Being a Zyra main, a lot of people asked me if I was excited for the new Zyra skin due to be released with the Harrowing patch.

Although my answer might surprise you, I actually don’t like Haunted Zyra. So many people have asked me why that I decided just to write a post about it.

To me, Zyra is a champion who appears harmless, but holds deadly power. Before she captured the body of the sorceress (according to her lore) and was just a plant, there was no apparent danger when approaching her jungle. Animals ventured in numerous times, and would eventually get killed by Zyra in a place where they thought they were in a regular natural habitat. Even after injecting her powers into a body and becoming mobile, she has an attractive and flowerly appearance, but when an enemy gets in range, she traps them in place and kills them instantly without giving them a chance of escape.

Haunted Zyra seems to have an innate evil to herself. She’s surrounded by death, and spawns creatures you would presumably find in a graveyard. Upon her death, she herself turns into a hideous creature. This conflicts with what I think Zyra is, or at the very least, what I want her to be. Instead of being innocent to lure in prey, she clearly advertises how terrorizing she is.

I dislike the Wildfire Zyra skin for similar reasons – it doesn’t seem like she fits in well with randomly setting forest fires when she herself is supposed to represent nature. I think a better skin for Zyra would be Death Blossom Zyra, similar to the Elise skin. I think that series is fitting for Zyra, and if it is ever made, I would definitely get it.

I recently read the patch notes regarding changes to Draven’s passive that will be coming up in patch 3.9. I usually don’t voice my opinion on balance changes because I feel as if I am underqualified to make such statements. However, Draven’s new passive is so blatantly bad that I feel as if balance expertise is not needed to point out its negative aspects.

For those of you unfamiliar with the passives, here are the old and new passives:

Wicked Blades: Draven’s critical strikes deal 30 + (4 × level) bonus physical damage over 4 seconds. Spinning Axe also causes this effect even if it does not critically strike. If Wicked Blades is re-applied to a target, its duration is reset to 4 seconds and any damage not yet dealt is carried forward, increasing the amount of each tick of damage.

League of Draven: When Draven catches a Spinning Axe, or kills a minion or monster, he gains one stack of Adoration. When Draven kills an enemy champion, he consumes half of his Adoration stacks and gains 3 gold per stack consumed. Draven loses half of his Adoration stacks upon death.

I’m going to cover three of the biggest points from three diverse perspectives – why the passive is mechanically bad, why Riot’s justification of not fixing the old passive is bad, and why the passive is unfitting to Draven’s character.

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Winners keep winning and losers keep losing

If you’ve known me for a long time, you might know that I was a diamond-level player on the old Twisted Treeline, before they revamped the map and added altars. Since then, I stopped playing the new Twisted Treeline because I don’t like it for many reasons. One of the biggest reasons I dislike it is because the map is oriented towards helping winners keep winning and losers keep losing.

The same concept applies to Draven’s new passive. If he is winning and getting kills, he gets rewarded even more by his passive. However, if he is losing and he is never getting kills, his passive never goes into effect. If he is losing even harder and keeps dying, his passive becomes even more useless – the amount of gold he is never going to get becomes lower.

This is a bad gameplay mechanic for both scenarios. If Draven gets more gold for getting kills, he becomes unfun to play against, because he snowballs out of control and gets exponentially stronger. On the other hand, if Draven never gets anything out of his passive because he is doing poorly, it becomes discouraging for the Draven player.

Do-nothing early-game passives don’t make them invalid

One of the reasons Riot gave for remaking Draven’s passive instead of adjusting and balancing the old one is that, if they were to balance it, the passive would become nearly useless during very early levels. They say that as if it is a problem, even though, in the past, they have demonstrated that there are balanced champions who fall under this category. For example, Tristana’s passive has no effect at level 1, and kicks in at level 2. Syndra’s passive has no effect at level 1, and continues to have no effect until level 9.

Where is this money coming from?

Finally, the concept of the passive conflicts with Draven’s lore and character. Previously, he was one of two blood brothers, and Draven’s passive made his enemies bleed, just like Darius’. Now, he randomly gets gold out of nowhere.

Twisted Fate is able to use the concept of gaining money because it fits his character – he is a gambler and has close ties with casino games. One could argue that bounty hunters could use the concept of money, but Draven isn’t a bounty hunter, he’s an executioner.

Overall, it creates a disconnect and breaks continuity with how the lore and character development was originally made.

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Is Riot going to change Draven’s passive? I don’t think so, because a lot of people complained about it with valid arguments when it was released on the public beta environment, and Riot still chose to release it as-is. However, now that it’s about to be released to millions, I think the potential for Riot to reconsider the passive more seriously, due to the imminent public disappointment, will increase.

I’m currently in the process of browsing through my old website files and cleaning them out as I finalize my server transfer (about which I will explain more soon).

While doing that, I found this ancient screenshot I took of League of Legends from over a year ago – the web server’s date stamp shows it is from April 2012.

