Riot just reintroduced one of its whackiest creations back into League of Legends, the company’s inexplicably popular team-based multiplayer game where angry little gerbil things do battle against gigantic, vicious dragons. Only this time it’s missing everyone’s favourite bloodthirsty fuzz monster Teemo.
“One For All” is a special alternate game mode that Riot first put into League of Legends in 2013. Like all of League’s best intentionally ridiculous “for fun” game modes, Riot’s only made it available for a few weeks at a time — a somewhat silly decision the developer’s made to preserve League’s singular appearance as a high-pressure competitive game. The conceit of One For All is that each five-person team chooses a single champion to play as for a match.
League’s predominately played with five unique champions on each team playing against each other with meticulously crafted and thought-out plays and counterplays, so One For All, much like the game’s annual April Fool’s Day treat “Ultra Rapid Fire” mode URF), is totally fucking bonkers compared to normal games. That’s the whole point. This year, things are even sillier thanks to Riot enabling mirror matches, meaning that all ten players can take the same champion. One For All matches make for some hilarious moments, like when five different versions of the old bearded wizard dude Zilean are all chucking their clock-bombs at a wave of incoming Dariuses (via Reddit):
Darius is an overpowered monster of a melee champ in League of Legends since his major reworking earlier this year, so I’d say he deserves every single one of those face-fulls of bombs.
It’s also a hoot when you have a one team of Azirs using the sand warrior’s spirit-soldier summoning powers to play ping pong with the other team of Azirs:
…or when ten different Teemos fill an entire map with the master-troll champion’s infamous poison mushroom bombs:
Errrrrr. Wait. That last one doesn’t apply to this year’s One For All mode, actually. Just a few hours after OFA went live yesterday, Riot put out another update for League that disabled the notorious and disgustingly cute champion from the mode.
Riot also disabled Karthus, a Grim Reaper-esque champion who has a powerful spell move that sends a ghostly pillar of death energy down on all five enemy champions like so:
In a post on the League of Legends forums, Riot said that Teemo and Karthus were both disabled lest their “core fantasies” end up trolling the enemy team a bit too hard:
Heya guys, quick PSA.
Teemo and Karthus have historically been disabled in the One For All game mode (their core fantasies create a degenerate play pattern for the opposing team, that goes above and beyond what the other champions can accomplish), but this morning they were accidentally still enabled for a few hours. We’ve since disabled them in the One For All queue.
You can still use Teemo & Karthus in custom games if you want to though, on the map of your choice! 😀
As Riot said, they both have been disabled historically. But they have also been playable in OFA at other points in the game mode’s history as well.
It seems silly to ban two champions for their troll potential when you’re making an optional game mode that’s literally based on the conceit of trolling your opponents and your teammates with ridiculous 10 v. 10 clone mirror match games. But at least there are 120 other champions you can do so with.
One for all is available in League of Legends until October 26 at 8:00 PM (2:00 AM PDT). You can find by logging into the League game client and selecting either player-vs.-player or player-vs.-bots games.
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