Anyone here play? I've been eaten by it over the past few days. (hence my slight disappearance in case anyone noticed)

It's essentially a PvP based, fantasy RTS. (Dawn of War/Command and Conquer etc) The main difference is that you only control one unit, your champion. Currently there's over 40+ champions available I believe, with new ones being added every two to three weeks.

There are also bot games, set in Beginner or Intermediate settings and two game modes. One is a standard 5v5 (with an additional 3v3 sub-mode only available for PvP) in which you aim to destroy the enemy 'nexus', essentially, their base. The other game mode is called 'Dominion', which is basically a control point game, that sees you capture and hold 5 points on the map to damage the enemy nexus from 500hp to 0.

The map (for Classic at least, I'll go onto Dominion in a sec) is split into 3 'lanes', bottom, top, and middle. Along each lane, there are two turrets or towers for each team, along with various patches of brush to conceal yourself in. Once spawned by your nexus, your minion waves will travel along the lanes and attack opposing minions and towers. As a general rule of thumb, two champs take top, two take bottom, and one in mid.

Middle is usually a cool lane, though can be pretty hard, as a lot of the team fights happen there. However, you'll more often than not see one in mid, one in top, two in bottom and one 'jungler'.

To win the game, you have to push the lanes until you reach the enemy base, (which houses a third turret for each lane) destroying the towers along the way, as they can two hit minions and 5-6 hit you at the start, and also to unlock the next tower so you can destroy it and so on.

In between the lanes is what's called the 'jungle', here at various points, neutral minions spawn who won't attack on sight. There are some characters who specialise at jungling, who instead of laning, take to the jungle and gain their gold and exp from the minions there. There are also special minions there, being the Golem, Lizard Elder, Dragon and Baron Nashor. Baron, Lizard and Golem all give buffs to the champion that finishes them, being a bonus to all stats and HP buff, attack speed and fire effect buff, and mana regeneration and ability cooldown buff respectively. The Dragon is there for lots of gold gain relatively quickly. All kinds of cool stuff. Its the jungler's role to help every lane and ensure the team makes it to late game, or to the win, whichever comes first. They do this via a process called 'ganking', turning up in a lane to force an advantage by locking down a quick 2v1 kill or something.

The map for Dominion is pretty different, instead of the enemy bases being in the top right and bottom left of the map, they are situated at the left and right side instead, and actually serve little purpose save for respawning and the shop. Instead of the three lanes, there is a circle, interspersed with 6 capture points connecting the nexus'. In the middle of the circle is the jungle again, this time with two buffs in the center (as there are no neutral minions) as well as speed shrines (giving a temporary speed buff as you pass over it) and health relics (gives you health when you nab it). This gamemode is pretty new, and is kinda underplayed. I can kinda see why though, personally I don't believe it's as good as the standard gamemode.

Once in a game, with your champion (of which there'll be a selection of free to play champions, which rotate every week or so), you notice the gold, shop, and level systems. This is another major point that separates League of Legends from other games, and unfortunately also makes being AFK even for 5 minutes fatal, and dropping out entirely impossible.

Gold is earned when you kill minions of any variety, champions, towers and inhibitors.(buildings behind a team's base tower, destroying this spawns super minions for the opposite team) While minions give you around 30 gold a piece, enemy champion kills net you about 300-400. This is then spent on items that boost your stats considerably, some even having activatable effects, such as health potions or the Rylei's Crystal Sceptre (don't worry about that...) at the shop back at base.

Levels are gained in the same way as gold, though instead of having to have hit the enemy or minions, you only have to be in the vicinity of them. This is to offset the fact that you have to land the last hit on minions or champions to obtain the gold. Predictably, you start at level 1 when you enter the game, and the level cap per game is 18. By that point you will have levelled all three of your skills to 5, and your ultimate to 3, the max levels for the abilities.

On that note, on to the abilities...

All champions have three regular abilities, obviously differing from champ to champ, and one ultimate. Ultimate skills are only available to first unlock at level 6, and is often a very good idea to max it as soon as you're able. Ultimates are usually the strongest and flashiest skills available, and so have a cooldown of anywhere from a minute to two or three; reducing in cooldown times with each level. There are cool exceptions, some champions will start with their ultimates and have different max levels for their abilities.

Completing a game, win or lose will net you summoner exp, increasing your summoner level and unlocking more summoner spells (extra spells that don't use mana or energy to use, but comes with a large cooldown cost. They are also un-level-able) It will also earn you IP, or Influence Points. You can use these to buy Runes (they boost your stats slightly, unrecommended at low levels, 20+ at least, since there are three tiers of runes, making the lower level ones obsolete) and Champions. Typically, you get about 100IP per game, and newer released champions are around 6300. So yeah, good luck getting them all without digging into your pocket and forking out for some RP, or Riot Points.

Riot Points is essentially how Riot get their money, all champions can be bought with it, newer ones for around 975, 800 points being £5 or thereabouts I think. Riot Points can also be used to buy champion skins, which every champion has about 2-4 of on average.

...

Damn, that's quite a wall there.

But yeah, Youtube RiotGames and watch some of their videos. The game's completely free to download and install, and... it's awesome... and fun...

JUST GO, JUST PLEH LEAGUE OK IT'S GOOD. T_T

TL;DR: League of Legends is a pretty unique ARTS/MOBA. Go play it. It's free.
EDIT: Or... just... this... X_X" Clicky

Also, highly relevant although a bit outdated:

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