Want to jump between the North America and EUW or EUNE servers in League of Legends? Now you can — but be advised, it’s a one-way trip (so make sure you double-check which server you’re headed to!) and will cost you 2600 Riot Points.

The activation of the feature was announced overnight, with a reminder that if you’re a European player who joined the North American server before June 1 2010, and weren’t able to transfer at the time, you will get a shiny free one-time transfer token.

If you’ve got questions, hit up the FAQ.

Source: VG247

Yesterday, a company called DFC Intelligence produced a report which stated that DotA 2 was the most-played “core” PC title in the West, passing League of Legends in popularity throughout the first quarter of 2013. DFC quoted a number of source including XFire, and went on to claim that MOBA players far outweighed even MMO heavyweights like World of Warcraft.

Overnight, however, Riot have challenged these findings. A Riot spokesperson revealed that League of Legends sees “over 500,000 peak concurrent players every day on just the EU West shard,” which doesn’t even take into account the number of US and China players. Meanwhile, Valve’s Steamgraph shows that the highest all-time number of DotA 2 players is 325,879 — vastly below that offered by LoL.

“You can see how we would have some issues with the accuracy of this report,” said Riot’s spokesperson.

DFC — who are not actually affiliated with Valve — claimed that the discrepancy was due to them only tracking “key Western markets”.

Source: Games Industry International

When it was revealed that DotA 2 was attracting nearly 300,000 concurrent players and topping the Steam most-played list, we were all suitably impressed. But of course, we also knew that League of Legends was topping 3 million concurrent users, back in October. Also very impressive.

Well, Riot just revealed that League of Legends is now enjoying five million concurrent players. On a regular basis. That’s two million more players in less than six months.

“We’re humbled by the support of players and now more than ever feel the weight of those expectations,” says Riot, nervously. “Good luck, have fun, and please have mercy on our servers.”

Riot Games have announced that they are opening a Sydney-based office to help support the further global expansion of their ridiculously popular title, League of Legends.

“Riot Games Sydney is official. Known for its beaches, opera house, sports scene and friendly-looking marsupials, we’re excited to introduce a little bit of riotousness to Australia’s biggest city,” reads the announcement. “With teams in marketing, esports and community, Sydney Rioters will craft unique experiences on the web and on the ground to support the growing League of Legends community in the Oceania region.

“The best part? We’re just getting started. Riot Sydney will have much more to share soon.”

The Sydney-based office is hiring for an eSports Coordinator and a Community Manager.

Source: Thanks, Nick!

A League of Legends-themed restaurant has opened recently in Chongqing, China. The restaurant, named ‘Demacia’ after the city-state in the game, boasts LoL-themed staff, food, and even the chance to play League of Legends in store for discounts.

A local news report spotted by MMO Culture suggests that some USD $160,000 was invested into the restaurant to get it off the ground. The menu is themed entirely around League of Legends tie-ins, with deep-fried Skarners available (or scorpions, to be precise).

Photos also show a restaurant adored with League of Legends figurines and collectibles, as well as massive statues. Take a look at MMO Culture for more.

Source: MMO Culture via PCGamesN

Riot aren’t pulling any punches when it comes to their mission to clean up what they see as ‘toxic’ behaviour in the MOBA community: two more professional players have crumpled under the banhammer for their “toxic behaviour in-game”, according to a recent ruling.

“We’re now taking action in order to help ensure that players seeking to compete in the LCS represent the principles of good sportsmanship and clean play,” reads the ruling. “To be clear, the actions taken today are the result of the players’ recent misbehavior; their past actions on previous accounts provided historical context and helped to inform our decisions regarding the appropriate actions to take.”

The players affected are Mousesports’ enVision (Ilyas Hartsema) and Against All Authority’s Linak (Damien Lorthios). enVision’s ruling shows that he has been reported in a whopping 29% of all matches played, at a rate 6X greater than the average EU player, and Linak has been reported in 20% of his games. Linak particularly was noted as having “worsened in the past three months, even as his team advanced into the upcoming League of Legends Championship Series (“LCS”) Season Three EU Qualifier.”

The news follows December’s high-profile slamming of Team Dignitas’ IWillDominate.

Source: League of Legends via PCGamer

Despite its name, League of Legends has actually never used a proper league system, always choosing to rely on a single ladder system when ranking players and organising tournaments. Now, as of Season 3, Riot are introducing a six-tier system — Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond and Challenger — and it’s up to you to win ranked matches and work your way up through them if you want to take part in the finals.

To take part in the league system, you need to be at least level 30 and have access to at least 16 champions. It’s all very serious business, so check out the explanation and infographic on Riot’s website and get all the details on how you can work your way up to the top.

A major patch is also in the works which contains a slew of balancing changes — get all the details in the video below.

Source: VG247

Riot are taking their attempt to clean up the online gaming scene seriously — so seriously in fact that they’re not afraid to ban even high profile professionals.

