League of Legends has already overtaken the success of GTA across almost all platforms and continues to attract professional players the world over
The king is dead, long live the king! Not since the emergence of Grand Theft Auto (GTA), had a videogame been so successful across the globe. GTA was released in 1997, had numerous versions released and even got itself into the Guinness Book of Records, thanks to sales of over US$ 1 billion in just 24 hours, of its most recent edition, in 2015. It’s worth mentioning that it is an action game, graphic and gruesome, with some semi-pornographic scenes – quite appellative, then.
Well, League of Legends is a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game (or MOBA), which is a subgenre of real-time strategy games, and it’s a free to play. Once you’ve loaded it up, you create your user profile, with which you can play 5 vs 5 matches, choosing if you want to play against the computer’s AI (Artificial Intelligence) or online, against other people.
The game was released in 2009, but it really started becoming popular in Brazil in 2013, with the first private championships. By the end of the same year, there were already eight professional League of Legends teams. Professional? Yep, their job is playing the game – they get paid for it! How? Thanks to championships that are organised by Riot Games, the game’s developer, and broadcast on You Tube and via streaming, which is a live online transmission, complete with commentary from the best players. During these transmissions, the players talk about what they are doing, whilst we watch their screen. It’s like a videogame Big Brother, where you watch what the pros do during their matches.
These professional players also receive money from sponsors (usually brands and products connected to the world of computer games) and the organization makes money selling T-shirts, equipment and accessories.
BBMag chatted with an ex-fan of the game. Pedro Pavan, 16, from São Paulo, first started playing League of Legends in 2010 and, for a while, spent all of his time playing the game. After his computer broke he only went back to playing in 2014. “But this year I stopped for good”, he says. “If you ask anyone who’s ever played, who’s ever had a group of friends with which they wanted to form a team, they’ll tell you that LOL is an incredible game. I used to be in a team, but we didn’t really take the rankings side of things too seriously. Once we got to the quarter-finals of a championship, which was awesome! When I stopped, I had a Gold 1 ranking and could have gotten higher. But my computer wasn’t very good, which influenced my decision to stop”, says Pedro.
Has that got you interested? Want to play? To find out more about League of Legends and get playing, access the link http://gameinfo.br.leagueoflegends.com/pt/game-info/
Interesting facts about MOBAs
-There are quite a lot of MOBAs, but there is only one other as successful as League of Legends, it’s called DOTA. No, DOTA aren’t initials, it’s the name of the game, really.
– Games aren’t continuous, like others (on XBOX, PlayStation), where you can save your progress. With MOBAs, each match is singular and unique, and is fought between teams of 5 against 5, in which the objective is to destroy the enemy’s base. There are other game modes, with smaller maps, but only to have a break from the traditional mode.
– Basically, as the initials suggest, MOBAs are third-person online games, with the mechanics of an RPG (Role Playing Game). However, the difference is that MOBAs are played on a match-by-match basis, at the beginning of each game every player has their skills levelled down to zero, and has to evolve as the match progresses, buying items and getting stronger with their team.
– Curiously, LOL hasn’t had any new versions, whilst DOTA, which has been around for less time, is already on its second edition
– Every match can last between 20 minutes (the minimum) and many hours. It all depends on the abilities of the respective teams in attack and defence.
– As players play more matches, get more experience and beat their opponents, LOL gives players rankings: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master and Challenger. In Brazil, the majority of players are ranked as Bronze and Silver. Many are unable to improve their ranking due to the lack of adequate hardware.
