After the talismanic Faker became the first arrival in the game's 'Hall of Legends' last year, Jian Zihao - better known as bot-laner Uzi - is following in his footsteps as the 2025 inductee. A giant of the domestic scene, Uzi's run of success in the hyper-competitive Chinese league was enormous, and while he may never have claimed the game's top prize, he's got 🐎several international tournament wins under his belt.

Uzi's presence within the game's community is such that the community assumed he'd be second behind Faker to arrive in the Hall of Fame. Now that that's p♊roved to be correct, he'll be getting some rewards. Perhaps most impressive is the custom Mercedes Benz G-Class he's being gifted, but perhaps more important is the custom in-game cosmetic that will be created in hiꦿs honor.

An entire in-game event was conjured to mark Faker's induction last year, and Riot is repeating that this year. In 2024, however, Faker's achievement was a little overshadowed by the fact that the full version of his honorific cosmetic cost around $450 worth of in-game currency. As Riot continues to grapple with the different expectations around in-game spending between its Eastern and Western communities, that particular announcement saw play🙈ers discuss boyco𒆙tts in protest over Faker's Ahri skin.

We don't yet know for sure which champions will be linked to Uzi's ascension to the Hall of Legends, but leaks suggest that they'll include Vayne - a character who Uzi personified in the trailer for the 2018 World Championship - and Kai'sa, a more recent arrival to the game who's likely to be helpful whenꦯ it comes to selling skins.

We also don't know whether Riot is planning to roll out that controversial pricing again, but it's likely to find itself in a tricky spot. The past few years have seen an array of alternative monetization options, many of which have proved unpopular in some spaces but have 🧜provided new🦹 revenue streams from those willing to pay.

Riot's latest controversy saw it eventually walk back deeply unpopular changes to free loot, after claiming that it needed to encourage players to buy more if it was to continue to grow.

If you've played Balatro, The Demon's Hand will be instantly familiar. A standard deck of cards is adapted very slightly ('Command' cards re▨place Face cards; Sun, Moon, and Stars replace traditional suits), but different hands still add up in an attempt to beat various high scores. Riot's effort adds a more combative approach, turning 'blinds' into HP and allowing your opponents to hit back, blending Balatro's score attack gameplay with Slay the Spire's turn-based approach.

It's an effective twist, even if The Demon's Hand doesn't rea🤡lly offer the same deckbuilding depth as the games that have clearly shaped it. Given that it's an in-client, limited-time spin-off, I'm willing to wave away that criticism. But ironically, it's those same factors that g🐓ive me cause for concern.

High Card

The Demon's Hand represents a substantial amount of work. Operating in-cꦐlient, getting it working within Riot's aging infrastructure has clearly been a significant undertaking. Unique assets and animations have clearly taken plenty of time and effort to create. The ability to unpick and reinvent Balatro as effectively as this is impressive work in itself. And yet in a little over a month, The Demon's Hand will be wiped from the client, and we'll probably never see it again.

Riot's got form with this kind of thing. Over the years, myriad mini-games have appeared and then disappeared from League of Legends. Some of those 🐼were more direct twists on the game itself, such as battles against comically-difficult AI. But more recently there was Swarm, a bright and colorful twist on Vampire Survivors, starring one of LoL's various anime girl team-up squads as its cast. Swarm was great, particularly as a distraction if you wanted to play League of Legends but needed to recover from just having played League of Legends.

However, after serving its purpose – primarily as an advert for Riot💜's latest batch of anime girl skins – Swarm was disabled. And now, less than a year later, a timer sits above The Demon's Hand, telling me that it'll be gone in about 35 days' time.

The problem is this: League of Legends players want these alternative experiences, but Riot can't afford to let them have them. A player locked into Swarm, or The Demon's Hand, is a player not filling out the game's traditional competitive queues. That harms the health of the game generally, but more importantly it harms Riot's bottom line – a player not queuing up for a 'real' game is a player who doesn't need to buy the cosmetics that♏ are the studio's bread and butter.

Riot's recent extremely public monetization controversy proved just how important those skins really are. The Demon's Hand exacerbates the issue by only letting you progress to its hardest difficulties by earning rare Sigils (the game's answer to Balatro's game-augmenting Jokers). Those Sigils can only be earned by playing League o♎f Legends, feeding you back into the ecosystem if you dare to step outside it for too long, only for the whole thing to shut down in a month regardless of how much you earn.

The Demon's Hand and Swarm are only two symptoms of a broader problem. Alternate game modes have never been allowed to hang around for too long because of their impact on player counts, but it goes further. Riot has long since struggled to know what to do with games that it can't monetize in the long term, as the untimely death of indie publishing label Riot Forge proves. Valorant and Teamfight Tactics still live becaus🧜e they could immediately be money-makers that continued to swell Riot's bottom line even if they did take League players out of the queue. Even as Riot says it wants to invest in these smaller experiences, their limited lifꦗe-spans means that no matter how good they might be, the knowledge of their eventual absence leaves a pretty sour taste.

Balatro's first big update is still on track for 2025, but it'll be "done when it's done, because it's got to be good before it's fast."

This article contains spoilers for Arcane Season 2.

The video in question is for La Meillure Enemie, the song the pair dance to in the alternate universe Ekko inadvertently finds himself in, in which Zaun is thriving and Powder never became Jinx. That sequence became iconic, rocketing singers Stromae and Pomme to global stardom, thanks in no small part to its beautiful at❀tention to🐭 detail.

Now, the musical pair has released its official music video, once again animated by Arcane animation studio Fortiche. Interspersed with shots from the show, it shows Ekko reuniting with Jinx, back in his own timeline. The latter's shorter hair dictates that this is after Jinx's suicide attempt after Vi frees her (and from which Ekko saves her), but the lack of body paint suggests♐ it's before the show's climact🍒ic battle.

The video is light on details, but it's further vindication for tho🍨se who have been shipping Jinx and Ekko for years, under the clever moniker of 'Timebomb'. Towards the end, a presumably-redeemed Jinx lifts herself up of the floor, before being embraced by Ekko, appearing to cement that relationship even more firmly than before.

Ultimately, it's all for very little - Jinx's fate varies depending on what fan theories you buy into, but it's certainly not a happily-ever-after ending. And w🌊ith Arcane very firmly having꧙ ended with Season 2, this is li🦂kely to be all the Timebomb shippers will eveꦿr get.

Arcane season 1 teased Ekko's "boy savior" role in season 2's climactic moments – but actor Reed Shannon says he still "never saw it coming."

dropped last night, somehow managing to remain a complete surprise until it showed up in the client. I've not had the chance to play it yeꦗt, but Riot has helpfully outlined the basics - every round, you deal damage to your opponents based on the cumulative attack values of the cards you've put togeꦰther, augmenting the game with powerful sigils. If that sounds a little bit like Balatro's Jokers, that's because it is.

Overall, players seem pretty impressed. Riot is generally quite good when it comes to in-client experiences like this, and for 🙈the relative gimmick it is, ✨The Demon's Hand seems to mostly live up to its inspiration. Some somewhat gnarly performance issues seem to be the major concern, but perhaps the biggest issue is progression.

Story difficulty isn't too tricky, but if you really want to see everything that the game has to offer, you'll want to u🦩p the difficulty. Hard Mode and Demon Mode - presumably the equivalent of Balatro's tougher Antes - are unlocked by gathering eight or 16 'Rare' Sigils. The catch is that the only way to do that is by playing actual games of League of Legends, and while that's something I've been doing for far too long now, it's not a fate I'd wish upon casual Balatro-enjoy🃏ers.

What's worse is that finding those Sigils seems to be a matter of luck - say they've receive🃏d none after multiple games, whereas others claim they've be🅷en gifted a handful after just a single Arena match. You can make it easier to find more Sigils by completing missions, but the RNG element seems to be a little harsh.

One of Riot's previous spin-offs was a Vampire Survivors-like, which is ironic since the roguelike's creator says he was lucky to dodge the waves of knockoffs.

When asked about the unnamed project in an int꧋erview with , Riot Games co-founder and chief product officer Marc Merrill said it's "probably the project I personally spend the most꧅ time on as well.”

The massively multiplayer spin on the world's most famous MOBA was 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:first announced in 2020 before going radio silent for many years. The last time we heard anything about the shadowy project was when Merrill himself said it had been 🦩"reset" because it felt like any old MMO just with a "Runeterra coat of paint🙈" slapped on top.

With such a turbulent production, it's good to hear that Merrill still thinks it's worth pursuing. Asked why, he explained it's "because when you abstract to the feeling that I think many people who have historically loved MMOs sort of nostalgically look back and wish they could rediscover🐓, I think that that is a very worthy experience to try to chase. And it's really hard to do,🙈" he said.

Merrill explained that making MMOs is so hard because developers need to do a lot at a "high level," while having a world people want to spend༒ time in and an "incredible team" to make it all happen. Despite all the things that could go wrong and have gone wrong, though, Merrill still thinks "Riot's exactly the type of company that should go after those types of opportunities, if we’re trying to make it better for the player," especially since he believes "people want to run around the world of Runeterra."

The LoL MMO has "a lot of momentum" and "a great direction," despite going dark for its reset.

When it comes to unlocking new League of Legends champions, if you don't want to splash the cash on League's premium currency, RP (which can be used to quickly unlock the game's now almost 170-character roster), you can also spend Blue Essence – usually earned from leveling up, opening Champion Capsules, and completing missions. While it takes time, it ensures that even free-to-play players can get thei🌟r hands on all the champions eventually. However, with the start of League of Legends' latest season, it's been after completing the Battle Pass to unlock a single one this w♛ay.

As explained by content creator Remus on YouTube, from now on, once you hit level 30, you'll no longer receive a Champion Capsule every level up, and on top of that, your first win of the day will no longer grant the 50 Blue Essence it once did, instead giving out Battle Pass XP. Speaking of the Battle Pass, in the current eight-week season, only three Champion Capsules are included, alongside 4,750 Blue Essen🔯ce in the first 50 milestones. 

After completing the whole thing, four out of the five repeatable milestones will grant 50 Blue Essence each, which really isn't much. Thankfully, you still won't have to spend a penny to earn any of it, but for reference, champions cost you 7,800 Blue Essence on the week of their release. After dropping to 6,300 for their first two seas🦋ons, their price varies, but the "majo🧸rity" are 4,800 each. With that in mind, you'll probably be able to get one new champion with this Battle Pass, unless you grind those repeatable milestones endlessly, which is probably where the supposed 882-hour figure comes from. Whether this is accurate is another matter, so I decided to do some of my own estimations. 

If we take a 4,800 Blue Essence champion, you'd have to level up 120 times after completing the Battle Pass to earn enough (that's accounting for the 24 repetitions of those same five milestones you'd need to do). As for how long that'd take, I deferred to GamesRadar+'s in-house LoL enjoyer Ali Jones, who reckons it takes him roughly between five and 10 hours of gameplay to earn one or two level ups. If we call that five hours per level up, that's 600 hours you can expect to spend after completing ൲the battle pass. Obviously, there are various factors at play here, so that estimate is far from concrete, but all you need to know is that it's a lot. 

Thankfully, there is a glimmer of hope, as the head of League Studio, : "Unlocking new champions via Blue Essence wasn't meant to get harder. Digging in to understand whไether something isn't functioning as intended now." With tha༺t in mind, it sounds like there could be more changes to come.

If so, it won't be the only alteration coming to League of Legends, ♕as lead gamepl🎉ay designer Matt Leung-Harrison has confirmed plans to Feats of Strength is a first-to-two competition with three possible 'Feats' to accomplish – you can destroy the first turret, score first blood, or slay three epic monster camps – in order to receive the Blessing of Noxus bonus for a buff to your tier-2 boots (and make tier-3 boots available in the shop). 

In a , Leung-Harrison acknowledges that while Riot doesn't think snowballing (essentially, building momentum after gaining an advantage, to the point where you become basically unstoppable) is "much higher than the previous season, if at all," the "perception" is that it's higher now, partially thanks to "the visᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚibility of the Feats reward." The team "wanted the Feats system to create more reward satisfaction, focus and tension around prioritizing early objectives," but know that "First Blood is causing too much friction for the satisfaction and clarity of gai🌄ning it."

Leung-Harrison explains: "As a result, we're going to change it either in 15.2 or 15.3. Candidly💎, we messed up here and it should have been changed pre-release, but we're going to own that mistake, learn from𒆙 it and do better for next time."

All in all, it's not been smooth sailing so far for Welcome to Noxus: Act 1, but at least Riot seems to be aware of the main complaints. Here's hoping we get swift fixes, especially before new players ✃commit to the ridiculous grind that can now be expected to unlock all of League's chamꦇpions.

For more games like League of Legends, be sure to check out our picks for the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best MOBAs and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best PC games.

Arcane writer and producer Amanda Overton said as much in an interview with this site here (GamesRadar+), specifically calling out Mel Medarda as the most likely candidate thanks to her badass magical powers. "I think we were all, in the writers' room, thinking 'we're making something badass and unique here - hopefully, fingers crossed, they'll put her in tꦦhe game.' I think that was always our hope that some of the characters in the show would go to the game and vice versa," she said.

No original Arcane characters have crossed back into Riot Games' MOBA just yet, but there's plenty of reason to believe that'll change soon. Mel's mother Ambessa just joined the fight recently, and leaks suggest that Mel herself won't be far behind - she 🍒might even be League of Legends' first new character of 2025, though Riot Games itself hasn't formally announced anything.

"We always knew that Mel would be a mage, and she would have thi🤡s arc, and we also always knew what her powers would be," Overton continued, before explaining that the team thought it would be "very interesting to give someone a power that's like a mirroring power, because they can beat anyone... they could be up against the most poweꩵrful mage, and they could beat them. To me, that is infinitely interesting."

"It's also 'why not give it to a woman?' We're known for being motherly, we're known for being empathetic. And Mel was that character in the show. As much as she tried to have that hard shell around her, she always had that.♈"

Arcane writer shares she wants to go with a new story in the League of Legends universe. 

You might often skip through and tick off an online game's terms of service agreement to quickly get to the shooting and/or slashing as soon as possible, but buried within the fine print is a solid list of dos and don'ts. Cheats, like ones that automatically perfect your aim, are explicitly banned in most games, for example, and now, the studio behind Valorant and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:League of Legends has added a few more "don'ts" to the list that mostly affect𓂃 content creators.

In its most recent , Riot Games reiterates that stream sniping is not allowed. For anyone not in the know, stream sniping is where someone uses an opponent's livestream against them to, let's say, take note of enemy positions or unfairly spawn kill foes. It'sꩲ hard to prove, so Riot is now in the "early testing phases" of creating a penalty system that'll soon let you report players who you think might be stream sniping.

Things get a little juicier as Riot Games turns its gaze to "content that promotes breaking our terms of service." It seems streamers and content creators have made a habit of accꦗepting sponsorships from websites that are built around breaking the company's terms of service. Some websites might offer boosting services (hiring high-skilled players to play on your account), smurfing (playing on a different account to match with lower-skilled foes), and buying/selling accounts - all of which are against Riot's own rules. "If a creator is sponsored by a boosting website, promotes ways for players to buy and sell accounts, or otherwise does anything that encourages players to break our rules, we may suspend access to your Riot accounts," the company writes.

For now, you can check out the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best MOBA games and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best FPS games if you’re in the mood for something similar to either League of Legends of Valorant. 

This article contains spoilers for the finale of Arcane season 2.

Last year, Riot confirmed that Arcane is official League of Legends canon, pledging to gradually undo "inconsistencies that have woven their way into the storytelling and worldbuilding of Runeterra." To be fair, the finale of Arcane certainly offers up some of those inconsistencies with League of Legends. The fates of several characters that are alive and unharmed in the main game are a matter for some debate. Caitlyn's injuries have likely cut her sharpshooter career pretty short; Heimerdinger was vaporized in an alternate dimension at worst and telepo𒁏rted to a different pocket dimension at best; Jayce and Viktor were scattered throughout the timeline; while Jinx and Vander are MIA.

Only Vi and Ekko remain definitively alive and unscathed, but perhaps the most egregious diversion from LoL canon belongs to Ambessa. Introduced to League of Legends just before Arcane season 2 aired, the character is already dead. As a Noxian, there's some speculation that 🐻her peoples' powerful attachment to various forms of necromancy could mean her story isn't over yet, but there's a sentiment among some sections of the community that her introduction to LoL was a waste of time – why would you want to play as a character that's already dead in the canon?

A rolling golem

It's not an opinion I agree with – Ambessa's backstory isജ already well fleshed-out, within and without the show. But root a little deeper into that feeling, and you'll find a whole ream of fans struggling to find their faves in the canon. Perhaps chief among them is Blitzcrank, a massive metal golem originally created to help with Zaun's toxic waste problem. In the official lore, the inert husk of one of these golems was uncovered by Viktor, who used Hextech to augment the automaton into an intelligent ally. In Arcane, that doesn't happen, and the result is that some players feel Blitzcrank has been written out of the canon. ෴If his creator got atomized before he could ever put his great golem together, surely there's no way Blitzcrank can exist within that canon?

No-one else has been unwritten quite as egregiously as Blitzcrank, but there's a whole sui♎te of characters that don't have a home within Arcane. Officially, the cities of Piltover and Zaun are home to 22 in-game characters, only ten of whom appear in the show. A couple more are the subjects of easter eggs or fan theories, but even some of the game's most totemic figures are missing. The least charitable reading of their absence – one that I've seen repeated multiple times since the final dropped – is that those characters have been written out of League of Legends canon. If they're not on-screen, living and breathing, the sentiment appears to be that they might as well not exist anymore. It's an argument I've got no time for.

When I started playing League of Legends, the titular league was essentiallꦬy the United Nations, with judicial 'summoners' possessing its representatives so they could settle political grudge matches. Any in-game storytelling was handled not by beautiful animated shows or even by fancy trailers, but mostly by an in-universe newspaper. Since then, lore has been rebooted and rewritten multiple times, but I bring up these poorly-aged, long-since retconned narrative tools to highlight the fact that it's been a decade or more since the League of Legends was a physical entity that required each of its characters to occupy the same space and time. The modern game owes more to Super Smash Bros than international relations – characters are plucked from their continuities, their exact relationship to one another often reliant on nebulous timelines or overarching sentiments. Most of the time, the 'canon' version of a given character is replaced by one taken from a parallel universe. The in-game cosmetics of Jinx alone cast her as an anime girl, a Guardian of the Galaxy, an apocalypse fighter, a different anime girl, and a🍬 waitress in a cosplay cafe. 

The whimsy attached to some of that storytelling is a big reason why some of those characters didn't appear in Arcane. If Viktor had suddenly revealed that he'd been building a big sentient robot throughout act 2, it would have felt just as anachronistic as if Jinx had rocked up in her Star Guardian uniform at the end of episode 9 – or if Twitch, a gross, crossbow-wielding rat, or Seraphine, a glossy, Swift-style popstar, had shown up to defend Piltover. That's to say nothing of characters who are broadly understood to exist further up or down the timeline than these versions of Jinx and Vi, or to even touch on how a narrative that even its creator admits struggled with feeling rushed would deal with introductions to anoth꧃er dozen or more 🌌characters.

There are a whole bunch of ways to explain why certain characters were acknowledged and others not, why particular moments in their stories were highlighted, invented, or ignored. But at the end of all of it, the only real important answer to any question about why Arcane made certain decisions about League of Legends canon is 'because it made a good show'. As a 13-year veteran of the game, I've seen the lore chopped and changed more times t🍬han I could possibly count, and as the end of all that, I got to watch Arc🌊ane, an acclaimed, beloved, astonishingly beautiful series that has raised bars not just for video game adaptations, but for serialized, mature animation everywhere. To be presented with that multi-year, hundred million dollar investment, and to step away from it complaining that there weren't more easter eggs is the peak of banality, and it's a criticism I hope Riot and Fortiche don't spend a moment entertaining.

Now that it's all over, check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Arcane season 2 review.

"Following the release of the second season of Arcane, a Visual and Gameplay Update (VGU) will be released for Viktor, which will arrive on PBE tomorrow," Riot explains in a press release🔥. "The update will feature new art and an updated backstory for Viktor, better aligning him to the Viktor fans were shown in Arcane, but largely retain his core gameplay apart🦋 from a slight functional and thematic change to his ultimate, which will now get larger with every kill until the end of the ability’s duration."

The devs go into a bit more detail on what to expect in the video below - but those details, I should warn, come with a spoiler warning for the Arcane season 2 finaleꦏ. Skip the video ﷽and stop reading now if you want to heed that warning.

"We're not pulling a Gangplank and disabling him because he's dead," League studio head Andrei 'M🌳eddler' van Roon jokes. "Well hold on," executive producer Paul 'Pabro' Bellezza teases. "I think you're on to something with killing Gangplank and other characters." But it seems that's all just a joke. (For now, at least.)

The exact nature of the art and backstory changes remain to be seen, but Viktor has historically sported a very different look between show and game. You can see Riot's teaser for at least one of the new s꧅kins below.

Arcane hasn't gotten any League of Legends characters killed in-game, Gangplank-style, but this is the second character to get an Arcane-inspired revamp. Around the release ꦅof Arcane season 1 back in 2021, Caitlyn got an Art & Sustainability Update (ASU) that brought the in-game character much closer to her apꦗpearance in the show.

Arcane may be over, but a new League of Legends show is already a year into development.

This article contains spoilers for Arcane season 2.

In the course of Arcane season 2, Mel Medarda is captured by the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Black Rose. She's able to escape their magical chains, however, thanks to her innate magical abilities - glowing gold, she bursts free of her thorny prison, before returning to Piltover with a series of spells at her disposal. Most relevant to the plot is a magical shield, which is able to withhold various weapons, even dispelling and reflecting a bullet at close range. Elsewhere, she's able to move enemies around, and make use of som꧅e bursts of damage too.

Mel's reveal is 100% champion material. She's got a full roster of spells tha🧸t's perfect for a League of Legends character, she's got a series of visual effects that would be ideal for an ultimate ability, and her magical form even comes with her launch cosmetic ready-made. She fits snugly into the stories of several different characters, and you'll never convince me that she's not set-up to be the game's next champion.

