A step in the right direction.
Riot Games the good:
Riot has been releasing champs regularly, has shown a marked interest in connecting with the community and has released an innovative judging system for players. The Tribunal (Update: The Tribunal is out of pre-release here: Tribunal) allows players to judge other players. Not only is this useful for rooting out bad players, it’s also quite enjoyable to read the logs about the outrageous things players have done. More than that, they said they will give special consideration to veteran players, which many of us appreciate. It is a step in the right direction and I hope to see more of this. They’ve also stepped up the quality of their character animations, as seen in the death animation of the character Rumble.
Not yours, can't have.
Riot Games the bad:
Riot has continually mentioned the release of their new map magma chamber (http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Magma_Chamber) but continues to push this release back further and further. As of now, it remains to be seen how far they will push it back. Another minor gripe that doesn’t affect all users is that paying users are treated the same as normal ones (http://www.leagueoflegends.com/tribunal/faq#21) . Which means, if you get banned you get no refund, you just lose the money you have spent on the game.
Things certainly have changed.
Riot Games the ugly:
The League of Legends EULA gives them some massive powers over what they can get rid of you for (http://www.leagueoflegends.com/legal/eula). You can have your ability to play the game revoked over “E. Use any unauthorized third-party programs that interact with the Software in any way, including but not limited to, “mods,” “hacks,” “cheats,” “scripts,” “bots,” “trainers,”. Which includes color blind mods so players who are color blind can see the game properly. To be fair, Riot has said they will help modders create mods such as these within the Riot game framework. But that still doesn’t negate the fact that this allows them to ban you for something else and claim you violated one of their many terms of service.
After reading through the EULA, my brain looked like this.
The even Uglier: The EULA goes on even further to state that “RIOT GAMES DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE GAME AND/OR THE SOFTWARE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE, THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED, OR THAT THE SOFTWARE IS FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL COMPONENTS. YOU ASSUME ALL RESPONSIBILITY FOR SELECTING THE GAME AND/OR THE SOFTWARE TO ACHIEVE YOUR INTENDED RESULTS, AND FOR THE INSTALLATION OF, USE OF, AND RESULTS OBTAINED FROM THE GAME AND THE SOFTWARE.”
While this is pretty standard for many contracts, gamers should be aware that riot has total control over your game. Don’t expect any less.
I think it’s safe to assume that magma chamber will be coming out in season 2 along with the graphics update. It would not look right to have the low quality characters in the high quality map, and would be a waste of resources to create the map in low quality when they are about to revamp it.
As for the EULA thing that’s pretty standard for any game from what I’ve seen.
I haven’t heard of any game with microtransactions that refunds you upon a ban, and at least riot will refund you if you regret a purchase, and will give you rp if you are just 50 or so short of what you want and luckily riot does not ban for silly things like they have mentioned in the EULA, which is pretty common from all games; where they just want to cover their bases.
Fair enough, but I worry that some people don’t read the EULA.
Magma Chamber and the graphics update were never really released as a “This is what is on the horizon!” but just as a “Expect this in the next year.” Type deal. They do this all the time. All the time. Like the Monkey King, dude was announced like 2 months ago and isn’t coming out for a long time. Or shit the Tribunal, that was previewed ages ago and is just now out in PREVIEW form.
Rumor is currently we’ll see the magma chamber/graphics near the DotA2 release along with a new game mode and another unannounced map.
Also the graphics update makes it look like HoN. Fuck HoN and the people who play it. It’s taken 200 of the top HoN players going “HERP DERP IMMA QUIT HON AND BE KING OF LOL” and ragequitting after getting stuck in Elo Hell (half of them had Riot assisting them) before ONE OF THEM even made it to the top tiers of players. (On that note, Chu8 is awesome tier. Fuckin God of LoL playing Maokai exclusively and with no help.)
Well, for the ban of paying players, they can say that they are fair and all, still we have yet to see if they live up to that.
For the rest… well, tipical riot way, so Its just patience, meanwhile enjoy some characters we will never se again in real games.