League of legends research

League of legends was originally named League of Legends: Clash of Fates, the name was shortened once the game grew in popularity.

League of legends is the largest and most successful MOBA game to date. It currently has over 100 unique champions for players to learn and use. It has four different maps each with their own game type requiring strategies in order to achieve victory.

The game recently hosted the season 2 world championships which had a 2 million dollar prize pool. The prize pool alone is a testament to how big League of legends has become.

League of legends has 32 million active players a month, by hours played per month it is easily the most played game in the world. League of legends was originally taken from the hit Warcraft mod called Defence of the Ancients, the game style involves two teams on opposing sides of a map both battling to conquer and destroy the other teams base. The game type eventually gained the name MOBA or multiplayer online battle arena.

Riot games, the development team who created League of legends were formed by fans of the original Dota game and the original Warcraft modders. They took their ground work on Dota and created a more streamlined and refined version of the original game with new characters and a new game engine.

League of legends characters fall into a number of roles, mage, support, attack damage carry, tank, fighter and Jungler. Each character gains experience from killing enemies or minions. Upon gaining enough experience the player’s champions will gain a level and an ability point to improve one ability per level up to a cap of level 18. Each champion has 5 abilities, 1 passive, 3 core abilities and 1 ultimate. The core abilities can leveled up 5 times and the ultimate 3 times.

League of legends main arena is called summoners rift, it is a 5 on 5 arena with 3 lanes. The area between the lanes is called the jungle, it houses brushes and neutral monsters. Neutral monster grant buffs to those who kill them, a red buff that grants a slow and a damage over time effect to anyone attacked by the user of the buff, a blue buff which grants mana regeneration and cool down reduction. A smaller green buff gives a small amount of health regeneration. One of the main objectives on the map is a monster called Barron Nashor, this is the strongest monster in the arena and cannot be killed until late in the game. Upon killing it every person on the team that killed it gains a strong buff that increases numerous stats.

League of legends continually growing list of champions have skins, these skins used to be simple palette swaps but Riot have been steadily improving the quality of the champion skins.

Above is one of the latest champions to be released, Rengar the pride stalker. On the left is his standard skin and on the right is his alternate headhunter skin. This is the kind of result I will try to accomplish with each of my characters. These skins are sold through micro transactions and make up a large amount of the games profit, creating good character skins will be useful.