Riot has stayed awfully quiet about its new arrivals this year. The last we heard about what was to come was in January, when the company introduced Smolder, who arrived on the Rift at the start of the year, and Aurora, who was teased ahead of her release in July. There was also a tease of the new🌺est arrival, Mel's mother Ambessa Medarda, who was released just before the start of season 2, and a mention of a visual update that's almost certainly about to be made to Viktor. Beyond that, however, the only clue we have about anything to come in 2025 is from that January video, when we learned there was another champion in the works who "should be𒈔 a familiar face to all of you." Perhaps that was Ambessa, but maybe it was Mel - Riot's silence is likely to have been an attempt to ensure Arcane didn't get spoiled because any clues could have given the story away.

Actually, I'm so convinced it's Mel that I even know what type of character she'll be. A character who's less physically able but defends herself with magical shields and disruptive abilities, and is shown fighting in close connection with Caitlyn, an in-game Marksman? Mel is an Enchanter Support, a long-running stalwart of the League of Legends roster that's gone largely underserved over the years. 2023 offered us Milio and 2022 introduced Renata Glasc, two anti-engage enchanters, but I'd argue you need to go back to 2019's Yuumi to find a reasonable Mel-equ𒁃ivalent (apologies, Senna and Seraphine fans), and back to 2012's Nami before that.

I might be more of a tank player nowadays, but I love an enchanter - Lulu remains one of my most-played champions, her shields and disruptiv🌠e spells a quintessential example of the class. My needs have felt a little underserved in the past few years by a handful of releases that try to do very different things with what these characters do, but Mel seems as though they're back to that highly protective part of the archetype. Arcane might be over, but its characters are still making their impact on the world, and I can't wait.

I'm also quite the fan of a certain Zaunite loose cannon - so what happened to Jinx in Arcane season 2?

T1, led by undisputed League of Legends GOAT Faker, has won the game's world championship five times. For those keeping score, that's four times more than any other team has managed, and as of the 2024 tournament, includes two sets of back-to-back wins. The run between 2023 and 2024 alone is one of the most i⛎mpressive achievements in the scene by itself, with the roster of🎶 Faker, Zeus, Oner, Keria, and Gumayusi staying together to win those two titles. Sadly, however, there will be no three-peat, as T1 announced top laner Zeus' departure from the team earlier today.

While many of the team's players have already re-signed for the 2025 series, the team confirmed today that 'Zeus' Choi Woo-je's contract had ended. Even if all four of the other T1 members stick with the team, it rem🐷ains the end of an era, as expressed emphatically by former LoL pro and major streamer Caedral, who described the newly undone team as the "greatest roster of all time."

That's a big claim, but it's one that probably does stand up. Even T1's dominant 2015/16 team wasn't an exact replica of its former self - 2015 top laner Marin was replaced in 2016 by Duke, while substitutes Easyhoon and Blank swapღped into the mid-lane and jungle roles respectively (the former in 2015, the latter in 2016). Few players have ever won more than one major international title, and no team has ever run it back with the exact same roster to claim successive Worlds wins. While T1 already has precedent for winning back-to-back world titles with a new top laner, there's already a feeling within the community that this is the end of an era, whether or not the new team can improve on its already world-leading run.

Don't cry because it's over, cry because the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Arcane season 2 release schedule means act 3 is almost here.

This article contains spoilers for Arcane Season 2.

As Riot began to tease the second season of its animated show, players began to notice that Vi - the long-imprisoned street rat who many saw as a symbol of the show's undercity - appeared to have joined the Enforcers, an oppressive police force. Unfortunately for those newer fans, League of Legends players had limited sympathy - after all, both Vi and Caitlyn have been positioned as law enforcement ไsince their inception a decade before Arcane ever existed.

With the first three episodes of Arcane now released as part of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Arcane Season 2 release schedule, Vi wrestles re♐peatedly with her ne💛w role. Caitlyn, on the other hand, does not - driven by grief, she not only begins to lose herself in pursuit of Jinx, but is willing to aid Ambessa in placing Piltover under martial law. It's a rapid descent towards brutality for a character who largely appeared as a voice of reason in Season 1, and that's for to at this early point in the season.

That difficul✅ty is something that co-creator Christian Linke shares. Speaking to GamesRadar+, Linke - who helped create both Vi and Caitlyn more than ten years ago alongside Ar🧜cane's other showrunner, Alex Yee - admits that "there's a global perspective" to the characters' roles as cops "that is difficult for me to take into consideration."

"I live in Los Angeles now," Linke explains. "It is commonly understood that there is a lot of fucked up behavior by American police. I was born and raised in Germany, where there's a very different perception and unders🐲tanding in society of law enforcement. The trust in the institution is much more shaken in America. There's something about that where there's just different perspectives on what that even means and how people see that." 

For Yee, there's a feeling that "I don't really feel like I can blame people" for having strong feelings about these character arcs. "There are things that have happened with characters that I didn't have a hand in, but I do feel like I'm on th🦂e team of people that did that," he explains. "So I don't necessarily feel like we were handed something that we had to live with per se. A lot of it felt like it was just sort of following throug🍨h on a thing we started."

Arcane season 2 returns to League of Legends' hottest ship, but the Netflix show's co-creator says getting the CaitVi pairing right was "scary": "We knew they were stepping into this s***storm."

Speaking to showrunners Christian Linke and Alex Yee ahead of the first drop in the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Arcane Season 2 release schedule, I asked which stories in the broader League of Legends 🍷universe were their favorites. With Arcane set to end with Season 2, Linke has already revealed that there are other stories in the franchise the pair hopes♏ to tell one day. While neither was ready to confirm their plans for a new show, they did have some narrative highlights to share.

"There's a lot," Linke admits. "We both played the game for a long, long time, and you have different kinds of characters and regions." While claiming that "there's too many to say 'this is gonna be the next one', Linke does point to Noxus, the warmongering nation that Arcane character Ambessa Medarda hails from. The Noxians are name-dropped in Arcane many times, but Linke points to their conflicts ꦛwith two 💙other in-universe nations - Demacia and Ionia - which dominated much of League of Legends' earliest storytelling. 

"I think Demacia/Noxus is dope," Linke says, "I think the Noxus Ionia invasion is really interesting," noting a fan-theory that's already convinced me about the direction a new series might go. He also loves Bilgewater, a pirate haven that's already been explored in detail in spin-off game Ruined King: "I feel like I'm ready for another pirate story," he says. He also notes that his own favorite in-game character is Heimerdinger, who hails f🍬rom the whimsical land of Bandle City.

As for Yee, he points to the Freljord, a 𓃲harsh frozen tundra with a story dominated by three warring tribes. That story has also been told elsewhere, in Riot Games' crossover with Marvel Comics, in a series that focuses on long-time character Ashe, the peace-seeking leader of one of those tribes.

Neither creator, however, is giving anything away about any actual future projects. Linke, in fact, says this period - with Season 2 on its way out the door and no future projects confirmed - "is the time for us to really explore, to see what kind of stories we can develop, and see what's possible.✨ It's still pretty open."

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Arcane season 2 first reactions say the Netflix show has "upped the ante in every way imaginable."

Speaking to Marc 'Caedrel' Lamont during the League of Legends Worlds Fin𝐆als on Saturday (via ), Merrill was asked if could provide any kind of update on the LoL MMO. In response, he said that Riot is "working hard on it," and that "it's the project I've spent, personally, the most amount of time on."

"I really think the team has a great direction now and is making a lot of momentum," Merrill continued. That's good news for a project that's had a rocky couple of years. 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:First announced🎃 nearly four yeꦡars ago because 澳洲☂幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Riot thought it would probably leak anyway, the project 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:lost its lead developer - former Blizzard developer Greg Street - in March 2023. A year after that, we got our most recent update on the game, which Riot told us was being "re𒉰set," and "going dꦫark" for a long time. 

A touch of optimism remained even in that message, but it remains hard to get any sense of what Riot's internal workings on the project look like - not least because, prior to his departure, Street told fans that the company would hav🌜e no qualms about cancelling the LoL MMO if it wasn't "good enough."

Merrill notes the "expectations" that he knows fans have for the project, and says that Riot is "going to try not to disappoin🧸t," but it doesn't seem like we're likely to get anything more concrete than that for some time yet.

Last year, I said I was starting to get really worried about my most-anticipated MMO - and I'm still not feeling much better about it.

Ambessa is an interesting addition to League of Legends' roster, as she's the first new character to have started life outside the game. Ambessa features in the first season of Arcane as the mother of Piltover elite Mel Medarda, but with the release of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Arcane Season 2 next month, will step onto Summoner's Rift as a full-fledged League of Legends character. While spin-off strategy game Teamfight Tactics has played host to a number of outside influences, most relevant among them Arcane Season 1's Silco, none of those have been included in t🐈he main ꩵgame before now.

As a leader from the war-mongering empire of Noxus, Ambessa is an able and aggressive fighter, wielding twin chain-axe weapons, and using hefty armor to limit incoming enemy damage. If that makes her sound like a tank, you'd be wrongꦉ - Ambessa seems like a quintessential example of what League of Legends refers to as a 'Juggernaut'. This character archetype ca𓃲n give and take plenty of punishment, but is supposed to be held back by limited mobility - if you can stay out of a Juggernaut's reach, you'll quickly alleviate any threat they pose.

I say supposed to be held back, but that's not really the case here. Ambessa's passive ability grants her a dash after every active ability cast. In an efficient combo that leads to the kind of stickiness that ensures that once Ambessa is close to you, she'll be very hard to remove. It's not an ꦚentirely new tool - marksman character Kalista has a little hop she uses after every single attack, but that's a better fit for her glass cannon-style character class. On a warrior like Ambessa, this is pretty terrifying.

The reactions of 𓄧the community are diverse. Some players are pointing out the complexity of Ambessa's skills compared to those of older champions - while the new ar𓃲rival gains mobility, attack range, attack damage, and resource replenishment from just her passive, a character like Nasus only gets flat life steal from his version of the same skill. Others have noted that this could be the end of the game's 14-year-long mobility creep arc - with a dash on every angle ability, "you can't creep mobility any higher," even if some players in the comments on that post are prepared to view that as a challenge. My favorite reaction genre, however, is that of players who have simply given up. That includes former European champion Andrei 'Odoamne' Pascu, who simply tweeted, "Honestly, what the fuck at this point" in response to a rundown of Ambessa's abilities.

I've been around for a lot of League of Legends champion releases by this point, and so I know how this goes - streamer ioki probably  in their acknowledgment that "she's getting nerfed 10 times on release guaranteed." Ambessa will release astonishingly powerful due more to the number of tools in her kit than the numbers behind that kit, and as such, Riot will have little choice but to reduce those numbers over and over again until she's no longer viable. That's a fate that's befallen plenty of new arrivals and will befall many more before League of Legends is done, yet Ambessa still feels like a step beyond what we've seen before. Given that this comes so hot on the heels of another Arcane fumble - the $250 skin gacha system unveiled just afteꦕr Ri🐎ot laid off a bunch of cosmetic designers - it's perhaps not the best community m🐓arketing the studio could have come up with for the upcoming second series.

