be "a world in which the factions and champions we all know and love have full freedom to grow, travel, and kick ass on a worldwide scale."

"In the early days of League," Riot say, "we created a fictional background that would justify how players could control champions during games. We came up with concepts like Summoners, Fields of Justice, an Institute of War, and indeed, the League of Legends itself all in an attempt to provide fictional context for in-game action.

"After a while, these early choices began to create unexpected problems. Every new champion needed a reason to join and remain in the League, and as their number grew, the net result was that over time the world started to feel, well, small, and eventually less interesting. The institutions we d designed fostered creative stagnation, limiting the ways that champions, factions and Runeterra itself could grow and change. Furthermore, the very idea of all-powerful Summoners made Champions little more than puppets manipulated by godlike powers. The background we d created to explain in-game action was ultimately restricting the potential narrative development of the game s defining characters."

To pick up that earlier point, here's how Riot hope to achieve this: "from champion interactions to bios to events (and beyond), we aim to expand the scope of League s story and pursue a more dynamic and wide-ranging world fit for the outsized capabilities and personalities of our champions".

If you've grown attached to the original backstory, Riot assure fans that "League s original lore remains a cherished part of its history".

In other recent LoL news, Riot talked depth and player engagement at PAX.

Members of Riot, the dev team behind the popular MOBA League of Legends, gathered at PAX Prime 2014 to talk about their design philosophy and how they carefully balance the game s dozens of playable characters. With over 27 million players logging into LoL per day, they cite player feedback as one of their key guides.

Player feedback is really important to our design changes, lead designer Greg Street said. We gather a lot of data from players, about champions being played and wins and losses. If we hear from a lot of players that a champion is problematic, that will cause a discussion in the office. Do we need to step in and change something, or will players invent a strategy that will compensate for this, or is it time to admit that there s a balance problem?

Attacks being slightly overpowered or a champion walking a bit too fast are just the beginning. According to Street, the team works on three discrete levels: mechanical, tactical, and strategic. The mechanical level is about where champions stand and how they aim their attacks. Tactical depth is about their coordination with other champions fighting nearby, and the strategic level looks at the team s approach to winning the match as a whole.

We define depth as, having lots of interesting decisions to make, Street says. He relates it to tic tac toe, where your move is dictated by your opponent s move or Monopoly where your decisions matter less than your luck. Those games have very little depth. LoL champions, on the other hand, are balanced in part by being different. Some champions, like Kog Maw, have limited mechanical depth but serve as a locus for team strategy. Other champions are more mechanically diverse, requiring players to maneuver effectively and take accurate skill shots.

After a short talk, the team spent most of their hour fielding questions from fans, many of whom claim to have played thousands of games of LoL. These hardcore fans grilled the team on how they make balance decisions, and several were concerned about the long-term fate of their favorite champions.

Every champion should feel overpowered--sometimes, developer Jordan Anton said. You should have a moment where you play the champion and think, I feel like a god.

For more from the team at PAX Prime this weekend, head to this page.

It's only a few weeks after the release of Gnar, and Riot are again announcing a new Champion for League of Legends. Azir is his name; or, more formally, the King Emperor of the Sands. They've run-down his play style in a detailed new profile.

"Azir is a mage who summons Shuriman soldiers to control the battlefield and basic attack for him. The soldier s piercing basic attacks furnish most of Azir s damage potential, making him an outlier amongst mages as a right-click-focused champion. Azir s spells, on the other hand, manipulate his and his soldiers positions to keep him safe and establish dangerous no-go zones for his enemies."



As for how the hero utilises these soldiers, Riot explains that players don't appreciate minions that run off, and also that direct-controlled minions aren't a great fit for the game's control system. With this in mind, they created a system where soldier placement is of primary importance, and where soldiers only respond to Azir's right-click command. "This makes both Azir and his enemy understand that a conscious command was given to the soldier," Riot explains. "This also means that if Azir is stunned or running away, soldiers cease to be a threat. All of a sudden, Azir s opponent can comfortably aggress."

For more, head to Riot's announcement post. So far, the studio has not revealed the Champion's release date.

Hackers have targeted a range of gaming services including Battle.net, Sony Online Entertainment titles, PSN and League of Legends, among others. While the DDoS attacks have mostly been resolved, a Twitter account claiming to be responsible for the hacks is now targeting Xbox Live.
Posting under the name Lizard Squad , the group also claims responsibility for a bomb threat which forced a plane boarded by SOE president John Smedley to be diverted. According to a SOE representative speaking to ShackNews, the FBI is now involved.
SOE services including PlanetSide 2 have since recovered from the large scale attacks and are now fully operational. Other affected games including Battle.net titles (Diablo, Hearthstone, World of Warcraft), League of Legends and Path of Exile are also now operational after temporary crashes.
.@AmericanAir We have been receiving reports that @j_smedley's plane #362 from DFW to SAN has explosives on-board, please look into this.

