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[umiman]

I think he's referring to the major slow from Teemo mushrooms. It certainly would make long distance assaults with Xerath much easier. Should try that actually, good idea! =P

Anyway, bored a bit, so let's make a list! I shall call this list... THE TOP 10 CHAMPIONS I DON'T WANT TO SEE COME FLYING OUT OF A SIDE BUSH WHILE I'M IN LANE. The rules? I actually have to see the bastard come out of a bush. Not magically teleport next to me out of nowhere somehow.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

10. Mundo
Lol, Mundo jungle. That guy so silly. *smack* ow wtf? Holy shit my movespee- *smack* ow! *smack* ow! OH GOD I CAN'T REACH MY TOWER! *smack* This is what happens when cleaver procs red buff...

9. Skarner
He reaches you, it's GG. Hope you brought flash! And better hope he's not level 6! Course, he has to actually reach you fir- oh wait, silly me... he's got that incredible speed boost and probably flash too! Ah. Ha. Ha. Ha. Fuck this guy.

8. Udyr
It's not only the unavoidable goddamn flash stun that's the problem. It's his ridiculous damage. Why on earth can this guy do so much damage and still be tankier than Cho Gath?! Boom, you get hit 4 times? Bye bye, first blood.

7. Lee Singer
A super long distance dash. A slow. Another dash. All at level 3... At level 1 this guy can remove 50% of your hp with just his freaking Q. He doesn't even need to kill you. Just does that and herp derps away, good you lost your lane forever.

6. Jarman
Why is this guy higher than Lee Singer? Because this bastard has the same goddamn thing as the blind monk except he has a freaking knockup too!!!! Not to mention he's even harder to kill...

5. Karthus
First, I smack you with my overpowered wall to remove all your defenses and speed. Then I remove ALL your hp. And if you're not dead? Gimme sec let me call my homeboys in the orbital space cannon.

4. Xin Zhao
Here you stand. Only a few inches from your tower. Here comes X^Z, you run backwards. TOO LATE. Slow, knockup, dead.

3. Malzaherp
Here's my thought process when I see Malzaherp coming to my lane. "Well... I'm dead." 30 seconds later I'm dead.

2. Maokai
HEY LET ME CHAIN CC YOU FOREVER HUE HUE HUE TOWERDIVE YOU WOOOO!!!

1. Blitzcrank
Ever tried to fight a Blitzcrank with red buff? It procs with his Q, his E, and even his ultimate. Neverending true damage. You can't 1v1 him. You can't escape him. Might as well just go make a coffee when he appears in your lane since you're dead anyway.

[RedKing]

List needs more Kassassin. "Imma teleport and give you a hug...oops, did that Void Blade end up inside you? My bad."

Also LeBlanc, for her teleport, Q, ult (which then acts like a beefier Q) and (in late game) instakills you. And then she decoys away before you can even touch her.

[ThtblovesDF]

3v3

I´m laning against teemo + heimerdinger (pre-madetrolls I bet :I) as blitzkrank, but it actually worked out just fine, grab the squishys and have some fun.

Jungle heimerdinger Y/N? I´m thinking Y, big time.

[umiman]

Not magically teleport next to me out of nowhere somehow.

[Werdna]

Newb here, providing progress report.  Played Dominion mode by accident* and got hooked.  The short 15 minute battles appeal to me, as does the Arathi Basin style of play (my favorite battleground in WoW).  There's no guides for it so its been fun experimenting with new item loadouts tailored to that sort of play.  Been running Ryze or Gangplank.  GP's barrage is a little more fun since it forces me to watch the minimap for good nuke opportunities.  In fact Dominion as a whole really forces map awareness.  OTOH I can see how it can encourage some sloppy play, it doesn't really have the same poke-poke conservativeness of Summoner's Rift.  Because of the faster combat/games though, I'm seeing and learning a lot more of the enemy champion skills than I was in Rift, where it was taking forever to learn what champion does what. 

Question:  What exactly is Riot doing during the long-ass "summoning" load screen?  They are certainly not loading the level, it should take seconds to load such a simple thing.  I'm guessing they are using our clients as part of a distribution network, uploading the patches and game downloads and what-not to people that haven't d/l'd them yet?  Just curious. 

* seems like a lot of folks end up in it by accident, every few games someone's raging about accidentally selecting it

[webadict]

Played as support Morgana. Got my summoner spells ready, and my awesome support master--wait. TF, why are you going bottom with Yorick?

