[Hiro_Antagonist]

Hey there Quitch,

Thanks for your feedback. We're doing our best to patch in new features while we work on our next game, but unfortunately we won't be able to everything.

One thing that might help... when you're in a game, you can press enter to bring up the chat box, and escape to dismiss it.

Observer mode, asynchronous play (where players can log on independently, and the server sends an email when the other player isn't on), and other major features were originally in our design document, but had to be cut due to budget constraints. These are expensive to develop, and we're but a modest development team. =)

As for the AI, we also wish it were able to hold up against more advanced players, but unfortunately AI for this type of game is extremely difficult. From a mechanics perspective, LOL is like Advance Wars crossed with a CCG (because of the logical abilities). Advance Wars's AI (a huge-budget title) is also unable to keep up with advanced players, and CCG's are basically impossible to develop a competant AI for. Since we're a hybrid game (in terms of what the AI has to deal with), the difficulty of making a highly competent AI is somewhere between the two. All things considered, I think we did pretty well given our budget!

That said, our next game is based on the LOL engine, and will have a better AI because we'll be able to build on top of the work we've done in LOL. But then again, we're adding a ton of new ability behaviors, which will make it that much harder for the AI to always know the right thing to do...

2v2 and other bigger game types have been proposed, and while I'm sure those would be fun to play for some people, they probably won't ever be supported in a LOL-engine game. This is for many reasons, but one major one is that players would spend the majority of their time watching other people take their turns rather than playing the game themselves. 1v1 already has a problem of 50% downtime, 2v2 would be 75% downtime! Also, more players and bigger maps would require a whole new and more cramped UI (mini-map, more player data, etc.), tons of new internet code, and would provide a less satisfying game experience far more often. (It only takes 1 person dropping out or disconnecting to ruin the game for everyone else!) In the end, I think that development effort is much better spent making LOL a better 1v1 game, which is how it would be played 90+% of the time even if we added 2v2 or more. =)

We definitely consider each suggestion, and try to implement each one, but like I said we're just a small team with a tiny budget, and unfortunately won't be able to get to everything. So we have to weigh all of the options with how much time we have, and decide what features will give the largest percentage of players the most value for the amount of development effort.

-Hiro_Antagonist