Why play with AI when it's so much more fun beating humans?

If you’re like me, you love playing competitive video games. But there’s so many out there, it’s hard to choose which one to play next. Well, here’s a nice list of some cool pvp-focused games.

1)  League of Legends

League of Legends “A New Dawn” Cinematic Trailer shows off an action-packed dramatization of a typical League game.

In League of Legends, you join a team of five to fight other players in the Fields of Justice, with the ultimate goal of pushing them back to their base and destroying their “Nexus”.With over 27 million players monthly, League of Legends is sure to provide a unique experience with each match. Players first choose their champion, which might sound easy if you don’t know that there are over 120 to choose from, each with its own unique style of play.

There are four main roles in the game: Top lane, which tends to produce tanks who soak up damage or fighters to dish it out; Mid Lane, usually assassins who can do fast, high damage to assist other lanes when needed; a Jungler, who travels between lanes killing NPC monsters for damage or mana/health buffs; and in Bottom Lane you have two players. The ADC, attack-damage carry, who is meant to attack from range and build straight attack damage to get an edge over the other team. Finally, there’s the support, whose main function is to take the blame when the ADC can’t do his job right  keep the ADC and to an extent anyone else who comes near him alive and hinder the enemy’s movement.

That’s the meta-game: what everyone expects you to do. For each role, there’s about 30 champions to fit it. But there’s no rule saying you can’t take, say, Teemo, a champion traditionally seen as literally Satan and a top lane damage dealer in bottom lane as a support. It might not work very well, but there’s nothing stopping you from trying.

Although your teammates may not like it…

After joining a game, you’ll spawn into the arena.  From here, you can choose from three special abilities or spells that you can cast in combat. Let’s say you’re using Teemo and going top lane. When you first spawn in, you can choose to take as your first spell “Blinding Dart”, an extra powerful blowdart that blinds the opponent, preventing him from hitting anything for a couple of seconds. Or you can choose “Move Quickly”, which gives you a movement speed bonus for escaping an aggressive opponent. Or if you like, you could pick his third spell, “Toxic Shot” which applies poison to every attack you deal out. As you level your champion up in a match, you can and will upgrade all these spells to make them more powerful.

At level six, you unlock your “Ultimate Move”, generally an extremely powerful spell with a very long cooldown. For Teemo, it’s instant death invisible poison mushroon landmines. For other champions like Garen, a swordsman, it’s a powerful sword strike that deals more damage the lower the victim’s health is. Other champions might be able to give temporary immunity to all damage. It depends on who you pick. 

Besides levelling up, you can make your champion more powerful by buying things in the in-game store. Don’t worry. It’s not microtransactions. Champions start with a set amount of gold, 500 in a normal game, though this can be raised by using runes and masteries, things bought with out-of-game points I’ll get into later. To gain more gold, kill things. Minions, jungle creeps, other players, turrets and inhibitors… anything you kill will give you gold. In addition, you have a passive gold gain, getting a set amount of gold every few seconds. In the store, you buy things that will increase your defense, health, or damage, as well as some that increase gold gain and a few with active abilities like dealing a percentage of the opponents health in magic damage.

Outside of the game, you can increase your stats across all champions through masteries, special perks gained by levelling up your account, and runes, bought using the points you earn by playing the game.

The developer team, Riot Games, is constantly patching the game and adding new characters or features.  It has a total player base of around 67 million players a month, and is still growing. Each year, more and more people watch the League of Legends world championship, to the point that 2016’s championship will be held in Madison Square Garden.

Behold the face of true evil.

Counterlogic Gaming vs Liquid, the NACLS Quarterfinals