League of legends is a free to play video game created by Riot Games for computers, where five players get pinned against five other players to battle it out. The point of the game is for one team to destroy the other team's "Nexus". League of Legends has a whopping amount of players, in 2016 a hundred million players had officially signed up to the game.
The game starts off in a phase called "Champion select". Every player picks one out of the 136 so called "champions" to choose from. Every single champion has four unique abilities that they can use in combat versus the enemies. Once everyone has picked a champion it's time for the game to actually start.
The map where the ~30 minute games are played consists of three lanes, a jungle between the lanes and a river.
Most of the time two players go to the bottom lane, one goes to the middle, one to the top and one goes to the jungle.
The nexus releases minions into all three lanes, these minions can then be killed by the players to get gold. Gold is used to buy items in the shop. Both teams have a shop in their base where they can buy items to upgrade their characters, kind of like how you power up on Steemit.
The more minions killed = more gold = more items = stronger character, Simple!
Now you might be asking yourself "What are these upgrades for?" Well essentially these items make you stronger and make it easier for you to take out the enemy players. Killing an enemy players give you an advantage because you get more gold, and because killing an enemy basically gives you more room to start attacking the enemies defending towers. To reach the nexus you have to kill all towers in at least one of the three lanes, and also kill the rest of the defense buildings in the enemy base.
Why this game is so popular?
Most players you come across will probably say that the game is quite addicting and fun, it's designed to let you grow better as a player and to unlock more champions to play with, and to level up. Now, sure that's fun for a while, but what happens when you reach the maximum level of thirty, and you unlocked all the champions you want? Once you hit level 30 in the game you can start playing ranked matches. These matches are much more competitive and the more you win, the further up you rank on the global ladder. The highest rank in the game is called "Challenger", what's interesting about the challenger rank is that players often get recruited by real professional teams, to play versus other elite players and make money in the official leagues and tournaments for huge prize pools. The League of Legends world tournament of 2016 had a prize pool of $5 million dollars. The korean team SK Telecom T1 won that tournament and brought home $2,000,000.
The future of the game
League of Legends gains huge amounts of players every year, and after 9 years of the game being out, they are still gaining new players every day. If Riot Games continue to release new in-game content and continue to focus on the professional scene of the game by increasing prize pools, I'm sure the future is bright.