League of Legends is a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena(MOBA) game by Riot Games that takes many concepts from DotA and combines it with a fresh game including all-new original champions/heroes, new maps, account-level leveling system, masteries (talents), runes, automatic matchmaking and more. If you've played DotA before, you'll probably like League of Legends. If you're new to DotA, League of Legends has a fantastic tutorial called Battle Training to help teach the basic mechanics of the game.
In League of Legends the most popular map by far is Summoner's Rift, which is most like DotA. On Summoner's Rift there are the Blue and the Purple teams. Each team has it's base which holds a Nexus, and 3 turrets guarding the base from 3 lanes going outside of the base to the enemy base. Each lane has 2 more turrets on each side, further guarding the base. To win, your team must push out and destroy turrets to eventually destroy your Nexus turrets and then finally destroy your Nexus!
To destroy the Nexus, you will encounter enemy champions guarding their towers, grabbing monster buffs in the jungle(the area between the lanes), killing lone weak champions and then running, and giant 5v5 team fights! Each champion has 4 abilities and a passive effect. We will refer to these 4 abilities as their default key bindings. The first three abilities (Q,W,E) are usually short cooldowns and are standard amounts of damage. The forth ability(R) is your Ultimate ability, intended to be extremely powerful and on a very long cooldown usually. As the game progresses you will earn gold which can be used to buy powerful items to enhance your champion's damage, resistances, critical chance, and more.
Best of all, this game is Free To Play and makes revenue through micro-transactions. Think Team Fortress 2 hat and weapon store. You can earn weapons by playing a lot or you can take the express route and buy them with real money. Replace hats with champion skins and weapons with unlocking champions. Since you have to unlock champions, there is free champion rotation. Every week or so, 10 champions are rotated into this list of champions you can play without unlocking. So basically you try the champions in that week's rotation, play some games with them, and then if you like one of them a lot, you can unlock it permanently with the currency you obtained playing games.
If you actually read this giant wall of text, you can signup for the game here.
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