So... I'm stuck fighting Ahri mid?!? With support masteries and items?!?

lol, Fizz ganks mid, gg. Hey, why not just farm mid while I'm at it... Kill Ahri once more. Volibear switches to hold it. He's dead. Warwick comes. He's ready. He waits until I'm low and starts hitting me hard. TF walks in and stuns. My ult starts. He tries to port out before the stun. Hits the wall and misses. Stunned. Double snare and stun by TF and I. Janna walks in and shields Warwick. I just hit him until he dies. TF somehow dies. I throw some snares and walk away.

I got to 4/0/10 at around 20 minutes, because I guess I'm still just going to be the support and assist like a champ (Like I care, I didn't even buy defensive items because they couldn't hurt me). TF, on the other hand, is only surviving because I shield him and then walk in front of him. Every time he gates, I just wait for the announcer to call out his death.

We take mid lane, they backdoor and take top lane. Not cool, Warwick and Volibear. Not cool. Teemo attempts to hide by going invisible. I throw out binds and pool. Yorick throws out ghouls. He starts to run. Mordekaisered.

Team fight breaks out at Baron. Well, what happens when a Morgana walks in last with her shield on, her ult up, and half dead enemies?

They attempt the same backdoor with bottom lane. I got there first. Warwick attempts to take the tower, but my ult has already started. He's at a quarter health before Yorick walks in and murders Volibear. TF stuns Warwick for the kill.

We take bottom all the way to the turret, but Mordekaiser gets greedy and 1v4s the enemy team. I try to save him but die. Nooooo! I revive and see TF get slaughtered by Ahri the Assassin. So, I go mid and try to hold the turret. I basically assault mid and laugh at them, but that Warwick... he's a mighty fast devil. Chases me through the turrets and I'm at quarter health. At the second turret, I bind him, and run past my Mordekaiser, who smiles widely. Woo Assist!

I hold top lane and save our inhibitor, push the lane, walk in some more and win the last teamfight.

I'd say it went pretty well, considering I wasn't expecting to take mid. Clairvoyance is kinda nice to have, though. 8/1/20 isn't bad to have, seeing as how my team averaged 11/7/12 without me.

Newb here, providing progress report.  Played Dominion mode by accident* and got hooked.  The short 15 minute battles appeal to me, as does the Arathi Basin style of play (my favorite battleground in WoW).  There's no guides for it so its been fun experimenting with new item loadouts tailored to that sort of play.  Been running Ryze or Gangplank.  GP's barrage is a little more fun since it forces me to watch the minimap for good nuke opportunities.  In fact Dominion as a whole really forces map awareness.  OTOH I can see how it can encourage some sloppy play, it doesn't really have the same poke-poke conservativeness of Summoner's Rift.  Because of the faster combat/games though, I'm seeing and learning a lot more of the enemy champion skills than I was in Rift, where it was taking forever to learn what champion does what. 

Question:  What exactly is Riot doing during the long-ass "summoning" load screen?  They are certainly not loading the level, it should take seconds to load such a simple thing.  I'm guessing they are using our clients as part of a distribution network, uploading the patches and game downloads and what-not to people that haven't d/l'd them yet?  Just curious. 

* seems like a lot of folks end up in it by accident, every few games someone's raging about accidentally selecting it

Nah, patches are downloaded separately. I guess they're just trying to sync with the server? I dunno. I'm not expert. What does Warcraft 3 do?

Also, it's because Dominion appears before Classic for some reason. It's actually kind of annoying.

[Werdna]

Nah, patches are downloaded separately. I guess they're just trying to sync with the server? I dunno. I'm not expert. What does Warcraft 3 do?

Sure, but when you download a patch, or the game, where are you actually downloading it from?  My guess is that all of the clients sitting at "Summoning" screens are all acting as temporary torrent-like servers, uploading chunks of data to people that don't have them yet.  That way Riot doesn't have to pay for extra servers for a game that many people are playing for free, and the wide nature of the distribution also means that a 'server down' doesn't cripple the network at a bad time, as it would if you rely on traditional central servers.  Blizzard does the same thing to distro their WoW patches (at the launcher, though) to prevent their servers from getting crushed every time there's an update.

[webadict]

Nah, patches are downloaded separately. I guess they're just trying to sync with the server? I dunno. I'm not expert. What does Warcraft 3 do?

