League of Legends game director Andrei “Meddler” van Roon gave fans insight into how skin lines are assessed in dev blog.
The Riot dev broke down the four factors that determine whether a skin line is expanded, reworked, or retired.
- How did the skin perform relative to expectations?
- Are players more interested in seeing this theme return than most other themes?
- Did this skin release get more or less support from us than usual?
- How many more champions exist that players are telling us they think would fit well into this theme?
The factors vary from player engagement and performance to Riot promoting the thematic through trailers. And if there aren’t any more champions that will fit in with a cosmetic line, Riot will focus on other themes.
The High Noon skins, for example, weren’t too popular initially. So Riot rebooted the skin line in 2018 with little promotion and it “performed very well,” according to Meddler. This put High Noon on the high priority list, adding Senna and Irelia to the skin line.
Sugar Rush, on the other hand, has “done poorly” in both of its releases. Since it landed in the bottom 10 percent for 2019, Riot decided to vault the skin line. And Star Guardian skins consistently perform “consistently well.” But Meddler explains that Riot doesn’t want to “force the theme” on a champion when it doesn’t make sense.
The Debonair skin line has gotten mixed reviews, with some cosmetics doing well and others missing the mark. While it’s possible that the skin line will be rebooted in the future, it’d need to be reworked a bit before release.
In patch 10.15 they’ll be removing Little Legends (LLs) from ARAM. Key factors behind that:
- LLs on ARAM meaningfully undermine visual clarity, with the motion and brightness they add making it harder to track champions and their spells. We’d hoped to avoid that being an issue by having LLs usually avoid central areas where combat happens. That hasn’t been sufficient however.
- Very few players have been interested in acquiring LLs specifically for ARAM use. While some players who’ve acquired them for TFT do use them on ARAM almost no one has purchased them for ARAM specifically. Overall player sentiment about their presence on ARAM is also quite low.
- We’ve been constraining our LL designs because they also need to exist on ARAM. That means limitations to things like silhouettes (need to ensure they never read as champion), size, emotes (animations shouldn’t look like spellcasts) etc. Making them purely a TFT feature gives us more freedom when creating future LLs to do cool things.
Having said that, there are some players who have very much enjoyed the presence of LLs on ARAM. For those of you in that situation our apologies. We think this is the right call for ARAM players overall, we realize for some of you it will be a downgrade in your experience though. For those of you who bought LLs specifically for ARAM who haven’t played TFT we’ll be refunding the RP spent on them. Details about how that will work:
- Refunds will be applied to accounts that own LLs but have never played TFT. It doesn’t look at specific LL usage, it’s an account-level “TFT yes/no” flag.
- The refund process will start when 10.15 goes out and should be finished before patch 10.16.
- It will remove all Little Legends from your account and refund the RP spent on them, both the LLs you used on ARAM and the ones you didn’t.
- Non RP LL unlocks (e.g. Twitch Prime rewards) will not be refunded.
