My Trip To Riot's Berlin Arena Made Me Miss When League Of Legends Was About People

I've been playing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:League of Legends since 2014, which is a long, long time by any measure. I picked up the game shortly after the release of Vel'Koz, something that's 🉐easy for me to remember because, back then, the newest champion was shown off on the login screen. If you ask anyone from this era when exactly they started playing, they'll likely reference their ‘first’ login screen.

I was 14 years old back then, and I'm still queuing up for a couple of hundred ranked games a season, though I'm far less prolific than I used ไto be. I played 532 games in 2015, and I'm sitting at 70 for this season so far. For better or worse, League of Legends has been one of the most consistent aspects of my adolescence and young adulthood.

With this in mind, I jumped at the opportunity to visit Riot Games' arena in Berlin, a venue I'd never visited despite attending several League esports events over the past decade. After 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:vis🎐iting LoL Park in Seoul earlier this𓃲 year, the home of European League of Legends was another venue to tick off my bucket list. Riot had invited me to get hands-on with the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:recently announced champion, Yunara, and also to show me other aspects of Spi♑rit Blossom Beyond, the theme of the se෴cond half of the ongoing season.

Skin to Win

Riot Games Spirit Blossom Skin Press Trip Showing Off Skins

I arrived, admired🍒 the venue, and mingled with the assembled press and influencers; that last word hadn't entered the vernacular when I first started playing the game over a decade ago. After some time meandering around the arena, we were eventually ushered into the stage area, where various team leads from Riot presented different aspects of Spirit Blossom Beyond.

In all honesty, this presentation made me feel old. I've had conflicting feelings about the direction of League of Legends for a while, and, because I'm a cynic 🌃by nature, I'm 🦩probably more jaded than the average player.

Riot has two sides. The first creates amazing cinematics, is open and transparent with the player base, and cultivates compelling thematic packages, all of which combine to make me want to queue up. But, there's also the side that charges $250 for a skin, while simul🦋taneously reducing the quality of these releases. Yes, one funds the other, but it's hard not to feel somewhat worried about the increased commercialisation of League✨ of Legends.

During the skin section of the presentation, each reveal was accompanied by a chorus of oohs and aahs from the assembled crowd. I haven't bou🀅ght a skin in years, and another pretty outfit for Nidalee (her seventeenth skin) just doesn't turn the dial fo🅠r me. It sounds dramatic, but I sat there thinking, ‘Has League of Legends left me behind?’

It's not just League — we're in an era where live-🦩service games are constantly innovating, squeezing out revenue from cosmetics and crossovers. We don't have it quite so bad in League of Legends, and I remain thankful Goku isn't invading my jungle at level 2 and stealing my chickens. However, there's still an encroaching level of monetisation that I don't quite agree with. Releasing a $250 skin just feels exploitative.

Many players adore skins, and they 𓃲help games stay free-to-p🔜lay. But I just can't help but feel something has changed in the industry. It's like games now exist to sell skins, rather than skins existing to fund games.

Community, a Bygone Era?

Existential crisis aside, after the presentation, we ♔were separated into various rooms. These are the player warm-up rooms i🔯f you've ever watched LEC. Our room wasn't labeled with any particular team logo, but I have a feeling Caps played a couple of solo queue games on the PC I used, and his spirit inhabited me during the subsequent ARAMs.

The ensuing hours playing League were my favourite part of the whole day. I was p🐎laced in a room with ඣa few English-speaking content creators I recognised. I told one of them, , that I used to watch his videos ten years ago, likely making him feel older than I had twenty minutes prior. We were on a private build of League, allowing us to test out the new ARAM map as a five-stack versus other rooms.

These couple of hours reminded me of why I got so hooked on League of Legends in the first place. Playing games on voice with four strangers, getting excited at every good play — the kind of thing that League is built on, not the 'going through the motions' zombie-like emotional state of your average ranked ♓player. It was exciting: I was eager to prove myselꦉf to these people I'd just met, and the vibes were great in-game. It was good 'ol-fashioned fun.

We won every single ARAM game, playing the various other teams present at the event. After lunch, we played a custom five-versus-five against a team of Germans to test out some of the new skins. It🐼 was a back-and-forth nail-biter, with the F🐷innish aficionado hard-carrying us in the late game.

The Good 'Ol Days

League of Legends Spirit Blossom Morgana Splash Art

The whole experience highlighted something that's amiss with modern League of Legends. It's a game built on community that seems to have forgotten the community aspect. This change in mentality dates back to the re-working of the client, which used to show off high-level games you could spectate on the front page, and used to have functionality for public chat rooms. The game felt alive. Now, you can ea﷽sily queue up for solo queue and play for 8 hours without having a single meaningful interaction. More fuel in the forever grind, forgotten the next day.

It's not as if the community has entirely disappeared, but it's become decentralised. I feel for new☂ players pickin𒀰g up the game today because League is lonelier than it used to be. Everything used to feel closer: the content creators, the professionals, the developers. You were part of an ecosystem; now you just feed the ecosystem. League has become systematic, and we've lost some of the spirit we used to have.

ꦯThere's always a danger when looking back that nostalgia clouds one's judgment and affects one's memories. It was a different period of my life:𝔍 I had more free time, and since I was learning the game, every time I improved, it felt like meaningful progression. Perhaps I've hit my ceiling, or don't love the game as much as I used to, or maybe I'm correct and something has changed fundamentally in League of Legends.

A𓆉t the very least, for a few hours in Berlin, I remembered why I love꧟ this game.