LoLKing – The Glory, The Downfall, The Closure

LoLKing had previously been one of the go-to-sites for information regarding League of Legends, specifically player statistics and in-depth guides. League of Legends is certainly a confusing game for fresh players, with its multitude of champions, different items and changing meta. This is especially so for those who have dabbled in MOBA games before like Dota 2.

LoLKing had been a must use for new users in the past, with its fairly accessible information providing new players to the League of Legends scene to quickly improve and pick up a few more wins. The guides were made up of a combination of meta and meta breaking. Given the still growing League of Legends Youtube space in the game’s early days, LoLKing set the scene for meta builds and champion roles.

Despite being such a major site for League of Legends, its traffic diminished with the introduction of new League of Legends related sites and content. So it begs the question, what happened to LoLKing?

While LoLKing has shut down, there are numerous other sites you can visit to improve. Mobalytics is one of the newer and more trendy ones, with personalised one on one advice depending on match ups. Check out how Mobalytics can help you.

What happened to LoLKing?

If you are like most people who played LoL in the early days, you would be familiar with LoLKing, and had searched up player info before a ranked, or even normal game. However, those that may have used it in the past, had slowly moved away from it in favour of other sites for information or videos for inspiration. Due to its reduced traffic, the website would officially announced they would be shutting down its operations on the 15^th of October 2018. While the site may have shut down, Fanbyte, one of their other sites now carry on some of their operation. Fanbyte hosts a range of different content, ranging from general esports news, podcasts, reviews and guides.

Who caused LoLKing to close?

LoLKing had been plagued with many issues throughout its years. While in the beginning it ran smoothly, the site soon after being acquired by ZAM Network (and subsequently Tencent), faced many troubles ranging from bugs, crashes and most crippling of all, being bloated with ads. Note, this is despite the website being taken over by ZAM Networks, a company known for managing various community sites for different games. Most surprising of all, given Tencent had acquired ZAM Networks soon after, LoLKing should have without a doubt been adequately funded. Unfortunately, with all that was going for the site, they failed to fix their issues, leading to a steady decline of traffic over the years and ultimately closure.

While it is clear that the site had closed due to reduced traffic, there is a specific culprit that accelerated the site’s downfall. Op.gg may have been launched after LoLKing, however, with its greater range of features and refinement, players flocked to the site. Particularly, the live game tracking feature on Op.gg made it an obvious choice for players. As LoLKing closed, Op.gag started to gain further traction, surpassing their past glory as the go-to-site for LoL related information.

LoLKing model viewer

While the site may have closed, the model viewer lives on. The updated model viewer can be found on Fanbyte.com. That said, the model viewer remains in its development / alpha stage and is likely to still contains bugs and some flaws. Unlike other third party apps, the LoLKing model viewer is still one of the more reliable and used model viewers out there.

Conclusion

Given Tecent’s ownership of Riot and LoLKing in 2012, there had been multiple opportunities over the years to better integrate the two. There was a major opportunity for Riot / Tencent to dramatically improve the website’s interface, possibly with an in game extension, or to increase usability. However, the time spent on LoL was not enough, the lack of development and Riot / Tencent failing to take advantage of their relationship ultimately led to LoLKing’s downfall.