“The decision to impact someone’s career is not one we make lightly,” reads the forum thread, “which is why this is tough news to deliver. Unfortunately, our Tribunal recently was forced to permanently ban a pro player as a response to his persistent toxic behavior, and after closely reviewing the individual’s case and history, the Riot eSports team has issued a ruling that follows this post.”

“IWillDominate has been in Tribunal nine times and punished eight times, including the most recent permanent ban,” states the ruling. “He has a persistent record of in-game harassment, verbal abuse, offensive language and negative attitude. Despite the punishments and official warnings, his harassment score has risen more than 30% from early August to the present date, placing him at the top of the list of North American pro players and among the worst 0.7% of all North American players.”

IWillDominate is a member of Team Dignitas, who were pulled up in August for colluding with a rival team to rig the finals match in MLG Raleigh.

Source: Polygon

Riot’s assistant game design Statikk has taken to the League of Legends forums to answer concerns about jungling and the role of support.

“The current dominant jungle strategy (GP10 Support / Tanks) is fairly stagnant and the overall current jungle playstyle in many cases severely limits potential strategy and choices in other lanes/roles as well,” writes Statikk. “One large problem is that efficient farming of the jungle has very little pay off compared to constantly applying lane pressure by camping / ganking. Overall junglers severely lack in gold unless they successfully gank and snowball the game from the get-go and/or opt for a GP10 strategy.”

“The approach we’re currently taking is to significantly increase the rewards of jungle camps over time (junglers already have a huge impact on the early game). To go along with this though, we are buffing jungle camps back up to actually be more threatening while simultaneously offering new / improved item paths that allow players to specialize in the jungle. Overall we want junglers to be rewarded for building combat stats rather than always being forced to build gold generation items.”

Source: LoL Forums via PCGamesN

Following some horrific network issues at the Season 2 Quarterfinals of the League of Legends World Championships, Riot Games announced that future tournaments would be using a LAN-enabled client.

At a Q&A session over the weekend, Riot CEO Brandon Beck commented that an “offline” version of the client was being created, and would be used for games in the rest of the series. It was not made clear whether or not the general public would get access to this LAN client.

Riot also had some vague news on the availability of a Mac client as well, saying “We’ll have some news soon on that front”. Which presumably means “Yes”.

Source: Destructoid

Riot Games has released a fascinating infographic detailing the achievements of its free-to-play MOBA, League of Legends. The highly competitive title has 70 million registered players, but counts its active player base at 32 million per month. That’s a tremendous jump since Riot last tipped its hand in November 2011, announcing a player base of 11 million.

League of Legends now attracts 12 million players each day and has a peak concurrency of 3 million; players tot up over 1 billion hours played every month, which Riot helpfully contrasts to the total time ever spent on Halo games – 2 billion hours. All this adds up to a bold claim: League of Legends is “the most played video game in the world”. Wow.

Season Two of League of Legends is drawing to a close, with global finals scheduled for October 13. This season boasted the largest prize pool in eSports history: $5 million dollars total, with a cool $1 million for the world champions. League of Legends is also a growing segment of Major League Gaming.

Source: PC Gamer

League of Legends otherwise super-impressive Season 2 of the World Championships has been marred by multiple network failures and disconnects, forcing the two teams into multiple re-matches to determine the outcome of the quarterfinals.

CLG EU and World Elite’s first game went well, but ten minutes into game two the stream froze and the connection at the LA venue crashed, forcing a rematch. An hour into the third match, the connection crashed again, just as CLG were on the cusp of victory — forcing yet another rematch. According to sources on the ground, Riot are still restarting and retrying the matches.

There’s no word from Riot on what caused the outages — although at the moment it looks like hardware rather than DDoS issues — or what they plan to do for the rest of the season to make sure it doesn’t happen again, but analysts agree that the re-matches have already skewed the outcome by giving both teams an extended and consequence-free look at each others playstyle.

Source: PCGamesN

While there’s always a bit of drama and intrigue in the world of eSports, this week’s column locked itself in when the League of Legends divisions for Team Dignitas and Curse NA delivered the journalist’s equivalent of a grubber outside off-stump with their stunning performance in Raleigh.

Why is this important? Major League Gaming awarded the pair the dubious honour of being the first winners and runners-up in competitive gaming to be disqualified for collusion.

The scandal began to unfold when both teams played out the first match of the grand finals using ARAM settings (where all heroes are randomized and ten players battle it out in a single lane for the entirety of the match). This wasn’t illegal, but many players and spectators took it as an affront to the integrity of the competition.

After Curse won the grand finals 3-2 and the event came to a close, MLG released an announcement saying that neither team would be awarded any seeding points or money after both teams were found to have colluded. Reports quickly hit the internet that the teams agreed to split the prize money, with Adam Apicella from MLG tweeting that the matter was “discussed in a public, crowded setting” and confirmed by both teams.

