# League of Legends

16 Hacker News commenters recommended League of Legends and 26 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended for polished gameplay, balancing and being fun and addictive to play. Critics most often point to skin and currency prices that are hard to predict, and to the game needing Windows.

## Why people recommend it

- Polished gameplay and balancing (2 comments): "Balancing in LoL and friends seems somewhat easier because the mechanics change less frequently" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47265296)) "very polished in gameplay and balancing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048550))
- Fun and addictive to play (2 comments): "I fired up LoL classic the other day and I could easily see myself putting another 5k hours into lux" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50114648)) "but can be incredibly fun and addictive" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48021635))
- Well made overall (2 comments): "I think they've actually done a pretty great job." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048113)) "it's obviously very well made" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047478))

## What people warn about

- Expensive skins and microtransactions (3 comments): "you can buy X RP, but a champion or skin or whatever costs either less or more, never the exact amount" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47339166)) "Games like Fortnite and League of Legends went down this road and ended up at even more unfathomable $500 microtransactions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46140788)) "Nowadays they engage in gacha, with skins effectively costing hundreds or thousands of dollars." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056249))
- Hard to run outside Windows (3 comments): "Riot added it retroactively after years of effort to patch Wine to work with League's weird quirky code" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46105835)) "Only league of legends forces me to dual boot into windows every once in a week or so" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49564862)) "that is unusable because the Riot servers don't allow updating/connecting from it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46431285))
- Hostile treatment of players (2 comments): "Riot Games is an extraordinarily player-, community-, and pro-player-hostile company." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047797)) "You will eventually get banned from the game if you choose the "wrong" play style." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46411422))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Dota 2](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dota-2.md): 28 recommend
- [Deadlock by Valve](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deadlock.md): 11 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "League of Legends", https://hackerapproved.com/p/league-of-legends/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).