Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last five years you will know about the storm of MOBAs like DOTA 2 and League of Legends that have taken the gaming world by the horns. Many of these MOBAs are slow and deliberate games based around something called ‘min-maxing’ where players kill artificial intelligence within the game to earn currency and to level up. MOBAs or massive online battle arenas are interesting games, as most are played from the top-down perspective and instead of aiming skills you select the skill you want to cast. Tome is one such game.

Tome is a new browser based MOBA which already sets it apart from the crowds and Tome tries to change things up even more by taking out a very important mechanic in most of these games which is last hitting. Last hitting is the ability to get the final hit on the AI (better known as creeps) to get the rewards, well Tome has taken that out and instead it shares all of the rewards for killing these creeps between team mates. This mechanic added to the way the characters play makes Tome perhaps the fastest MOBA I have ever played, instead of taking an hour matches take ten minutes, there are also a whole host of other mechanics in the game that we’ll leave for you to find for yourselves!

Tome continues to deliver in the art department as well, even on the lowest graphics settings the game performs well and looks good, it has a punchy and vivid art style with some very subtle undertones that make it pleasing to look at and satisfying to play, this combined with the sound assets which are heavy and often brutal make the presentation of this game easily rival that of bigger, non-browser based games which have their own engines and clients to play.

All in all Tome is a gorgeous game with solid mechanics, a fun character set and it has low demands on your system which makes this free to play game look very promising. Tome is presently in closed beta and is well worth a look. Developer Kixeye are onto a winner here.

Our very own Digmbot is also in the Tome beta, check out his video impressions below:

Part of 2D MOBA Awesomenauts set-up for defending your area from the opposing team’s assault is the way you customise your chosen character’s weapons and upgrades so that you can get stronger as the match wears on. However the way the game had it set up up until now has caused some of the less-popular upgrades to be chosen very rarely as they weren’t considered to be as good or left you at a disadvantage if you chose wrong. Developers Ronimo have decided that it needs fixing.

Right now you can choose three of your upgrade options per line before the match, so choosing wisely was a priority and so the same upgrades would be chosen over and over. It wasn’t possible to choose any other upgrades other than those ones once you’d locked them in, which could leave you wanting if you chose badly. To fix this, Ronimo are overhauling the ‘shop’ part of two bases on either side of the map.

“With a completely new interface and expanded shelves, you now have 6 options in the shop per skill row.” explained dev Joost. “You still can buy 3 items per row, but you will have all the items available to you to choose from during the game.”

This will allow for more customisable ability builds in game, without greatly changing the way an Awesomenauts match currently plays out. The only downside is that with choice, you could possibly spend too long choosing a new upgrade. Not a good idea in a game where you need to protect a drill core from being destroyed.

Full beta patch notes are here: [x]

Riot have been running an experiment within the MOBA game League of Legends in an attempt to see if they could clean up the community better with a strict policy as opposed to their usual ‘redemption’ methodology. One Redditor decided to see just how well this method was working.

PersianMG created a perl script that has collected the data from 100,000 of the recent Tribunals in the North America server regions, although due to the removal of Tribunal pages the sample pool is actually closer to 10,000 cases. The data was collected from the online Tribunal pages to see just how big a percentage of people were being punished or banned from the game as the crackdown on “extreme toxicity” went ahead.

The results revealed that in the majority of cases summoners were punished for their actions, although most of the punishments came in the form of ‘first-time warnings’. Just over 1000 summoners, a percentage of around 1.1% were actually permabanned from the game, while just under 8% of Tribunals resulted in a pardon or were dismissed. One of the most common complaints were racist chatter; one of the things Riot wished to cut down upon.

For those of you who follow the Smite eSports scene closely you will know that both the NA and EU regions have been taking part in a series of weekly tournaments for the last 10 weeks; according to Hi-Rez the teams taking part in these regions have played close to 500 games!

