I’m not a bot, but can you share your experience at all? (I only noticed there were new posts in the thead because of the bot above.)
Sure. My visit was part of my interview loop for a Director-level position at Riot’s HQ in Santa Monica several years ago. YMMV, but it had several unsavory elements, e.g. introductory fist-bumps (a bit odd in my business attire, but given the company logo and culture, I get it), a very disorganized interview schedule (shuffled between different buildings and conference rooms) and sadly, several senior engineers who expressed a “my-way-or-the-highway” attitude and ego…
My friends at Riot say that things have changed in recent years, but I would summarize their issues as growing pains that accompany too-rapid growth. I still hold Riot Games in high respects for the problems they’ve tackled at scale, their advancements of e-sports, etc., but my interview experience soured me enough that I stopped playing/watching League and haven’t looked back.
If you guys ever feel that League matches can be stale or boring, you must watch tonight’s game between the 2 top EU teams: Fnatic and G2.
The picks were unexpected. The role swaps surprising. You won’t believe what happened next!
Seriously though. It was a really entertaining match to watch.
Rift Rivals starts at the end of this week. And so, we get an awesome EU vs NA rap battle:
Feeling pretty good about EU’s chances for this one.
EU is busy showing NA what non stale compositions look like:
Garen + Yuumi vs Mordekaiser + Pyke. Not something you see every day in competitive elsewhere…
I got the script ahead of time so I wasn’t particularly surprised by the picks. It was the most entertaining of the finals I’ve watched so far though (NA, LCK,LEC.)
Oh right except it’s just that it should have been the finals. The team playing against the winner of this series is gonna get rolled.
You were so right.
And so, we get the FNC Vs G2 finals today, along with a possible preview of this year’s World Finals. :D
On in a bit less than 2 hours here:
Should hopefully be a fun series.
Shocking it took them so long, really.
I was coming to post that. Here is the announcement:
And the trailer:
15-20’ matches, a rewrite from scratch, not all champions but reworked gameplay and a full visual remaster and the champion gallery looks awesome.
They have also announced an animated series that looks like it could be a lot of fun:
With the current excitement of Worlds, these are fun times to be following League. They have gone all out for their 10th year celebration.
Been back playing league with some old guildmates. Still a really fun game and the community has overall been substantially less toxic than a few years back. If anyone is looking to play again and wants some regulars to play with, feel free to look me up as BanzaiExsulum. I think Im also in the qt3 group there.
Which region are you in?
We are in NA.
Pretty sure you are on my friends list.
I need to do something i haven’t tried in a few months - logging in. If I do play with you guys, be warned that I’m gonna be real, real rusty. It might be better if I play ARAMs for a few days until my brain learns how to read the game again - when I’ve been away for a while, team fights all start out as a dizzying blur of colors for the first few games, then eventually I can read them a little more properly.
I wouldnt say that any of us are particularly good at the game, so no worries. We have a lot of fun though and do win about half the time. I think Im the only one playing any ranked games atm and I have done terribly in my placements, so no high expectations from any of us.
I find it amazing right now that most of the competitive league of legends tournaments are down right now [thanks covid19!] , but the players are getting together to play open houses, and the casters are getting together to organize and cast the games.
These will no doubt be far better than the actual LCS games.
Hey, at work we’re exploring the idea of predicting the outcome of professional LoL matches.
If anyone here is a fan of the Leagues of Legend uh, leagues, I’d love to hear from you in a PM here, or from this survey to see if you’d be interested in doing some 15-minute swarm sessions with other fans on League matches in the future.
Interesting. I think there aren’t really a lot of 50/50 or 60/40 matches most weeks, which makes prediction using statistics the more accurate than most fan votes for most games. There’s usually a lot of 1st place vs 8th place types of matches that are quite boring because of their predictability.
Are you predicting just based on teams, or after team comps have been selected? After team comps have been selected would be a hell of a lot more interesting, but obviously hard to do outside of a live setting.
Also, have you seen www.twitch.tv/saltyteemo? There’s a huge world of data mining options down there - it’s a spectator stream for low ELO games with a whole community that bets on every game after champion select. They use Parimutuel betting to determine prizepools. I’d be super interested to know how often the crowd there actually bets on the winning team, and how accurately one can predict the winner based on team compositions before the game starts.
It’s nothing like the pro games at all, so it would be a poor data set to train machine learning models, so maybe that’s just something I find interesting.
Yeah, there are a bunch of challenges which we’re facing, but we’re going to give it a shot, too.
Basically, we need a couple of things in place:
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There has to be good sportsbook odds on the matches. We think of sportsbooks as the ultimate “Wisdom of Crowds”, where presumably thousands of bets on various matches move the bet lines.
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We need people to have some knowledge – even casual knowledge – of the teams involved. Even if that means that they’re not bringing in a bunch of pre-existing knowledge, but rather a willingness to at least do even a modicum of research (like, even just 10 minutes of looking at prior records, etc. sometimes!) We like to think that at its best, our platform captures swarm intelligence in a way that magnifies and adds a multiplier to human intelligence. But as my boss likes to say, “If we’re multiplying by zero, the answer stays at zero.”
What I think we’re likely to do is to do the group stage games of the LPL and LCK and maybe some of the elimination round matches in the LCS too for the next few weeks, and see if we’re capturing/demonstrating intelligence. And if we are, then when the summer LCS starts in June, we jump in on that.
I’ve watched about a dozen League matches (recorded) on Twitch and Youtube in the past week or two. I’ve played juuuuuust enough LoL to know what I’m watching. But I just watched my first live match, an LCS Spring Split playoff just now, and it was about as epic a match as I ever could’ve wanted for my first live viewing. Like, it basically ended with Malcolm Butler intercepting Russell Wilson on the goal line.
I can now say I completely “get” eSports. Holy shit that was awesome.
That was a good series, definitely. About 1 in every 10 or 20 series is that good…but if you think that’s nuts, you should watch the group stage of the world’s competition. Some of the “minor” regions like vietnam pull out some stuff the higher level regions have never seen, and totally bamboozle them.
Bonus for Esports: that was broadcast on ESPN.
Check this game out, just to hear a packed stadium going nuts for the extra hype: