Filed under: MMORPG Related, Opinion | 10 Comments »
League of Legends (LoL), is a Defense of the Ancients (DotA) game made by Riot Games. I have logged in countless numbers of hours into LoL during the past few weeks but not once did I think of it as an MMORPG until I saw this news feature on the League of Legends website. LoL was nominated for: Best MMORTS 2009 and Best New MMO 2009. After seeing this I wondered why people would consider LoL an MMO. Riot Games says that League of Legends is not technically an MMORPG but it does have a lot of similarities that these type of games offer.
So how exactly is a DotA game like League of Legends an MMORPG?
Your character in LoL is a summoner that can summon a champion of your choice onto the battlefields of Valoran. At the start of every match you can choose two utility spells out of a list of thirteen to use during the game. The spells vary from heals, extra movement speed, teleport, etc. At the end of every match you gain experience based on whether your team won/lost and your personal performance during the match. 
The max summoner level is 30 and for each level you gain you get a mastery point. Mastery points are spent on the three mastery trees which are: Offense, Defense and Utility. This allows you to customize your summoner to your play style. Adding in talent trees makes LoL very unique for a DotA game since everyone will have different mastery builds.
You also get influence points at the end of every match (which can be viewed as currency). Influence points can be used to buy champions you don’t currently own and also to buy runes.
Runes are items that enhance your champions traits and abilities. Summoners have a rune book where you can place certain runes in their respective slots. As you level up you get access to more rune slots in the book and higher tiers of runes. There are three tiers of runes that can be purchased with influence points and four different types of runes. The different types of runes are: Marks, Seals, Glyphs and Quintessences. The runes do various things like increasing attack speed, additional mana, bonus health regeneration, etc.
So is League of Legends an MMORPG? I don’t really think there’s a right or wrong answer. People will have their own ideas and views of what an MMORPG. If you search for “League of Legends MMO” you will find a lot of sites that view LoL as an MMO. Even sites like SK-Gaming (a well known team of professional E-Sports players that compete in games like: World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, etc) refer to League of Legends as an MMO and points out that the game has many similarities which are found in MMOs. LoL is just one of those games that could be an MMO while at the same time it isn’t. What I can say is that it does have a lot of things that you would find and expect in an MMORPG like choosing spells, leveling up character, customizing mastery trees and buying items (runes) that increase a character’s stats/abilities.
For the record I personally don’t consider League of Legends to be an MMO/MMORPG. It does have some of the main traits that an MMORPG has but I just don’t consider interacting with nine other people (five vs five games) as a “massive” multiplayer game.
Certainly not an MMO, they are pushing the MOBA title now. This game is great though.
If it were mmo, wouldn’t that make diablo a mmorpg as well?
JP:
Yea, I never really heard of the term MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas) until I started playing LoL. I don’t like the term because I feel that people are going to start making up their own little “genres” for games. We should just call it a DotA game and leave it at that because that’s what League of Legends is at heart. And yes the game is great and very very addicting.
Callan:
I never really got into Diablo because at the time I was playing Counter-Strike like a mad man so I can’t really comment on that.
As I said in my post I never considered LoL to be a MMO until I saw that news article on the LoL website. After thinking about it I had to admit it did have some MMO/MMORPG qualities. Are those qualities enough for it to be coined as a MMO? I don’t know but there are a lot of people and many sites that label League of Legends as an MMO which I found to be very interesting because like I said I don’t think LoL is a MMO.
Eric: DotA is as much of an existing “genre” as MOBA is. DotA is just the name of a mod. If we were to stick to the defined genres LoL should be classified as RTS, nothing less, nothing more. After all, an rts is what it is.
@psycho
You’re absolutely right when you say LoL is an RTS and DotA is as much of a “genre” as MOBA. The thing is though when you play games like LoL, Heroes of Newerth, etc. you automatically associate it with DotA. I mean the way I see it is DotA has kind of evolved into its own “mini” genre under RTS.
Having never played DotA, it doesn’t conjure that image for me. This would be like calling all MMO”s Ultima Onlines, or whatever the first one was.
.
And it isn’t quite an RTS, the S part implies strategy, and while there is some they are definitely more team based than strat based. It feels more like a game of soccer than Command and Conquer.
Definitly not an MMO, heck even Guild Wars wasn’t an MMO but rather just a COORPG (co-op online RPG).
The thing they both miss is a large persistant world with alot of player characters to really make them “Massive”
We just need an official MOBA classification to list this game under, and a lot of others that are coming, such as Bloodline Champions.
And for those defending it that it’s an MMO, what makes it massive? The community? By that logic Diablo and FPS games such as Unreal or Quake are MMO’s
To those of you in the gaming community which are avid users and/or fans of various online-based games, I come to you with a report on the abuses of users/fans of League of Legends (LoL) by RIOT Games.
While promoting their product, they asked each and every one of those who are active members of the LoL community to vote multiple times daily at MMOSITE. If RIOT achieved top seat in two of the three categories, we would each be rewarded.
The community responded, and the achievement was so. Since LoL became public, however, the reliability of the servers has been horrible. Downtime for up to 12 hours at a time, glitches throughout the client and in gameplay, etc.
Today, during our reward period for voting LoL as the top game for two categories, the servers have been mediocre at best. Additionally, the server crashed within the last few hours removing any and all benefit of the reward given.
Poised as a company that is for and by players, RIOT has now reduced its standing and has caused many people to just give up. When issues are reported, there is little or no response. Due to the frustration by the LoL community, hostility has come toward RIOT Games. In response, RIOT has completely disallowed any user to login to the site to post anything.
I am posting here so that some of you may read this and make your own decision whether to play LoL (it is a really fun game – if it is working). But am also posting hereto attempt to “go to the mattresses” and get help in resolving this issue by outside pressure.
Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter.
LoL is still a great game…although I think Riot can fix on a lot of simple quality of life things to make the game even better.
plz dl link?