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Longest Game Ever

Adaptive damage, Yasuo’s spoken language, and the longest ranked game on record.

Welcome to Ask Riot! Have a question?

Let’s talk about adaptive damage, what language Yasuo speaks, and the longest game of League on record.

Q

How is adaptive damage calculated?

A

Adaptive Damage, similar to Adaptive AP/AD, is based on your item purchases. If your items give you more Attack Damage than Ability Power, Adaptive Damage will be Physical. If the opposite is true, then Adaptive Damage will be Magic.

In case of a tie, each champion has a default they will go to based on what that champion usually prefers.

Technical Game Designer, Game Systems
Q

What language does Yasuo speak when he uses his skills?

A

When we wrote Yasuo, we referred to his combat utterances as an “ancient Ionian dialect,” which was a canonical way of justifying his faux-Asian vernacular. (He wasn’t the first one to speak an ancient Ionian dialect, by the way—listen carefully to Karma when she casts Mantra.) The practical truth is that we chose not to connect Yasuo’s ability grunts to any existing culture on Earth, since doing so would a) break the fiction of Runeterra and b) make localization tough for every region that has to translate them into equally distinct and memorable phrases in its native language.  

Yasuo’s co-writer ManWolfAxeBoss lived in Japan and speaks fluent Japanese, so we asked him to write lines for Yasuo to shout during high moments that would evoke the power and emotion of a samurai flick—but without any actual Japanese words. (Just a typical example of the fun and absurd challenges we can face when writing for League of Legends.) Given how legendary the cry “hasegi!” has become within the League community, I think he did an amazing job. Some things never dull!

Senior Content Specialist (formerly Narrative Designer)
Q

I recently came off an exceptionally long game (over an hour of gameplay). Now I terribly want to know: what was the longest match in league history?

A

Oh, there’s a couple of ways of looking at this one! We can do longest esport game as well as longest ranked solo queue game across all servers (in the last 12 months).

For esports, there was a 90+ minute game (91:23) between Hong Kong Attitude and AHQ e-Sports Club in 2013. Another notable runner-up is Worlds 2014, where Fnatic vs. OMG stretched to nearly 72 minutes.

For games a little closer to home, the longest ranked solo queue game this year actually happened less than two weeks ago in Oceania. The match lasted 2:42:28. Yeah.

Some notable features of that game include:

  • A final gold difference of only 10k.
  • Veigar aiming for 3000 AP (sadly, he didn’t get there).
  • Nidalee telling the enemy team (at 50 minutes) that if they’d just focus on pushing or grouping, the game would end in 15 minutes.
  • Graves happily saying, “I think this is the longest ranked I’ve ever seen xD!” at 53 minutes. Joke’s on you Graves—it’s the longest ranked game, like ever.

A runner-up game in NA squeaked in under 2 hours at 1:56:59. However, unlike that OCE game, this game ended with a whopping 74k gold difference and a 120/12/12 Kindred. Yowza.

Thanks to Riot Peaches for digging out the game data!

NA Live Ops (formerly good at League of Legends)

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