Out of these tournaments, 4 teams from each region have advanced to the next stage- the pro league.  On the 26th of July the EU regional kick-off lan tournament will pit these teams against each other with a prize pool of $50,000 as they try to qualify for the world championship tournament.

Each of the teams going to the LAN have faced each other repeatedly and all of them have made regular appearances in the semi-finals and finals, with all of them taking first at some point during the qualifiers . To bring you up to speed on the teams and competitors taking part in the EU regionals, we’ve put together a handy guide to each team and their respective rosters.

Cloud 9 HyperX  are first seed. Cloud 9 have made 8 appearances in the finals and taken 1st 3 times during the qualifiers, earning themselves first seed. They have performed consistently against the top teams in Europe and earned their spotand these veterans will be looking to close out the kick-off LAN with first place and $50K in their pockets. In the run up qualifiers Cloud 9 had an almost complete roster change with only 2 of the original team members staying on the starting line.

Their roster is:

Hunter- Youngbae(ex TSM player)

Support- Half Devil

Midlane- Psiyo

Jungle- Suntouch

Sololane- EnQu

Standing in Cloud 9’s way are Team Solomid. TSM are the reigning champions from the 200K launch event. TSM took second seed in the qualifiers after major roster changes and a very rough start- eventually swapping their hunter with C9. Their synergy initially seemed to fall apart then they pulled it back together towards the end of the qualifiers and now they have a lot to prove in this coming tournament.

Their roster is:

Hunter- Smek (exC9 player)

Support- Trixtank

Midlane- Lawbster

Jungle- Qvofred

Solo lane- Gamehunter (commonly referred to as Godhunter)

Team Coast Blue are the third seed, originally called Worth Gaming this young, upstart team took the qualifiers by storm in week 3. That week they beat C9 and took one game off of TSM in the finals,  finishing in second with some meta-breaking choices. In week 4 they came out even stronger, storming through all of their matches to finish 1st. They have consistently been a top 4 team and this brought the attention of Team Coast who are now their sponsor. They have been a force to reckoned with since week 3 and they will be looking to take the LAN event by storm to truly kick off their smite careers.

Their current roster is;

Hunter- Shaggyshenk

Support- Princesstomato

Midlane- Korinyo

Jungle- Ninjabobat

Solo lane- Variety

Team SK Gaming barely scraped their way into the launch tournament,  eventually finding their way into 4th place but the initial qualifiers proved to be too much for them and they were fighting desperately from week 1 to find a place within the top teams. TSM consistently beat then for 5 weeks, leaving them behind in the round of 8 until in week 7 they came out in top form to seize first place and find hope. For the rest of the qualifiers they were vying for position against another top tier EU team called IIIII. In the last week of the finals IIIII failed to clinch their position as 4th seed so they had to face SK in a tiebreaker match,  which SK took by storm.

Their current roster is:

Hunter- Realzx

Support- Badgah

Midlane- Captaintwig

Jungler- Zyrhoes

Solo lane- ManiaKK

The tournament will kick off on twitch.tv/smitegame at 6:00 AM EDT/ 12:00 PM CEST/ 5:00 PM GMT .

Don’t forget to show Team Coast Blue some Sanitarium.fm love for helping with our charity stream!

Riot has begun testing a new banning system for League of Legends to try and curb the toxicity within the games massive community. They are looking to use a new system that utilizes both human reviews of complaints as well as “machine learning” in an effort to catch offenders and punish them, under this new system those seen to be ‘smack talking’ could receive extensive bans ranging from two weeks for minor offenders to permanent bans for repeat or chronic offenders.

This time though Riot are planning to be transparent with people appealing against their bans and much harsher, even going as far as releasing chat log transcripts as evidence. Riot they had this to say

“Some players have also asked why we’ve taken such an aggressive stance when we’ve been focused on reform; well, the key here is that for most players, reform approaches are quite effective. But, for a number of players, reform attempts have been very unsuccessful which forces us to remove some of these players from League entirely.”

Seems like a cruel but fair system to us, what do you think?