First of all, I believe League of Legends has the potential be a phenomenal game in the competitive scene within the next 2 years. I mean probably up there next to starcraft and Counter-strike. I can't think of any other competitive game that is as reliant on teamwork and precise coordination and much as much fun. Sure there are some imbalances and bugs and the state of the game has been quite volatile initially, but that all improves over time. If anything is going to hold back League of Legends from being run in pro circuits, it is the lack of an LAN and easily deployable game client.

With this said, I am concerned about how the grass-roots growth of the competitive scene is going to play out. This has mostly to do with the lack of LAN multiplayer. From my understanding, this game is based on a Server-Client model where the server is controlled by Riot. Where I live, we could never have a major tournament because of the ping delay of playing on servers hosted across the ocean. In very highly competitive play, 80+ ping delay can impose a huge impact on professional level games. Major tournaments and events sponsored by pro-gaming circuits probably won't roll over very well when Team X just gets annihilated because of a lag spike from the Riot Servers. International tournaments will have the hardest hit from this as well.

Also, the dependence on Adobe Air as a platform creates really high costs of deployment on many systems and most rapid software deployment methods will not work with AIR. For the second time in a row, I was unable to host League of Legends at a major annual university lan-party because of this. I'm sure many other local grass-roots driven events will suffer the same constraints.

If there was a LAN/Offline client that users could host games locally for optimal competitive play at LAN tournaments, as well as a portable distribution of AIR that allowed the game client to be deployed across many systems this would solve these issues and will help the growth of flourishing competitive League of Legends scenes.

People have been telling Tryndamere to ditch adobe AIR since early beta.

Also, I would really like to see an offline/LAN lol as well, but it's prolly going to be many months in development or some such thing.

I would really like to see this. For one LAN parties/Local competitions and such aren't very doable as of right now with it.

Also, I know this is just my opinion but I wish the Client was a single program instead of having PVP to then launch the game. Personally I think it looks cheap as a result compared to a full professionally done experience.

All in all I hope they are holding back right now with plenty of features and planning on releasing them at the same time. Ex: a few maps, champions, game options, everything.

It just seems like they have plenty of people working but not much is being put out there. Even with their amazing funding I hope they start pulling it together soon because they have amazing potential but it's just not looking good right now. :/

+3 for LAN

Everynight we have LAN party in my office, mainly DotA,COD and L4D. I don't really play those game seriously until I got here in my job where LAN play every night is a must. I can't resist the fun of taunting,screams and funny trash talks echoing the whole office so I really got into those game.

I had problems introducing my coworkers to this game because of the lack of LAN option. Being a fan of DoTA, everyone here loves LoL's art and overall ideas but those are not good enough reason to install it in their house and play online together. And no we can't install LoL here and play practice game instead because LoL eats too much bandwidth.


And FYI, 2 of the Biggest DotA tournament is held on LAN(SMM and ADC)

Then why is WoW a major esport?:O No lan.

What if riot made a server made for competitive play?

Starcraft 2 will not have LAN play either.

Riot is very paranoid about hackers. If there was a competition server that went to major lans, Jesse Perring would come handcuffed to it to guard it.