Lizard Squad (@LizardSquad) August 24, 2014
'Lizard Squad' sent the above message on Sunday, which prompted American Airlines to divert flight 362 to Phoenix instead of San Diego. A spokesperson for American Airlines later confirmed the flight had been diverted due to security concerns.

More updates as they come through.

You know what? Gnar is pretty cute. Just look at him. I don't want to get sentimental about Gnar, because he's a League of Legends champion and not say, a loved one, but I'm not sure watching Gnar die is something I'm prepared for. The video says Gnar has a "sweet cuddly face" with a "terrifying temper". Sounds like a cat to me.

Teased last month, Riot has sent Gnar free, and the video below demonstrates his movesets and abilities. While mini-Gnar specialises in ranged attacks, mega-Gnar is a huge ugly tank who, mercifully, is not very cute. You can give him a go as of now.

"During the laning phase, use basic attacks and clever casts of Boomerang Throw to trigger Hyper, which chunks your opponent down and helps you stay out of range of their retaliation," Riot Games writes. "Hop s a useful ability, too, but best saved for moments when you need to flee from jungle ganks or guarantee kills against your target. As teams start grouping, Crunch into fights as Mega Gnar before using Wallop, Boulder Toss and GNAR! to burst down the enemy s weaker damage dealers and pummel their tanks."

Full details on Gnar's characteristics are on the League of Legends website. Go easy on the little guy.

An awful lot of game studios and publishers these days seem to view free-to-play as the holy grail, but finding the sweet spot between giving the store away and taking unfair advantage of your players is a tricky business. League of Legends is one of the few games that really seems to have nailed it, and yet Ubisoft Blue Byte's Teut Weidemann says it's not a game that other publishers should emulate.

The problem, in Weidemann's eyes, is that Riot Games is just too darn generous with its players. Looking at the numbers from 2009 to 2013, he calculated that League of Legends has a conversion rate that is, the portion of people who actually pay to play of just 3.75 percent.

"Usually, conversion rates for client-based games is between 15 and 25 percent," Weidemann told Gamasutra. "World of Tanks has 30 percent. It could afford to have one-third of the customer base and have the same amount of money as League of Legends."

And why does a game as popular as League of Legends have such a low conversion rate? Therein lies the bit that gamers will likely take issue with: According to Weidemann, Riot isn't trying hard enough to actually make money from the game.

"Riot doesn't care. Optimizing monetization is not the top priority," he said. "They monetize purely through their reach. So it only works because of the large user base, and if you don't have that user base or don't expect to, you should not adopt their monetization. It should not be a role model for your monetization system."

In Weidemann's defense, he's coming at the issue strictly from a business perspective, which doesn't always run perfectly parallel with "keeping gamers really happy," and ultimately it's less a criticism of League of Legends than a warning to other studios that they likely won't be able to duplicate its formula for success. But it's interesting that while he he exhorts others to "learn why it works, and where the mistakes are, and why they can afford to let the conversion rate be so low," he never touches on the possibility that Riot is successful precisely because it doesn't focus on monetization. Maybe there's a good reason for that; but maybe it's one of those ideas that just crazy enough to work, too.

The League of Legends 4.13 patch is a big one, but rather than making any big changes, it implements a whole lot of little ones instead. Riot's Chris "Pwyff" Tom said the latest tune-up is all about breadth instead of depth, as the studio seeks to "promote more diversity in competitive play."

Among the fighters, three early-aggro junglers Elise, Evelynn and Lee Sin have proven to be "very suffocating" in organized play, Riot noted in the changelog, so they're being toned down to encourage players to give others a chance. Mages and assassins are getting some "low-scope buffs," and Marksmen are also being given more "strategic diversity" in order to dilute the dominance of strong hypercarry characters. Rather like fighters, some support characters are having their abilities slightly reduced as well.

The biggest character-specific changes have been made to Sona, who's been specifically reworked to "give her more meaningful (and recognizable) gameplay without heavily changing her aura-focused playstyle."

Various items are also undergoing changes, as is the order that upgrades appear in the store. Some new, color-based search terms have been added, numerous bug fixes have been made and, as mentioned above, match loading speeds have been improved by 10 to 30 percent.