The official reaction

Naturally, the proverbial hit the fan and scattered everywhere. Curse quickly responded by saying that they had agreed to play ARAM – a strange clarification given that you couldn’t really force those settings in the grand finals of an international tournament without the approval of the other team – but all other speculation, including the splitting of the prize money, was false. Dignitas only  admitted that some of the claims were true, but didn’t specify which ones.

Riot Games backed up MLG’s decision, although one imagines they can’t have been too pleased with the decision to ARAM and a negative response that was compounded by fans unhappy with a string of technical issues that plagued the event from start to finish.

The long term impact

MLG has rebounded from less than stellar events before, but the sour taste left in many mouths and the obvious divide between fans may never be repaired. League of Legends is at an interesting crossroads, caught between the dreams of the hardcore vying for a salary and trips around the world, and the casuals concerned about competition draining all the fun out of the game.

It’s interesting to see MLG’s take on splitting prize money, since it correlates with the world of poker (which so many former professionals compare eSports to). 50/50 or even 60/40 splits are common in small poker games and tournaments, and anyone who’s been around competitive LANs for a long while will have seen a bit of prize splitting once or twice just to save time.

But there are some poker tournaments where chopping the pot is forbidden, and it’s typically frowned upon in eSports because it ruins the matches as a competitive spectacle. The games might be more interesting when all the chains and shackles of competition are thrown off, but it’s besides the point – organisations, players and tournament bodies are putting up millions of dollars to sort out the best from the best and no sane administrator would allow the proceedings to be undermined by any back-alley agreement.

The (im)perfect crime

This has been known locally for a long time, and the few occasions where collusion happens is often done privately to avoid exactly this kind of publicity. The fact that the teams were stupid enough to collude in a restaurant where witnesses, including SirScoots from Evil Geniuses), could hear is nothing short of baffling.

Did they truly believe there would be no consequences, or that nobody would rat them out? Furthermore, what guarantee did they have of a proper split? MLG would have never allowed them to draw the series even if the collusion was kept secret – one team would have been declared the victor, awarded the trophy and received the lion share of the winnings via bank transfer or other means. What would have stopped them from keeping first prize and then denying the talks ever occurred if the other team went public?

It’s this kind of naivete that damages the entire industry, but it’s also the kind of lesson it needs. Gamers have spent the last few years learning how to cope with the demands of crafting a professional image, a necessity in a world where games are played not in basements and bedrooms but on the international stage. But money brings responsibility too. It’s time for some common sense.

And on the subject of tournaments, Riot’s unstoppable MOBA League of Legends is the subject of Major League Gaming’s attention this weekend. There’s $10,000 up for grabs in the Summer League of Legends Arena in New York, but unfortunately most of it takes place during prime sleeping time for Aussies. If you are up burning the midnight oil, matches resume at midnight, with the final scheduled for 7:00AM AEST – just the ticket for a bit of pre-office viewing. Unfortunately, the Arenas are part of the MLG’s ongoing efforts to becoming financially sustainable, so video on demand is reserved for premium users. Should you be so fortunate or have no commitments tomorrow which can’t be slept through, tune in here.

Source: VG247

Trailers for patches! What is the world coming to! Well, there’s a trailer for the upcoming patch for League of Legends, which outlines the changes we’ll see for Rumble, Urgot, Cho’Gath and the Tribunal. Check it out below for all the latest details.

Forbes and XFire have come up with some pretty amazing stats as to how much time we are putting into our games, or at least, those of us in the US and the EU. Some of the figures are pretty unsurprising, with Starcraft II for example still being a heavy hitter. But there are a few interesting trends to be found. First up, the sheer number of hours poured into League of Legends is staggering, beating out many other two games combined, at a total of 1,292,502,456 hours played between July 1st, 2011 and June 30, 2012. It’s important to note that no other game even approaches the billion mark.

World of Warcraft is the second most played game, which is interesting only because we’re mostly given the impression that the game is haemorrhaging players. Not enough to make a difference, according to these numbers. Finally, Diablo III is comes in at number 5, which is notable because Diablo III wasn’t released until 45 days before the study’s end. Meaning in 45 days, Diablo III racked up more hours than almost any other game. Whoa.

Source: Forbes

Lead champion designer Morello took to Riot’s forums to address ongoing discussion of League of Legends’ 100th champion, the disappointingly vanilla Jayce, with a gentle reminder that milestones are just things. Still, to assuage the hurt, he teased champion 101:

“I’m really stoked about champion 101 too because I got to work much much more directly on it than I usually do and it’s an archetype I think we’ve needed. I’ll….plant a little teaser for you. (Hint, she’s not made of flesh)” he revealed. Follow the source link to see a full size image of the new combatant, whose filename suggests may be called Zyra.

Source: League of Legends forum