Welcome to a new series on Eurogamer: State of the Game

Hello! We have a new series for you. It's called State of the Game and the goal is, basically, to tell you exactly that. Over the next couple of months we'll be running a series of features that dig into the biggest, most interesting and most influential live service games that are running at the moment.

Naturally, the words "live service" give some people the ick, and that's fair enough - but it's also the type of game where vast numbers of players want to spend their time, and the type of game that, in bottling the magic of fun-with-friends, can often capture the very best of the medium.

It's also an area that's been quite tricky to adequately cover here on Eurogamer. To borrow a phrase, these are 'hobby-grade' games - games that often demand extraordinary amounts of time or attention - and so keeping up with them all in sufficient detail quickly becomes impossible. The focus, naturally, falls on the biggest controversies or the most sweeping changes, when a lot of the really special stuff is found in the detail. It's also hard to know what on earth people are talking about when they do write about them, if you're not already immersed in the games yourself.

That, hopefully, is where this series comes in. What we're aiming to provide is a detailed but manageable look into some of gaming's most all-consuming worlds. Think of them like a mixture of updated reviews, retrospectives, and essays. Or maybe like a mid-term report, except the term is the entire lifetime of the game and it's hard to know what you'd call the middle of it.

They'll all be different, in other words. But the first is live now. Here's a look at what's happening in what is quite likely the biggest game in the world: League of Legends.