It really is a big list of small things Graves now does 40 percent damage per additional bullet when he hits a target in the face with Buckshot instead of 35 percent, for instance but Riot was good enough to break it down sections based on specific groups and themes. "Under each category you can see our overarching goals and philosophies as well as deeper context on each individual champion, item, or summoner spell," Tom wrote.

The full breakdown of what's what is up at leagueoflegends.com.

A fearsome new League of Legends Champion known as Gnar has broken free from an icy tomb, but who or what is it?

Gnar was a happy... whatever he is, going by the primitively illustrated League of Legends Champion preview page. But then something bad happened, and his family was torn asunder! This left Gnar extraordinarily miffed and then he was entombed in ice! That last bit really comes out of nowhere, but the Gnar teaser released today has a semi-happy ending: Gnar makes his escape, which is good, but comes out looking like an enraged were-gremlin with murderous intent, which is probably somewhat less so.

It's not much to go on but at this point, it's all we've got. There's plenty of discussion underway on the League of Legends forums, however, one bit of which notes that this may have been "foreseen": In September 2012, the user Lunarwind posted a "Champion suggestion" for "Gnar, The Snowmass Sorrow."

"This 'cute' yordle is one that enjoys living in cold areas and learnt to master the power of cold and ice, like nunu," the description states. "Unlike nunu, Gnar focuses on area denial and crowd control in some extent." It also contains a hand-drawn image of a red-mittened Gnar that's considerably less threatening than the one being teased today.

It's impossible to say what the connection between the two is, if any, without knowing what the "new" Gnar brings to the table in the way of abilities, but it's hard to imagine that the original suggestion didn't at least inspire the design. We'll let you know when we know; in the meantime, thoughts?

I can say with a good degree of confidence that you don't need to be a League of Legends fan to appreciate the surprisingly brutal six-minute cinematic A New Dawn. I'm almost as confident that if you are a non-fan, you'll be at least slightly more interested in the game after watching the video than you were before.

I myself stand among the ranks of those who don't play League of Legends, and yet I watched this video twice, from start to finish, compelled by its impressive attention to detail and occasionally remarkable viciousness. I suppose this technically qualifies as a spoiler, so consider yourself warned, but it's essentially a series of brutal murders for reasons I can't quite fathom other than, "They were there."

Riot doesn't have a whole lot more to say about it on the New Dawn page, which offers some really nice wallpapers featuring concept art and screen caps. "Following A Twist of Fate, we created A New Dawn to explore fleshed-out champion interpretations and brutal team fights in ways they ve never been seen before," it says. Somewhat more informative regarding the motivations behind the effort is a "behind the scenes" video that's very entertaining in its own right.

"The goal of this particular piece is, we wanted to dive into the League of Legends universe with a bigger, more diverse cast," Rylan "Riotsilverfox" Davies says in the video. "I think it's just about fleshing things out, like, who are these characters, what is the world really like that they live in? When you play the game, you get a very small piece of a much broader story that we want to tell."

I know this trailer has absolutely nothing to do with what League of Legends is actually like, but even so I can't deny that it gave me an itch to dig into it a little deeper. Anyone else?

The League of Legends community has an unfortunate reputation, but Riot Games is eager to change it. Lead Designer of Social Systems Jeffrey Lin has tweeted that the studio will test new disciplinary measures today (July 21), with a view to introducing them permanently should they prove effective. Punishable offences include "intentional feeding, racism, death threats (and) homophobia."

"Today, players that show extreme toxicity (intentional feeding or racism, etc) will be instantly (banned for) 14 day or permabanned in #LeagueOfLegends," Linn wrote. If the one day test run works, the company will roll out the policy permanently. Linn later clarified the new rules - and the way they'll be enforced - in a Reddit thread.

"We'll be testing one server at a time in small doses to monitor the effectiveness of the system carefully and minimize false positives," Linn wrote. "All Riot regions will get the same test at some point in the future. Depending on the results of the tests, we'll be rolling this system out more permanently on all servers."

"In the past, we've avoided publicly naming and shaming players; however, we've learned in recent months that being transparent is extremely critical to the playerbase's trust in our systems, so we've decided to do a compromise. If players complain about unfair bans for this particular system (so, have a ban year code of 2500), we're going to be fully transparent and posting the chat logs that resulted in the ban."

Lin also said Riot is looking at introducing measures to punish leavers and AFKs (away from keyboard). It follows a rather awkward situation last month when two League of Legend Championship Series players were suspended for "extremely toxic behavior".