Arcane Season 2 isn't the end of Riot's animation push, and fans are already theorizing where in the League of Legends universe we're heading next.

Although the number of affected developers wasn't initially confirmed, Riot later revealed in a that 27 people on the League of Legends team have been affected, as well as five people in publishing roles. As previously mentioned, these include Ben Rosado, who designed the Ahri skin that was part of the Signature Immortalized Legend Collection bundle to celebrate four-time world champion player, Faker. This bundle set purchasers back a whopping $450 in RP (in-game currency), and while the exact number of sales isn't known, despite the fact that 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:some planned to boycott the character, plenty ended up buying it.

Rosado isn't the only skin designer affected, as Tereza 'Teya' Rozumkova, a character artist behind 23 different skins including Star Guardian Akali and Mythmaker Irelia, was also impacted after four and a half years at the studio. It's a shocking loss of talent, and even more surprising when you consider Riot's claims that the layoffs weren't about saving money, but "making sure we have the right expertise so that League continues to be great for anothe𒐪r 15 years and beyond." 

Just to make matters worse, the reveal of this new gacha system came just one day after the layoffs werꦉe announced.

The gacha system ties into the introduction of a new, potentially very expensive tier of skins – Exalted skins. that they'll be obtainable using a new currency called Ancient Sparks, which can be bought for 400 RP each. Using one will give you the low, low chance (0.5%, to be exact) of pulling "S-tier content" such as the shiny new Arcane Fractured Jinx skin – the first of this new tier. There's mercifully a pity system so that you'll be given a guaranteed S-rank pull after 80 attempts, but that's going to cost 32,000 RP – a ludicrous amount of currency that, if you're spending the absolute minimum amount of real money you can on bundles, will cost you $240. It might not be the $450 Ahri bundle, but it's still a very considered purchase i👍f you♋ end up having to go all-in. 

Needless to say, the reaction to this series of events hasn't been positive, with some calling it and others saying that they're Riot admits that "there’s been a lot of focus on luxury goods thi𒊎s year," but claims that "we're also exploring new technologies, features, and content types (even outside of skins) that are meant for a broader audience, which we’ll be able to share more on later this y⛎ear."

5 days after reports of 650 more Microsoft gaming layoffs, the company announces plans to pay out even more money to shareholders.

In an update shared to Twitter, Riot co-founder and chief product officer Marc Merrill shared "some important updates" about League of Legends. Chiefly, there have been some "changes to our teams and how we work to make sure we can keep improving the League experience now and for the long-term. Merrill stresses that Riot isn't "slowing🍌 down work" on League and that it's actually "investing heavily in solving today's challenges faster while also building for the future."

That's an interestin♛g way of saying Riot is laying off "some rol💛es".

"This isn't about reducing headcount to sav🧜e money—it's about making sure we have the right expertise so that League continues to be great for another 15 years and beyond," Merrill said. "While team effectiveness is more important than team🦄 size, the League team will eventually be even larger than it is today as we develop the next phase of League."

Riot developers impacted by the layoffs will ♈be offered a severance 💖package that comes with six months' pay, an annual bonus, health coverage, job placement assistance, "and more."

It hasn't been a year since Riot's last wave of layoffs. In January, the company killed about 500 jobs, 11% of its workforce at the time, and announced plans to effectively shutter its experimental Forge🌼 indie label after the release of 澳洲幸运5开奖号🦋码历史查询:Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story.

Former Blizzard president says the "gaming downturn" is "a little bit overstated" and companies just wanted to "cut back" after the pandemic.

When T1 support player Keria took the title along with his team back in November, he was quickly disappointed to learn that he couldn't have the skin🐭 he wan📖ted. Keria's favorite champion is Lux, but the rules state that you have to have played a character during the tournament in order for them to be eligible for a Worlds skin. In a classic example of suffering from success, T1's run through the tournament was so decisive that Keriౠa didn't have a chance to play the character, so he wasn't able to pick her for his skin.

At the time, Keria said that he had "only thought about making a Lux skin," and th🍒at he wanted something "pretty." When Riot told him that he couldn't have that skin, but it could try and make his alternative good-looking, it was pretty clear he didn't believe them: "I just frowned."

Now, many months later, Riot is finally able to sho𓄧w off the skins it's cooked up for this year's World Champs. And while Keria's bespoke T1 Bard obviously isn't the character he was hoping for, there are a couple of details woven in that offer a nod to his real pick. Lux's portrait appears briefly in the animation of one of Bard's skills, but the real symbolism is in the skin's recall animation. That features a spectral version of Lux that Bard offers some comfort to, before t𒁏he pair of them hold the Worlds trophy aloft together. It's not quite the skin he might have designed himself, admittedly, but it's probably the closest Keria could possibly get while abiding by Riot's rules.

Earlier this summer, Keria's teammate Faker got in some skin-themed hot water, as  players protested his $500 skin with a forced boycott, perma-banning Ahri to stop anyone using her new cosmetic.

In a twe🌄et earlier this week, Temtem developer Crema pꦺosted a video about its upcoming spin-off, . A Vampire Survivors-style roguelike, Swarm pits Tems against hordes of enemies, tasking you with lasting as long as you can amid its top-down, 'bullet-heaven' gameplay. 

Unfortunately for Crema, that real estate is a little crowded right now. "Put a finger down if one of the biggest companies in the industry with millions of players all over the world just announced that their survivor-like game mode i🦄s named exactly like your new, upcoming survivor game," the video below jokes. 

That company is League of Legends d𒅌eveloper Riot Games, which recently unveiled Swarm, a top-down, 'bullet-heaven', Vampire Survivors-style roguelike that pits members of LoL's heroic Anima Squad against hordes oꦚf enemies. League of Legends: Swarm was teased several months ago, but has only just been officially named ahead of its release next month.

Adding to Crema's woes is the fact that that launch takes League of Legends: Swarm into 2024's third quarter, which is the same release window that Temtem🅰: Swarm currently sits in. Temtem's spin-off could release as late as September and still hit that window, of course, and perhaps it will quietly slip back a bit to allow League of Legends fans to get their fix first.

It's worth pointing out two things here, of course; firstly, this 🐬is definitely delivered in jest, and secondly, the crossover between Temtem's creature collecting and League of Legends' MOBA audienc﷽es seems like it could be pretty slim. The timing is undeniably unfortunate, but Crema seems to be taking this coincidence pretty well.

If you're looking for even more permadeath action, check out our list of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best roguelike games.

Signature Ahri is a particularly fancyꦐ skin, designed to commemorate League of Legends' all-time esports great Faker. Trouble is, the fanciest version costs $500, and players aren't happy about the potentially slippery slope that could set Riot sliding down. The concern is that if it's willi🎃ng to charge this much now, it'll be happy doing this again𓆉 in future, milking the community for ever-larger amounts of money.

Even as the skin was announced players were expressing plans to stop those who purchased it from being able to 💫use it by deliberately banning Ahri from every game. Now that the skin has released (and key developer Andrei Van Roon has further stoked controversy by making it clear there are no plans to back down from this kind of drop), they've come good on that threat: Ahri's ban rate has rocketed, doubling almost overnight in certain regions.

It's unlikely that that spike holds for long - when you've only got five bans to use across your team, using one of them to spite players who might not even be in your game is a bit of a waste, and eventually Ahri's ban rate will probably return to normal. Still, it's amusing to see that the parts of the community expressing their concern did come good on their threat, even if reports suggest that the vast ꦇmajority of these bans are coming from Western regions, rather than the Chinese and Korean markets that seem more likely to purchase the skin in the first place.

Elsewhere in the League of Legends ecosystem, Arcane is ending with Season 2 - but fans are already theorizing where it's heading next.

"Arcane is just the beginning of our larger storytelling journey and partnership with the wonderful animation studio that is Fortiche," Arcane co-creator Christian Linke told fans. "From the very beginning, since we started working on this project, we had a very specific ending in mind, which means the story of Arcane wraps up with this second season. But 𓃲Arcane is just the first of many stories that we want to tell in Runeterra."

The League of Legends community has long since latched onto the other stories that could be told in a manner similar to Arcane. There's the Ruination, a tragic story of lost love that's the origin story for several champions and has already been adapted and expanded in both a game and a novel. There's𒁏 the Demacian civil war, depicted in part in a , or the conflict over the Freljord, a frozen waste home to both a trio of gods and three 🌠warring tribes, or the Fall of Icathia. 

Runeterra is a land rich in stories, but there are two that currently stand out as strong follow-ups for Fortiche. The first takes our attention to Targon, an isolated land a long way from the mean streets of Zaun, where civilizati꧋on is built around the foothills of a mythical mountain. There, the religious groups of the Solari and Lunari fight over their respective worship of the Sun and Moon. Champions Leona and Diana are 'sun and moon canon lesbians' mentioned in the tweet below, with an angsty rivalry that feels like the perfect fit for Arcane's storytelling, but there are plenty of champions that would be an excellent tangential fit for the world.

An even more co༺mpelling theory, however, pertains to the Noxian invasion of Ionia. Noxus, a warmongering nation, is already working with the citizens of Piltover in the final episodes of Arcane's first season. In the recent trailer, we see the Enforcers come face to face with Singed, the scientist who appears briefly in season one and is a key part of one major season two characters' arc. In his , Singed eventually finds his way toward working with Noxus - "who contracted the alchymist to help [...] break the bitter stalemate of the war in Ionia."

It would be a strong setup for a new series. Not only is the Ionia conflict on♛e of League's oldest yet least well-told stories, but it would work as an ideal bridge for a new Fortiche project. Neither dire✅ctly linked to Arcane nor so distant from it as to be entirely brand-new, it would offer an excellent next step into a story that could still involve a wide array of champions.

We've still got several months to wait for Arcane, so I imagine we're several years away from discovering what Riot and Fortiche are cooking up next. Nevertheless, there's a treasure t🍌rove of stories to pull from, so I'm excited to see what's to come.

Arcane fans are shocked to see Vi as a cop - but League of Legends players want you to know that's been her job for 12 years.

After the first 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Arcane Season 2 poster drop focused on Vi and Jinx, a brief teaser snippet changed the focus slightly, onto Vi and Caitlyn. Accompanied by a handful of currently unknown characters, the duo step forward wielding their iconic weapons - Caitlyn's rifle and Vi's gauntlets. What's cau♏ght some series fans by surprise, however, is that both characters are now kitted out in Enforcer gear, placing them firmly within the ranks of Piltover's police force.

That's not gone down too well. Putting any potential negative feelings about the police as a whole to one side, some fans are flabbergasted as to how Vi - a character whose parents have spent a lifetime under the thumb of the Enforcers and have experienced their brutality first-hand - would eventually join the force. In Season 1, we come to know Caitlyn - a citizen ඣof thꦦe upper class - as a member of the Enforcers, but we meet Vi through an almost entirely different lens.

That led several series fans to speculate about the narrative gymnastics tha🌄t Arcane would be attempting in order to justify this apparent change. But for League of Legends fans, it came as no surprise at all - when Vi arrived in the game in 2012, it was literally in the role of 'The Piltover Enforcer'. In the game, Vi has never really existed as anything other than a crime fighter, and in contrast to Caitlyn's calmer, more calculated approach, Vi tends to opt for an approach that veers far closer to the 'brutality' type of policing.

