League of Legends No Longer Playable On Macs
For those of you that enjoy playing League of Legends (LoL) on your Mac, or for you Mac users that were planning on trying out LoL, I have some unfortunate news: Riot Games has decided to drop its support for the Mac native client they’ve been working on for the past 13 months. As of 12 AM September 6, 2011, those using the Mac client will no longer be able to access the game.
The news hit this past Friday in a forum post (you’ll need to log into the forum to actually see the post) from Tamat, LoL’s community manager.
This decision was made primarily because with the rate at which LoL goes through its update cycle, Riot Games felt that they were unable to reach the desired level of quality across both platforms (Mac and PC). In addition, “since the plan was for the Mac to share servers, we believed that a Mac version that was frequently unavailable was not up to Riot standards.”
Apple-ites, take heart, as Tamat says:
We [will] continue to investigate the opportunity to provide player access on the Mac Platform in the future that aligns with our service and content update standards. We are committed to building a solution that will work on the Mac in the long run, but it will take some time. Additionally, testers that have utilized the League of Legends store during the Beta can either continue playing the PC version of the game, or receive a full refund on RP purchases made (which would close out the account).
Essentially, those of you that want to continue playing are going to need to pick up a valid copy of windows to use with Bootcamp if you haven’t already done so.
If you’ve been an active tester of the Mac beta client, you also qualify for a little thank you gift consisting of a Champions pack. To grab your reward, you’ll have to log in using the Mac client before September, 6, go to the in-client Store and use the code that you’re given.
As a Mac user, I find this discouraging, but I think that trying to provide a quality gaming experience is respectable. I can only hope that as the number of Apple users grows, developers see the potential for good business, and start making games natively for OS X. We like to game too!
Who buys a Mac to play games?, seriously.
No one buys a Mac to play games specifically, but the point I was trying to make is that Macs have the power and are decently enough specced to play games. Therefore, developers should shift some of their focus towards Macs as well. IMHO.
Agreed. I didn’t buy a Mac under the assumption that it would be a gaming machine, but I certainly enjoy plenty of games on it. To be fair, though, Macs have been getting more attention from gaming companies, and I do appreciate that. Axing Mac support when it was pre-existing, though, seems like kind of a slap in the face. I don’t play LoL, but if Blizzard suddenly dropped WoW support on Macs I’d be pretty pissed. I’d imagine there’s a few LoL players who aren’t too happy with this situation.
Yeah, off course, if you just happened to already own the mac for whatever purpose and you decided to use it for some games too, I can understand that. I’m just saying that some of those users weren’t expecting this, and perhaps people will now think twice before buying a computer.
LoL sucks, Macs suck, Anyone who says different sucks, nuff said.
If they’re getting a refund on purchases they made then its all good imo. A good plan, if it was slowing them down. Also it feels great knowing that someone out there who owns a mac is frustrated at this. Made my day.
I think there might be a solution if they try Googles NaCl technology (native client).
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=1792062