Cover-Credits:
It seems that Riot might be taking a step back from integrating elements from TeamFight Tactics into League’s core gameplay as their first try at it, namely adding TFT’s Little Legends into ARAM, hasn’t particularly taken off. RiotMeddler, Design Director for League of Legends, posted in a Dev Diary highlighting key issues that plagued the entire addition of Little Legends to ARAM in the first place. His points mention:
- Little Legends were undermining visual quality due to motion and brightness. While it was hoped that they would avoid central areas of combat thus not causing an issue, that didn’t happen.
- Insufficient demand for Little Legends specifically for ARAM combined with overall player sentiment about their presence being quite low.
- Design constraints for Little Legend designs due to its existence in ARAM. Making them purely for TFT gives more creative freedom.
Refund Option for Little Legends
If you have bought Little Legends specifically for ARAM, Riot has a refund option. Here’s how it’ll work:
- Refunds are applicable only if accounts own Little Legends but never played TFT.
- Refund process starts when 10.15 goes out and will be over by patch 10.16.
- It’ll remove all Little Legends from your account and refund the RP spent.
- Non-RP Little Legend unlocks (e.g. Twitch Prime rewards) will not be refunded
Skin Themes
Next, RiotMeddler shares how they assess skin line themes. He essentially points at four major things they look at when they assess a skin theme. First is how the skin performs relative to expectations. Here, how much the skin was bought relative to the base champion’s popularity is what matters. Second is player surveys about the theme which looks into the theme’s potential rather than specific skins just released. Riot also looks at how much support it has given a skin line in the past through things like trailers, prominent space in the client, the overall amount of time taken building the skins relative to others at the same tier and other champions suggested by players for a particular theme.
Based on these outcomes, Riot either continues with the skin line as a high profile theme or a regular set of skins. The devs sometimes rework the theme to try and better deliver on the promise players think it has or vault the theme with no plans for further skins.
He then gives some great examples of the earlier pointers and alternatives in action. We’ll highlight two of them. Talking about the High Noon Skin theme, RiotMeddler said that the original High Noon skins didn’t perform particularly well. They believed though that there was a lot of potential in them so they rebooted the skin line with the 2018 release. That release didn’t have a large amount of support. The reboot performed very well though and players gave really positive feedback about it. As a result, High Noon was made a higher visibility/priority skin line since.
Image courtesy Riot Games |
Talking about a skin line that’s vaulted, Sugar Rush has some great skins, including the now-iconic Lollipoppy, and has seen Braum, Evelynn and other champs get skins but perhaps with the exception of Poppy, it has done poorly. Sugar Rush 2019 was in the bottom 10% of skin lines versus expectations for the year. As a result, Riot has reluctantly decided to vault Sugar Rush.