League of Legends players wasted very little time telling those shocked by Vi's new appearance that a decade of storytelling backed up this version of their newly problematic fave. And while 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Arcane is canon to the LoL universe, that means it exists alongside what came before, rather than existing in its place. I still think that Riot and Arcane studio Fortiche will have some work on their hands to sell this transformation, but given the importance of the show's most popular ship to the story so ♌far, perhaps that'll be si🐽mpler to pull off than we think.

Elsewhere, Arcane fans are speculating that Season 2 could feature a substantial time skip.

That's according to Twitter user Starlight, who runs an allowing League of Legends and Genshin Impact players to purchase in-game currency at reduced prices thanks to regional conversion rate🎉s. Even with those lower pr♚ices, however, Starlight says that players are going to pretty extreme lengths to procure League of Legends' hyper-expensive new skin.

In a tweet yest💞erday, they asked "Can you guys stop taking out loans to buy the Ahri skin," referring to that $500 bundle. "I don't want to put you into debt," they continued. "Legit every second order is with a loan agree🐟ment." In subsequent tweets, they clarify that in some countries, such as the UK and Germany, it's possible to pay with loan agreements via Paypal, and pay the money back over 3-6 months.

At what appears to be 0% interest, that's not technically any more expensive than paying straight up, but it's stil✃l far from the most sensible financial choice. Given that you'll have to purchase four maximum-size bundles of currency for a total of £400 ($508), the skin in question - a Signature Ahri cosmetic intended to honor League of Legends' best-ever player, Faker - you're already setting yourself back a substantial amount to even afford the item. And given that some League of Legends fans are planning to permaban the champion to prevent anyone from using the skin, it seems like this mi🐎ght be an even more unwise investment than it first appears.

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Faker might be the GOAT, but $500 still seems a bit steep.

The Signature Immortalized Legend Collꦫection is the most expensive offering in a range of three different bundles. As well as cosmetics for two of Faker's best known 💮characters, it comes with several other, smaller bonuses, many of which are entirely exclusive to the bundle. If you want all of those bonuses, however, you'll be shelling out a total of 59,620 Riot Points - League of Legends' premium in-game currency.

To put that in perspective, most skins cost 1,350 RP, which you can amass through a total of around $16 in spending. To amass the nearly 60,000 points you need for this bundle, by contrast, you'll be buying four of the biggest bundles, setting you back $100 each, plus another $50 bundle to make up the rest. That's a total cost of $450, making this far and away the most microtransaction Riot has ever offered - last year, players were angered by a skin placed behind a $200ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ ga💯cha system, and this more than doubles that price.

Unsurprisingly, the response has been pretty negative. There's ൩obvious community reverence for Faker, but equally obvious fru🐷stration at Riot, with the discussing the cost at length, and high-profile esports figures speaking out.

Some players are even planning an in-game protest, a form of forced boycott o𒈔f the skin. While no-one can stop anyone else from purchasing the cosmetic, they can attempt to stop them from using it. League of Legends' ranked matches utilize a pick-and-ban phase, and if your champion is banned before the start of a match, you have to use a different one. With that in mind, players are already planning a mass target-ban of Ahri from the skin's release date on June 12. If you can't play Faker's signature champion, you're not likely to have much luck trying to use the expensive new skin you bought for it.

Riot does have an unfortunate habit of testing the waters with this kind of thing before walking it ꦛback when players make their displeasure known. Whether that happens here remains to be seen, but I'll be fascinated to see if the developer tries this again with its next Hall of Famer.

I don't think this bodes very well for the LoL MMO I'm looking forward to either, and I'm already pretty worried about that one.

Yesterday, Phillip Koskinas, head of anti-cheat at LoL and Valorant develo๊per Riot Games, showed off a graph outlining League of Legends bans, showing a substantial uptick in punishments meted out since the start of the month. That uptick matches up with the rollout of Vanguard, a somewhat controversial anti-𝕴cheat tool that operates at 'Kernel level' on your machine, meaning that it can prevent disallowed software operating at the same time as the game.

Vanguard has not proved particularly popular, primarily because of its access to players' systems, and reports that it was damaging PCs. Riot has hit back against those claims, and seems to be sta✨nding by Vanguard - Koskinas' tweet seems evidence of strong support, and Riot's official Dev Team account quoted that initial post to provide a little more context behind that rise in bans.

The new software means that the League of Legends devs are now "🔥starting to target more cheats that we weren't able to action on in the past." That explains the rising number of bans, but it also means that recent ban-waves "come with League's first ever Hardware ID bans, increasing the action weight against cheaters."

A Hardware ID ban is different to an account ban, in that it targets the identification tools of your system, effectively removing the ability to access the game from your current computer. In the past, prolific chꦡeaters could have their accounts permanently banned, but could simply boot up new accounts, or even buy pre-levelled ones at relatively low cost. Now, their entire PC can be banned from the game, significantly increasing the price of starting over.

In this 14-year history of League of Legends, this is a step that Riot has never taken before. The most high-profile similarity was the 'indefinite' banning of streamer Tyler1, whose repeated disruptive behaviour at the time led to Riot arranging to ban any account that could be identified as belonging to him, before his eventual return to the game. Even then, however, Riot was unable to target the streamer's hardware, resorting to manually banning individual accou🐽nts.

Calls for hardware bans have grown over the years, particularly as the issues of botting and account ꦯselling have become more prevalent. Whether the hardware bans fix those issues in their entirety remains to be seen, but this is still a substantial step forward in Riot's attempts to take on cheaters.

Found yourself booted from your favorite game? Here are the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best PC games you can play instead.

In a posted on March🤡 7, Greg Street confirmed that he has "decided to step down from [his] role at Riot Games," where he served as executive producer on the MMO project. 

Street went on to say that "a combo of personal and professional considerations led me down this path." A number of personal issues meant that Street said he wanted to "be closer to my surviving family." He also, however, said that "after nine years at Riot it feels like🌳 it's time for something new."

"I said from the beginning that building a League of Legends MMO worthy of you 𝐆all was going to be a long journey. The MMO is in good hands and it's the right time to hand over the reigns for the next phase."

Street took on the role several years ago, having spent time at Riot after a career at Blizzard, and specifically World of Warcraft. For all the excitement around the project, however, he has also made clear that there are no guarantees that the game will ever come out, and that Riot could cancel the project if it d�ꦛ�oesn't deliver on expectations, having pointed out that nothing is certain in game development🌞.

In a after Street's departure, co-founder Marc Merrill confir💖med that the game is "still in early development, but we have a direction that we're very excited about," and that "it will still be a VERY long road to get there."

Meet the lore expert mapping out the League of Legends MMO years before its developers.

Last week, Riot Games revealed it was the target of a cyber attack which resulted in source code for League෴ of Legends and Teamfight Tactics, being s꧒tolen. The hackers also managed to obtain the company's old anti-cheat software Packman.

As sp༒otted by Twitter user , the hackers are now auctioning off the League of Legends source code and the legacy anti-cheat system with bids starting at $1 million. An image of the forum post shows a 1000-page PDF file containing a directory listing for the 72.4 GB of stolen source code. While we don't know if this is, in fact, the stolen data, what's on offer certainly comes with a lofty asking price. 

Following the breach, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Rio🌟t Games reve♋aled that it was held to ransom, with the hackers threatening to leak the source code un𓆏less the company coughed up $10 million. Riot outright refused, leading the hackers to put the data up for auction.

While the incident has meant that Riot's had to hold off on releasing updates for its games, the company said there was no indication that player data or personal information was stolen. "Truthfully, any exposure of source code can increase the likelihood of new cheats emerging," said Riot. "Since the attack, we’ve been working to assess its impact on anticheat and to be prepared to🌊 deploy fixes as quickly as possible if needed."

It's not been an easy time for Riot Games; recently, the League of Legends dev issued an apology over a trailer so bad fans thought the game was dying.

Drawing on high school TV tropes, Heartbreaker Caitlyn is the hard-working, butter-wouldn't-melt type, while Vi is the rebellious punk/goth archetype. There's a pretty intentional attempt at chemistry in their joint splash art (at the top of this article), but it's only once you take the skins in-game that the shiꦐp steps it up a notch.

When Vi channels her recall animation, she can be seen cracki🃏ng open a high school locker, before delicately placing a heart-shaped note inside it. When Caitlyn channels her animation, that same locker shows up, and once Caitlyn notices the note, she quickly hides it, before clutching it to her heart.

The duo has long been professional cri🎃mefighting partners, but it wasn't until Arcane that CaitVi was firmly established as one of League of Legends' premier ships. While the relationship is never made official in the show, the pair's feelings for one another are made pretty clear - but even these new skins don't really confirm anything.

In the 'official' canon, 🧔Caitlyn and Vi are crimefighters in the troubled twin cities of Piltover and Zaun, not high school stereotypes. League of L𝓡egends' different skin lines are understood to exist in universes parallel to that central narrative. Caitlyn's other skins, for example, send her to an anime 'battle academy', turn her into a time-travelling hitman, or simply let her enjoy a pool party. 

But while this isn't the total confirmation that CaitVi fans have been looking for, it hasn't stopped them from expressing their… enthusiasm for the pairing online. The #CaitVi hashtag has roared to life sinc☂e the skins were revealed, and some people are struggling to keep their cool.

In less polite news, one League of Legends pro challenged a streamer to an IRL cage match to decide which of them has to quit the game forever.

In an posted to Twitter, the developer explains that it has no plans to pay the demands of a ransom e🌳mail received earlier today and💫 that the team remains “confident that no player data or player personal information was compromised”. 

“Truthfully, any exposure of source code can increase the likelihood of new ch⛦eats emerging,” Riot says. “Since the attack, we’ve been working to assess its impact on anti-cheat and to be prepared to deploy fixes as quickly as possib✨le if needed.”

Riot goes on to say that the hackers have obtained information on unreleased modes and experimental features, but warns that there’s “no guarantee” they’ll ever be fit to launch, as much as the developer hopes the⛎y w🀅ill be one day. 

Mov♔ing forward, Riot’s security teams will continue working with consultants to evaluate and audit systems, with a further update to come. 

“We’re committed to transparency and will release a full report in the future detailing the attackers’ techniques, the areas where Riot’s security controls failed, and the🐠 steps we’re taking to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” the developer said.

“W🔯e’ve made a lot of progress since last week, and we believe we’ll have things repaired later in the week, which will allow us to remain on our regular patch cadence going forward. The League and TFT teams will update you soon on what this means for each game.”

Riot initially about the attack late last week, explaining that the social engineering attack would affect its ability to rele꧑ase conte🌺nt. 

Elsewhere, GTA Online is dealing with a security incident of its own, with a security-related update to come. 

Xie 'icon' Tian-Yu, who has played in China's League of Legends Pro League since 2015, had a recent disagreement with streamer Tian Hu🅷iℱhui during a match in the game's Ranked Solo Queue, ending with icon issuing a challenge for Huihui to meet him in the Octagon.