(Click to enlarge)

So for everyone who has joined League of Legends more recently, that’s what Summoner’s Rift used to look like.

If you’ve been keeping up with the League of Legends patch notes for the public beta environment, you might already know that there is going to be a new leagues system for competitive ranked play on League of Legends. It’s currently being tested out, and will eventually go onto the live servers in some form of what the testing version is like now.

The basic premise of the league system is that you’re placed into a league, and you compete to earn points in order to get promoted and demoted from divisions inside the leagues. If you do extremely well, you can also get promoted to the next league.

The main idea of doing this was to get rid of the elo system – basically, Riot Games didn’t want each individual person to have a numerical value assigned to them that signifies their skill level. They also wanted to make the scale of competition more local – instead of being on a massive ladder of hundreds of thousands of people, you are now competing against a handful of other people who have been placed into your division.

My initial opinion about this is that, although it might be pretty on the outside, it seems to be the same as before on the inside. It doesn’t seem like matchmaking will prioritize you with people in your own divi­sion (and if it did, it would get pretty frustrating because you would be playing with and against the same people over and over). The number of points you earn to move on to the next league seem to still be global.

Going back to matchmaking, it most likely will completely ignore what league or division you’re in, because it will still use a hidden elo (or MMR, which stands for match making rating), just like normal games do. So, if you seem to be a very unlucky silver league player who always fails your promotion series, you might have a high-enough hidden elo that you’re queued with gold and platinum league players, but still never manage to get out of silver league.

Of course, I had to try this out, and as we all know, the people on PBE are complete trolls (or are just plain stupid or bad). I streamed my experience to share with everyone.

Out of the first three games I played, two of those games I had to carry so hard that if something like this happened on the normal server, you would be considered some sort of god. The first game I played Kassadin and went 33/10/13 (the tenth death being an execution to a super minion), and the third game I played Miss Fortune and went 29/9/11.

I ended up placing into Silver Division I (which was named Zyra’s Infiltrators for me).

If you’re also interested in trying out the new leagues system, you can head on over to the public beta server (and prepare to carry as hard as I did if you want to win). If you want to watch the replays of my stream, they can be found on Twitch.TV at http://twitch.tv/parkzer/b/359268549 for the first part and http://twitch.tv/parkzer/b/359328617 for the second.

A while back, I had a “moment” in my League of Legends career where I got overly frustrated with ranked games, and publicly announced that I was temporarily retiring from competitive League of Legends play. I specified that I would only be playing normal games with my friends for fun.

Since then, you might have noticed that season 3 started, and I already made my way back up to about 1400 elo. No, I did not already come out of temporary retirement; I just took a different approach to solo and duo queue, and no longer see it as a competitive environment anymore. That’s why I’ve decided not to even call solo queue solo queue anymore, I call it yolo queue.

If you’re unfamiliar with the phrase “yolo,” it stands for “you only live once.” Most people declare this acronym prior to doing something very stupid, justifying their action by saying that you only live once, so you might as well do it.

Although I personally don’t really like the concept of “yolo,” and prefer the parodies of “yolo” instead (such as “better put on your seat belt, because yolo”), I thought League of Legends would be a great scenario when “yolo” would be very applicable.

In addition to this, I’ve come up with a short list of ways you can rethink solo queue so you get less frustrated while playing. We’ll start with,

Solo queue is no longer named solo queue, it’s named yolo queue.

Being forced to support when you main AP carry? Just support anyway, because yolo. You suck at support? It’s okay, yolo. There’s a troll on your team? Just play, because yolo. About to lose because of the troll? It’s okay, yolo. As you can see, saying “yolo” to every potential problem that arises will make you feel much less anxious and much more relaxed.

Solo/duo queue elo is not an indication of how good you are at League of Legends, it’s an indication of how good you are at solo/duo queue.

League of Legends, as a game, is about role fulfillment, teamwork, coordination, strategy, reaction, and overall group efforts. Solo/duo queue, on the contrary, is pretty much all about farming (last-hitting minions) and leadership skills in regards to leading complete strangers.

As you can see, the two are very different – this clearly means that just because you are good at League of Legends doesn’t mean you’ll be good at solo/duo queue, and vice versa. I’ve seen plenty of people with lower elos than me who are better at the game; I myself am also better at the game than many people with higher elos than me.

Nothing bad happens if you don’t get a high elo.

Sure, you might miss out on a few end-of-season rewards like a skin and a profile border, but nothing bad is going to happen because you can’t make it to a particular elo.

If your friends are young and immature, they might mock you for sucking at solo/duo queue, but once they understand that it doesn’t really matter (maybe you can speed up that process by sending them a link to this list you just read), everything will be just fine.

With that perspective, I was able to successfully come back to League of Legends solo/duo queue and lose 9 out of 22 games so far this season without ever getting annoyed or frustrated.

Is the competitive aspect of League of Legends troubling you as well? I suggest you shift your per­spective to be more similar to mine, and League of Legends will become a lot more fun.