Sure, but when you download a patch, or the game, where are you actually downloading it from?  My guess is that all of the clients sitting at "Summoning" screens are all acting as temporary torrent-like servers, uploading chunks of data to people that don't have them yet.  That way Riot doesn't have to pay for extra servers for a game that many people are playing for free, and the wide nature of the distribution also means that a 'server down' doesn't cripple the network at a bad time, as it would if you rely on traditional central servers.  Blizzard does the same thing to distro their WoW patches (at the launcher, though) to prevent their servers from getting crushed every time there's an update.

Perhaps, but if that were the case, the loading bars wouldn't all be separate. You could have everybody uploading an allowance, so something must be loading that might take at least a minute.

[umiman]

Allow me to explain.

The client you use to login and browse stuff is completely separate from the game itself. The client uses Adobe AIR and you can just think of it as the launcher that starts the game. All patches and external stuff are downloaded and saved when you start the launcher.

The loading screen itself merely loads the game. It's basically as if every time you start a game, you are restarting the entire game. Think of it as playing say... Starcraft. Where every single time you wanted to play a match, you had to restart the entire game. That's how it works. So for some people, it can take a super long time (ask Jar of Jam) but for people with more up to date computers, it's pretty fast.

While all this is going on, something called Pando Media Booster is acting as a sort of pseudo-bittorrent client that helps mitigate server load by spreading some of it out over every single computer that has LoL installed. I've tried uninstalling this thing a few times but every single time LoL patches, it reinstalls itself.

[Werdna]

I'm finding it really difficult to believe that it takes so long to load such a simple game.  Skyrim loads faster!  Does Starcraft really take that long to load into a MP game (I only played SP)?  The entire map is sitting locally, there should be nothing to load from other people besides info on what the other nine separate models to load are, and those model graphics should also be sitting locally.  If that were the case,your loading bar should load the same way every time, but I've had it hitch on some loads, or go slower than normal.  It does clearly go slowest on the first game though, which does indicate caching, but that works both ways.  Some people with flash drives should be showing incredible loading speeds, but I never see it?

That Pando Media Booster sounds exactly like what I am talking about.  I think a good portion off your Loading bar is actually that thing packing off a few chunks of data to some other guy, who is just now loading into his launcher and finding a patch to download.  Have you ever noticed that when 9 people are at "Summoning", the last person's summoning bar tends to suddenly accelerate?  Does that make any sense, if he's just loading up a map?  Or is it because 9 other people are helping that last guy upload a few data chunks he hasn't gotten to?  Or, sometimes your own bar pauses - why, if you're loading a level from disk? 

For people that take a long time, I'm willing to bet they're on networks with poor upload speed.

[umiman]

Who exactly are you complaining to here? Because last I checked, no one here has the ability to modify Riot's shitty code. If you are raging so hard at just the loading screen, I really want to see what happens when you actually play the game in solo queue. xD

[Werdna]

Chuckle... sorry if it sounded like I was raging, I have no complaints whatsoever - this is pure curiosity (I'm a software developer).  Loading screens are a chance for me to take a leak, get a beer, or read a few pages on the Kindle so its no sweat to me.  I'm just dying to know what's going on beneath the hood.   

[RedKing]

I'll admit, I'm curious too. Because mine dials up to 100% in no time. But every other match or so, there will be one guy who takes like five minutes to finish loading. And it seems to be independent of ping time. I've had people with ping times in the 300s load quickly, and people with less than 100ms ping times take minutes. Is that their ping to the server, or their ping to me? (And my ping is typically <100ms)

[Wravburn]

Not sure where he would rank in Umi's list, but personally I'm scared shitless if Malphite runs out of the bush. Especially if he has some AP(true story) he scares the poopoo out of me. Then again, I usually play physical heroes.

[RedKing]

Not sure where he would rank in Umi's list, but personally I'm scared shitless if Malphite runs out of the bush. Especially if he has some AP(true story) he scares the poopoo out of me. Then again, I usually play physical heroes.

I've only really ran afoul of Malphite once. But it was terrifying. Late-game with Master Yi, used to popping Highlander and Surge and making corned beef hash out of enemy champs. Malphite had been in another lane most of the game and started showing up on my mine. I couldn't scratch him. I didn't think to check his stats in the target window up top, but his armor must've been over 300 with hefty MR as well. I fared poorly after that. He hounded me the rest of the game, and I didn't have anybody nearby with CC to keep him off me.