That disagreement stemmed from icon's decision to play the character Brand, a fire mage, during a game in which he was matched alongside Huihui. icon took to the game's middle lane, a position typically reserve🅘d for magic-centric champions, but Brand's role has shifted over the years to that of support. As a result, the decision appears to have upset Huihui, who made his displeasure clear through the game's chat feature.

According to (translated via Google), the argument continued throughout the game until icon eventually 🐼challenged Huihui to an octagon cage fight. With his honour as a pro player reportedly besmirched, icon even bought Huihui a flight to Shanghai, where the fight is set to take place.

It's been hard to translate the terms from the Chinese DMs that icon and Huihui shared - even the form that the fight will take isn't clear, but a cage fight implies MMA. One thing, however, is more clear: the loser will have to "quit the network." It's not 100% certain what that means - China does boast a 'super server' on which its top Lꦗeague of Leꦉgends players compete, but it's also possible that "quit the network" means quitting LoL altogether.

The latter seems unlikely - icon is still under contract as a player, and to leave the game would be to turn his back on his entire career. Hu💮ihui, on the other hand, has suggested that if he were not to quit, he'd donate 1 million yuan (around $147,000) to charity, rather than give up his own livelihood. The match is set to take place on January 25, so we'll see who's forced to step down, and what action they take.

In a more wholesome move, a different League of Legends pro said he'd name his son after the character that made him world champion.

As spotted by , the listing is for a title called Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story, and a translated description confirms that the project is an action game featuring the League of Legends character Sylas. The only other information ♊in the listing states that the game features "continuous battle scenes" against both human and non-human foes, but is suitable to pl𝐆ayers 12 years old and above, presumably suggesting that it's pretty light on the gore.

Mageseeker comes via Riot Forge, Riot's in-house game deve♎loper publishing smaller League of Legends experiences. So far, that&apos🍸;s included turn-based RPG Ruined King and rhythm game Hextech Mayhem, which both launched in 2021. Also confirmed were the adventure game Song of Nunu, releasing this year, and action-platformer Convergence, which is still listed as "coming soon" on Steam.

While Convergence and Song of Nunu focus more on 🌟the isolated stories of specific characters, Mageseeker seems likely to follow in the footsteps ﷺof Ruined King, which expands one of League of Legends' most sprawling narratives, or Arcane, the animated series that tackled a broad array of characters from the same region.

Sylas fits within one of those broader narratives. The character was born with magic powers in the in-universe kingdom of Demacia, where such skills are outlawed. Imprisoned, Sylas manipulated Lux, a young noblewoman (hiding her own magical abilities) to break him free, whereupon he ignited a rebellion known as the Demacian Civil🍨 War. After that, he's hidden out in the frozen wastes in the far north of League of Legends' world, which is likely where we'll find him fighting those non-human foes.

There's 𒊎no word on when we might see Mageseek༺er, but its presence within the ratings board suggests that it might not be very far away at all. 

It's been a rough week for Riot Games, which recently published a League of Legends trailer so bad it made fans think the game was dying. 

In a message on Twitter last night, Riot Games addressed the backlash to this year's new season cinematic. Each year, as LoL&apos🐟;s competitive mode gets its annual restart, Riot traditionally releases a trailer putting its characters front and centre. My personal favourite is 2019's 'Awaken':

This year, the video is The Brink of Infinity. By contrast to the battle scenes that have dominated the new year cinematics in recent years, this year's effort is a realistic flythrough of League of Legends' map,൩ Summoner's Rift, with a voice🅠over from a child understood to be the in-game character Pantheon.

In contrast to previous years, the video is pretty unimpressive, with players on describing it as an Unreal Engine demo rather than a creative outpouring from one of the biggest games in the world. But beyond those individual complaints, some have ✤highlighted broader concerns.

League of Legends had a fairly lacklustre year in 2022. Its traditional roster expansion fell from six champions to five, with only one major overhaul of an existing character. The preseason - often a period of significant change - 🌟was muted, with one of its biggest 'new' features the return of a neutral monster that had to be cut from the game last year. After Arcane in 2021, we've had no follow-up, and many players have noted that the flow of in-game lore and storytelling has dried up significantly.

This is all set against the backdrop of comments by Nicolo Laurent, CEO of developer Riot Games, announcing that the company's 2023 budget is the biggest it's ever been. That might be good news for just L💮eague of Legends fans, but for the sheer breadth of content the company is currentl🤡y working on. Not long ago, Riot only produced League of Legends, but it now makes several other ongoing games; Valorant, Wild Rift, Legends of Runeterra, and Teamfight Tactics all have dedicated teams behind them. It's also making an MMO and a fighting game, developing a second series of Arcane, publishing indie games through Riot Forge, and likely has plenty more happening behind the scenes - all while attempting to overhaul several of its domestic and international esports scenes.

That hive of activity paired with what appears to be a dearth of content for its 'bread and butter' title had the community in what almost amounted to all-out panic. On Reddit, some about ways that Riot could fill the apparent hole in its budget, while others asked that the game was nearin♓g its sunsetting period. Necrit, a YouTuber so well-known for his breakdown of the game's lore that he was actually immortalised within the LoL universe, published a video in response to Brink of Infinity titled "League is ACTUALLY Dying." 

Riot has taken note, publishing a thread that was nearly unprecedented in its transparency. While the company is relatively vocal regarding upcoming features, I don't remember seeing such direct communication about a community uproar. The dev♏eloper told fans that "unprecedented circumstances" led to an "alternate approach" for the Season 2023 video and acknowledged that Brink of Infinity "has led to further speculation about our investment in League."

The thread goes on to say "we should have been more communicative, which might have helped with some of that feeling and speculation. We do believe that League has a bri🐎ght future and we are investing in that." More details on that investment are said to be coming "in the next couple of days."

It'll be interesting to see how Riot attempts to change the narrative. In reality, League of Legends itself seems to me to be in pretty good shape, especially for a game approaching its 14th birthday in 2023. Less new content isn't great news, but the impact of the pandemic on production schedules is still being꧋ felt, with the huge number of AAA games coming out this year indicative of the logjam we've seen elsewhere in the industry over the past few years. League of Legends isn't dying, but it's clear Riot has some work to do to convince fans that it's still kicking.

One former League of Legends pro is naming his son after the character that made him world champ.

Introduced in 2019, Yuumi's main selling point is her ability to latch onto another character and become permanently untargetable. Unless her companion died (and there was no other ally nearby to jump to), Yuumi's enemies couldn't touch her. The original intention behind that design choice was to provide an avenue for new League of Legends players tꦏo learn the game from a position of relative safety, but the Magical Cat has proved hugely impactful at all levels of expertise, right up to professional play.

Riot acknowledges that despite all its attempts to curb her power, Yuumi remains unstable in solo queue, and "one of the premier champions in the last two World Championships." The most recent competition, which concluded in November, saw several key figures in the ♔competitive com🦹munity break ranks, complaining that Yuumi - a member of the fragile, healing-based 'enchanter' category of champions - could output more damage than her teams' DPS champs, offered a huge amount of extra utility, and could do it all from a position of unparalleled safety, untouchable while latched onto an ally.

That Riot's deciding to rework Yuumi is a notable decision in itself. Firstly, most champions that get a full gameplay update have been around significantly longer than this o🌳ne - Yuumi only arrived in 2019, but Udyr, who got a full visual and gameplay update ea🌳rlier this year, first showed up in 2009. Secondly, another major factor in determining reworks is a lack of popularity, but Yuumi has consistently been a recurring pick. There's plenty of solid reasoning as to why this change is being made, but it's still outside Riot's traditional remit.

There's no word on exactly how Yuumi will look once the rework comes through, but her ability to remain attached to allies is mentioned as an "essential" part of her kit. Increased counterplay is a major focus, as is her ability to grow in power as the game p♏rogresses.

One League of Legends pro is naming his son after the character that made him World Champion.

League of Legends developer Riot Games and Nerf have teamed up for a Jinx-the🦂med blaster that'll eat your who🍨le entire wallet with its giant movable jaws.

Fishbones is one of League of Legends hero Jinx's signature weapons, and it's now a real-life Nerf blaster measuring 35" in length and packing an 18-dart capacity drum. You can stuff six clusters of three darts inside the blaster's massive jaws, or you can proudly display your ridiculous League of Legends Jinx blaster with the included stand. To be frank, at $169, this seems more like a collector's item than something you'll want to be running around outside with. Hasbro notes that "everything comes in premium packaging that’s also designed for display."

However, if you do decide to show up everyone at your next Nerf ba😼ttle, Hasbro recommends people bring face protection. After all, this pump-action blaster fires off three foam darts in a single shot, and if you've ever toyed around with the more premium Nerf product lines, you'll know these things can pack a serious punch. Although, since the in-game weapon is a rocket launcher, there might've b🐻een some missed potential in having the Nerf gun simply be compatible with normal-sized foam darts. Why not one giant Nerf dart that explodes with confetti when fired?

You can pre-order the League of Legends Jinx Nerf blaster thro𓂃ugh now, although orders aren't expected to ship until December 2023.

In case you missed it, Riot recently said it'll cancel the upcoming League of Legends MMO if it isn't "good enough."

In an interview with Kanon, Greg 'Ghostcrawler' Street spoke about the MM🍰Os like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14, suggesting that a major aspect of their success comes down to the budget its developers have to execute on their ideas. Asked whether he was happy with the amount of money Riot had given his project, Street said that "one of the nice th🃏ings about Riot is that we're not going to run out of money."

With the global success of League of Legends bankrolling the company, Street says he's not facing "a publisher that's like 'you gotta ship by Christmas or we're cancelled'." Instead, he has to cꦛontend with quality - "Riot will cancel this game if the game isn't good enough. They're not gonna cancel the game because it gets too expensive."

To clarify that statement, Street says that "those go hand-in-hand. You can make a very expensive, bad game - and then I would get fired. We could make a less expensive game that still really captures hearts and minds, but it's not a blank cheque." Rather than invest in the costs of the LoL MMO, Riot could take that money and make a new game, or "double down on Va🌞lorant." To make his own case for more money, Street would have to consider Riot's perception of the project - "'How does the game look, what are playtesters saying, how are we doing about hitting our milestones?'"

"In the very simplest sense, you can think of it as 'you get some money, if you spend﷽ it well they're gonna give you more. If you don't spend it well, you're probably not. And in our case rather than shipping a bad game it would just get shitcanned."

This isn't the first time Street has spoken bluntly about the fate of the League of Legends MMO. Back in April, he pointed out that 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:nothing is certain in games development, and that there's always a chance that the game won't ever ship. He's also spoken about the game's very early reveal, telling fans that the team 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:expected the project to leak, and Riot decided it was better to get the news out♋ itselꦦf. While development is said to be going well, it's likely to be several years before Riot begins showing off its MMO - if indeed it ever sees the light of day.

Meet the lore expert mapping out the League of Legends MMO years before its developers.

Last night saw the beginning of League of Legends' 2022 world championships (澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:starring Lil Nas X). That old rivalry reared its head quickly, with the second game at the tournament pitting Euro🌠pe's fourth seed, Fnatic, taking on NA's third seed, Evil Geniuses.

The game was a stomp. North America was ahead for a brief window right at the start of the game, but the rest of the match was, to quote one of its commentators, "a beatdown." Add in the fact that Fnatic was playing remotely and 🀅with a last-minute substitute due to COVID complications, and it was a terr🎃ible start for North America.

And that lousy start didn't seem to sit well with the moderators of the game's subreddit. At six million members, it's one of the biggest online forums for Le🌞ague of Legends out there, but in the wake of that first game, players began to notice that the page had been made private, allowing only "approved members" to take part in discussions.

The change was only temporary, and at the time of writing, the subreddit has been restored 🔥to its former state, but the moderation team's actions haven't gone unnoticed. In particular, dozens of comments citing the impact of Fnatic's substitute have been from the , as have those that called out 💃the mods for locking the sub.

While EU fans are likely riding high right now (both of the region's representatives went undefeated on their first day at the ꧟tournament), there's still a long way to go. Worlds is a month-long spectacle, and even if Europe is currently coming out on top of this bitter inter-region rivalry, fans probably won't be laughing quite so hard when the likes of Korea and China start getting involved.

Check out some more of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best PC games out there.

Necrit is well known in the League of Legends community as one of the greatest experts ꦉof the game's labyrinthine lore. In fact, his ex💫pertise was deemed so impressive that he eventually earned himself a spot in that lore, with a voice acting role in last year's Ruined King: A League of Legends story. In that game, Necrit played an expository assistant - also named Necrit - who had unwillingly served alongside the game's villains.

Traditionally, Necrit's video's discuss the stories behind new characters or in-game🌠 events, but recently their attention has turned to the upcoming League of Legends MMO. And while Riot has been keeping deliberately quiet about its mysterious project, Necrit has been outlining the form 🅠it's likely to take in exhaustive detail.

In one video, Necrit explains how &ཧapos;the World of Riot's MMO is already done'. There, they discuss that while gameplay and social features are key to an MMO's success, the third pillar of that success is an expansive, believable world. Fortunately for Riot, that world has been in place for years, and - as Necrit points out - is perfect for adapting into an evolving multiplayer title. The video below maps out each of the major regions, outlining the conflicts - and quest lines - at their hearts, and how the League of Legends MMO could expand its world over many years by expanding from place to place rather than dropping all at once.

That video garnered a lot of attention from MMO fans, with Riot's world drawing praise from the likes of veteran World of Warcraft personality Asmongold. In a recent follow-up, Necrit took a deeper look at the people who populated those regions, breaking down the races and classes likely to be available based 🤪on the characters that populate Riot's world – Final Fantasy 14 fans who play a Lalafell will likely find plenty to like about Yordles.

Necrit's videos are no guarantee of what Riot will eventually produce, but the YouTuber's knowledge of the world and straightforward breakdown of its intricacies that their speculation isn’t just some clumsy wishlist. It's an analysis of the groundwork that Riot has been laying for years, even if the developer itself isn'🐠t ready to publicly commit to those ideas. The League of Legends MMO is still a long way away, but when we eventually get to see it, don't be surprised to see more than a few of these ideas crop up.

The League of Legends MMO was revealed super early because Riot thought "it would likely leak anyway."

Last night, some of the new skins heading to League of Legends' next patch appeared on the testing server. Among those was a skin named 'King Viego', a co🧸smetic for the sword-wielding champion introduced to the game last year. While the character, also known as the Ruined King, traditionally sports a shock of white hair, a ghostly crown, and a distinct bad-guy demeanour, the new skin offers a very different look.

In his new skin, Virgo wears a very real crown, as well as a kingly garb and a notable soft-boi expression. Down on one knee, he looks ten🌼derly up at a woman in front of him whose hand he's holding. That woman is Isolde, Virgo's in-lore wife, whose death is responsible not only for his transformation from anime hero to anime villain, but into one of the biggest threats facing League of Legends lore. 

Hundreds of years before the current state of LoL's confusing narrative, Viego was king of the Blessed Isles, a beautiful and peaceful region of the game's world. After his wife took ill, however, he desperately sought a cure for her ailment, but Isolde eventually succumbed to her sickness. In one last attempt, Viego plunged her body into a sacred, he𒐪aling pool at the heart of his kingdom. 

That one action immediately destroyed and corrupted the Blessed Isles, turning them into the corrupted and ghostly Shadow Isles, a region that remains a blight on Riot's entire world. It also transformed Viego into his undead state, but did nothing to sate his attempts to bring his wife back to him. In undeath, he continues to seek Isolde even at the expense of the rest of the world, and his efforts are a key pillar✱ of Riot's storytelling. As well as an in-game lore event called The Ruination, Viego's efforts have surfaced in the wider League of Legends franchise in the standalone game The Ruined King, and in an upcoming𓆉 book also called Ruination.

A single skin is unlikely to prove Viego's redemption. In fact, it's almost certainly tied into that novel, which releases next month. Nevertheless, it&a🐻pos;s an interesting choice, as Riot rarely opts for cosmetics that hark directly to characters' backstories or evolving narr𓆏atives. In fact, other than those cosmetics released specifically for the Ruination event, some of the most recent such skins date all the way back to 2015.

One former League of Legends pro is naming his son after the character that made him world champion.

In a tweet late last night, developer Riot Games announced via its official support account that "we will be performing extended maintenance impacting players in the NA region." Both League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics will be entirely unavailable today from 01:00🎃 PT/ 04:00 ET until 13:00 PT/16:00๊ ET.

Riot hasn't directly explained why it's uไndertaking such a lengthy period of maintenance, saying that the aim is simply to "improve the experience." Over on , however, players have been suggesting that they've been facing significant lag spikes over the last week or so. Others have pointed out that the game's Application-Programming Interface (API), which tracks player statistics and details about recent games, has been turning up inaccurate information in recent days.

Despite those issues and the potential fix, however, with the amount of downtime they're facing. While Riot has clearly attempted to limit disruption with the late night/early morning maintenance, those trying to login on the east coas𒆙t are likely to have to go a little longer without playing. Others are hoping that other issues, such as long-term champion bugs or issues around bots, will also be tackled over ▨the next few hours, but that seems less likely.

The length of the server maintenance means that, hopefully, Riot will be able to tackle the issue in enough time🥃, but there's always a chance that the League of Legends servers remain down slightly longer into the afternoon.

Elsewhere, a former League of Legends pro is naming his son after the character that made him world champ.

Chan-yong Kang, better known as 'Ambition', announced the ꦰupcoming birth of his son earlier this month (via ). He told fans that the baby is expected in December, and that he and his partner have already set a name - Jarvan V. That's in reference to Jarvan IV, a League of Legends character who, in the game's lore, ꦿis a prince, and one of a long line of Jarvans that make up the in-universe royal family. 

Ambition isn't just naming his son after the character, however, as the player himself has a notable link to the champion. Jarvan IV is the character that helped Ambition and his teammates become League of Legends world champions in 2017, ౠand it was Ambition's tournament journey - and his performance as Jarvan IV - that was adapted into the soundtrack for the following year's competition.

Following that win, and in line with League of Legends tradition, Ambition and his teammates🥂 were all immortalised in a new in-game cosmetic. World champions are allowed to choose the character they want to make a skin fo🙈r (assuming they played as them at least once during the tournament), and Jarvan IV was Ambition's choice.

Given the number of times that Ambition has found himself in s🧔ome way personified as Jarvan IV, you might argue that his unborn child is not just the heir to the character, but to Ambition himself. The former pro seems to share that idea, suggesting that one day he wants to be able to perform at the highest levels of League of Legends alongside his🍌 son.

As part of League of Legends PreSeason 2023, Riot wants the jungle to be a little less scary.

In a blog post published on Friday, developꦑer Riot assures that it's taking great care not to "dumb down" the jungle posit꧙ion and simply wants it to be "complex in the right places."

"Jungle is a powerful role, but also the punching bag of the team," Riot says. "We’re supposed to gank every lane, control all the macro, perfectly farm our 🔜camps, and set up vision ALL at once. It’s a lot. And that’s awesome—that’s why we main this role—but it’s way too much to jump into without a pool noodle."

One of the key ways Riot plans on lowering the barrier to entry for wo🦂uld-be junglers is to better demonstrate for🦄 them how the role is played, which sounds like a new tutorial is incoming. Furthermore, Riot teases rather vaguely that jungling mechanics will be adjusted to be "less punishing and more intuitive."

Riot also says it's considering adjustments to the rules around camps resetting as well as leash range. "When you’re newer to the role and accidentally lose camp patience it feels like you’re getting slapped in the face," Riot says. "Even for experienced players the rules are finicky and sometimes your champion feels useless because they can’t abuse these rules as well as other cham❀ps."

Future updates will also address jungle clear optimization with the intent of making more champions viable junglers. Riot acknowledges that certain champions have better clear rates because they're more easily able to "abuse" certain rules, an📖d it sounds like that'll be a big focus of this comprehensive jungle rework.

"Right now in League, it’s not realistic to expect a ton of different characters to be viable at the highest levels♕🅘 of play because a lot of them simply can’t optimize their clears enough to stand up with the rest. Will Rammus ever be powerful in high skill brackets with a clear as slow and as fragile as his is right now?"

There will also be additional tools for junglers to more proactively communicate with their teams. Since jungling is the role most focused on macro strategy, Riot wants to give junglers the ability to get their teams on board with their strategies. That'll include more tools to get 🎶teammates to help out with objectives, communicate their ganks to their laners, and more.

Finally, pets. That's right, pets are coming to League of Legends to make junglers' lives a little easier. It isn't clear exactly what form pets will take as Riot is still iterating on the design, but they'll help you with little tasks like clearing or taking down epic monsters. You'll also be able to gradually raise yoꦬur pet to the point where it'll "empower" you, which is an effect that'll be shrouded in secrecy while Riot nails down how strong the empowerment should be relative to your base kit, runes, items, and whatnot.

Here are some🅘 early and very much not final designs for the pets:

Again, some of this🐼 is definitive and some of it Riot is still working out how to implement, but either way, you can expect a bunch of changes to the jungling role starting with the 2023 preseason update.

Find out where League ranked on our list of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best MOBAs to play in 2022.

Riot VP Greg Street has taken to to address community questions over the project's light-on-details reveal and when we'll get "more real" information. The thought behind the "low-key" reveal is fairly rational – Riot needs MMO experts to develop the game, and what better way to get those job ads in front of people than to generate some buzz? As you might remember, GTA 6 was also revealed in a 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:relatively low-key way, and the array of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Rockstar job ads up right now point to a similar rationale.𒁃 And, yes, Riot is aware that many announcements in the industry tend to leak ahead of time. 

"Often in this business, you worry about someone scooping you, but that is harder꧑ to do with an MMO," Street . "Everyone more or less knows how to make one. The challenge is actually doing so, and the massive cost and time it takes."

As for when you'll see more of the League of Legends MMO, it looks like you'll have to wait a bit longer. Street explains that another benefit of the project's low-key reveal is that the team can chop and change plot points and features without fans worrying that something is wrong – eagle-eyed fans dissected Cyberpunk 2077 when it came out to discover a 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:lack of wall-running after so🃏me very public development, so you can understand where he's coming from. 

"We know that when ♔we start releasing actual information, such as features, the story, a look at the art, shit will get much more real," Str🌊eet . "And it will also make it harder to undo those features, change the story, or update the art. Players and media may again interpret this as 'something must be wrong' because they aren't used to seeing those changes (which are very normal) in public."

If it makes the wait easier, Street🍌 is clearly confident about what Riot has. The industry veteran that the team wants to talk about the game more and that everyone believes they have something "truly special". Alas, "it's not the time yet". 

Once communication starts, though, Street says you can expect it to look like what Riot is doing with its League of Legends fighting game, currently named 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Project L. Just the other day, we found out that the fight &ꦏapos;em up with be free-to-play and include League of Legends' Illaoi in a video 🐠update.

Can't wait to learn more? Here's the lore aficionado mapping out the League of Legends MMO years before its developers.

Pro🐼ject L, Riot Games' upcoming 2D fighting game based on League of Legends, will be free to play, the studio has confirmed.

In a dev update shared to YouTube on Monday, senior director Tom Cannon confirmed that Project L will be free to play, acknowledgin🌜g that the news probably won't surprise longtime fans of the studio. 

"One of our goals is to remove as many barriers as possible from you enjo💜ying Project L," said Cannon. "We want you to be able to play no matter where you live, what your skill level is,ꦍ or how much money you have to spend on a game."

Of course, in 2022 it's pretty much expected that the devs behind a new free-to-play game touch on monetization, although Cannon only assured players that Riot will be "respe💙ctful of both your time🤪 and your wallet."

The dev team behind Project L also released a on the game that introduces its newest champion, the Kraken Priestess Illaoi. The game's narrative director, Scott "Ja꧟redan" Hawkes, describes Illaoi's Project L incarnation as "a powerful and charismatic spiritual leader who inspires others to be their own unstoppable force" and someone who "turns heads and dominates a room with her physical presence and confident, purposeful swagger."

Game designer Caroline "Riot Shyvana" Montano explained that Illaoi will have tank-like stats with slower movements, heavier hi🥂ts, and a "huge" hurtbox. 

"Illaoi is a strong and muscular woman who att💃acks with a giant totem, so it makes sense she would hit with her own physical strength, as opposed to hiding behind the power of her god or magical abilities.

Project L doesn't have a release date yet.

For what to play right now, don't miss our guide to the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best PC games in 2022.

League of Legends is coming to Game Pass with every champion unlocked, which means you’re getting 🥃a cast of over 160 characters to choose from. That goes for League of Legends’ mobile spin-off, Wild Rift, too, which currently has o𝐆ver 80 champions. 

Ifꦗ you're more into something that meshes Overwatch's hero abilities with CS:GO gunplay, then you'll be glad to know that Valorant is coming to Game Pass, too. Yes, that also includes all 18 agents that are currently available on the roster. 

Finally, you're also getting strategy card game Legends of Runeterra and auto-battler Teamfight Tactics. With Game Pass, you're getting a Foundation Pack for free on the former, and access to a rotation of tier-one Little Legend avatars on t𝓀he latter. 

"We’ve always res𒊎pected Xbox’s relentless push to drive gaming forward, and we’re proud to add our games to the Xbox catalogue through Game Pass," Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill says. "We’re also thrilled to welcome Xbox players into Riot’s ecosystem of diverse and passionate gamers across the world.

"In the coming months, we’ll share more about the partnership and ho🍸w members can access the Game Pass content. For more information on Riot’s biggest titles coming to Game Pass, stay tuned to riotgames.com and Xbox Wire."

Head over to our Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase June 2022 Live Coverage report for a complete tracker of everything that's been announced from the presentation so far.

Earlier today, Riot unveiled the 'Champion Durability Update', which will arrivꦰe with League of Legends patch 12.10. In that update, all of the game's 150+ champions will see improvements to the ways they deal with all types of damage. There'll also be tweaks to some other sustain-based stats, and some map-based objectives.

Riot says it's making the change because both its developers and Leꦐague of Legends' pro communities agree that "there is currently too much damage" in the game. That can lead to games where certain types of characters are simply deleted from the map with no counterplay, which is both frustrating for players, and hard to watch when it comes to the game's competitive scene.

The crux of the change is that players should feel like they're dealing and taking less damage, and that some characters will have to commit a little bit more to s🌟ecure a kill. The payoff to that is that fights should last longer (unless one team is really far ahead of their opponents), which should help dial up the excitement during a drawn-out back-and-forth.

While Riot has been discussing a change to League of Legends' damage expression, this change is quite abrupt, and not very common, even within multiplayer game environments. Likely the closest parallel to this change is the difference in time-to-kill that you might experience between different iterations in a shooter franchise, like the change from Titanfall 2 to Apex Legends' shield-filled approach, but there are several extra factors to consider when it comes 🌃to a game as complex as League of Legends. With that in mind, Riot says it'l𓃲l have a close eye on the changes over the coming weeks.

As well as its MOBA, Riot's also working on a League of Legends MMO, but even its lead developer doesn't know if it'll ever ship.

In , Greg Street said: "A few weeks ago I made a tweet where I intended to emphasize what a commitment I had made to this MMO. Some players and media latched onto the "might never ship" part and extrapolated that the d🐼evelopment was not going well. Spoiler: It is going great. This team is so stacked."  

It seems like there's a bit of confusion surrounding the upcoming game, which was quietly anno🌃unced by developer Riot back in 2020. Things have been made slightly more baff🎃ling by Street's tweets how🍌ever with fans questioning whether or not the game will ever ship at all. 

Following on from this, Street also replied in a thread explaining how regardless of how good development is currently going, "there is no guarantee any game in this business will ship." Before going on to emphasize the fact that "[Riot] won’t ship a disappointing game. (We also wo🧸n’t crunch just to make sure the game is as good as it can be.)"

The next tweet in the thread appears to muddy the waters even more as Street then goes on to saꦺy: "Do I think Riot will launch an MMO at some point? Absolutely. There are so many good reasons to do it. Maybe I am not the right leader, or th▨is is not the right team, or our design isn’t the right one. But the company will keep at it until the game is worthy of your expectations."

There's a touch of humility to Street's posts that's certainly admirable. That said, the decision to tell fans that the project they're excited for might never see the light of day - despite Riot havi✱ng spent many years talking about it - is an odd one. Game development has plenty of ups and downs, but it's r💖are to see those realities portrayed in quite so stark a manner. 

For now, it’s best for fans to remain patient and leave the League of Legends MMO in the developer’s capable hands. Street also showed appreciation for fans that are already excited for the game in the final tweet of the thread bꦗy saying: "Thanks for your support and patience. We got you."

Looking for something to play in the meantime? Take a look at our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best MMORPG list for inspiration.  

Fortiche is a Paris, France-based animation company known for producing the massively popular Netflix series Arcane, itself based on Riot's enduring MOBA League of Legends. The studio has collaborated with Riot for almost 10 years, starting with the music video celebrating the launch of League🎉 of Legends champion Jinx. Today, Riot announced that they've purchased a "significant" but non-controlling stake in Fortiche, cementing the two companies' partnership for decades.

"Fortiche ha🅠s been an integral partner for a long time, but this agreement ensures we'll be working closely for decades to come," Riot CEO Nicolo Laurent said in a press release. "We hold a high bar for everyone we work with and insist they understand players deeply and focus on them relentlessly, and from day one, Fortiche has exemplified Player Experience First. 

"In working with Fortiche, we collaborate to push the boundaries of what’s possible and raise expectations for how games can be represe🔴nted in media. As proud as we are of Arcane, we know the best is yet to come."

Fortiche and Riot are currently celebrating several big wins at this past weekend&𒁃apos;s Annie Awards, with Arcane taking home nine awards including Best General Audience animated series. In today's announcement, Riot is unclear about what its equity investment in Fortiche means for the future, but promises "the best is yet to come." Fortiche, meanwhile, is hard at work developing the second season of Arcane for Netflix.

Check out the 50 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Netflix shows streaming now.

Product lead for behavioral systems Ha﷽na "TimTamMonster" Dinh posted a candid to LoL's official website, committing to "shifting [Riot's] approach" to toxic player behaviors "to directly impact your ♓experience and strengthen our community".

"I know many of you have been disappointed in the lack of progress made in Behavioral Systems over the last few years. You've told us again and again that this space is important. And I&aཧpos;m with you. That's why I'm here to share some updates kicking off Riot's new approach to this space in 2022," they wrote.

After revealing that changes thus far have chiefly be♓en "behind the scenes" upgrades, Dinh acknowledged that Riot's "detection and punishment systems t🅰o improve your experience [...] isn’t making enough of an impact". 

"The data shows that only 5% of players are consistently disruptive," Dinh explained. "These are players we definitely should be punishing, and we will always continue improving our systems for that. But the other 95% are regular players who get tilted every once in a while, and these players make up 86% of our r🅠eports. In other words, almost all reports are on the average player who usually behaves well."

After also confirming that Champ Select Reports is still problematic - "although we have been monitoring these reports, we didn’t add punishments for them accordingly as promised" - the update then turned to verbal abuse, something Dinh says affects "the majority of players". Consequently, the team will be upgr🀅ading💃 "to more advanced models to increase Verbal Abuse detections" after which it "expects to see improvements in this area by up to 10x". 

To help improve player behavior, Dinh also revealed that although Riot had "failed to update" Honor 2.0 and🧸 "fallen short of [player] expectations", the🍌re will be an exclusive skin for players that reach "Honor 5" as part of the End of Seasons rewards to reinforce positive play.

Riot isn't the only publisher trying to control toxic behavior in its player base. Over 350,000 Call of Duty accounts have been banned in the last year for racist names or toxic behavior, whilst 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Call of Duty: Warzone co-developer Raven Software revealed last summer that over 500,000 cheaters have been banned from the battle royale's servers.

Looking for something new to get stuck into? Here are the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best PC games right now.

Publisher Riot Forge revealed that Ruined King, a strategy game originally due to release in 'early 2021', would also be releasing today, and will be available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One, with PS5 and Xbox Series X versions coming soon via free upgrades and with backwards compatibility. The game was delayed out of its original wind𝐆ow in December 2020, and there's been little mention of it since.

Riot Forge also confirmed that Hextech Mayhem, a rhythm game from the developers of the Bit.Runner series and which was announced last week, has released on Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam, E🎉pic, and GOG.

The showcase also revealed that a third game, time-bending 2D platformer Convergence, will launch in 2022, along with Song of Nunu, an adventure game from part of the team behind The Sexy Brutale, which is coming to Nintendo Switch, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Xbox Series X, Xbox One, PS5, PS𒉰4, and PC, also next year. Finally, a fifth game was teased🐽, but other details are scarce.

Established in 2019, Riot Forge is Riot's publishing wing, focusing on stories set within the League of Legendꦅs universe. Ruined King was set to be its first title, but the impact of the pandemic is likely to have rearranged schedules. That does se💮em to mean that it's now hitting the ground running, with four games set to launch in the next 13 months. 

Tempted by the world of League of Legends? Netflix series Arcane is the best introduction you could possibly have.