[2020] The store calls every AP champion a "mage" and that's super weird.

Howdy, I designed the store. Here to give you some store lore.

Once upon a time: The tabs at the top of all items weren’t classes, they were attributes. Things like magical, physical, durability, etc. you could turn on tabs in combinations to get the profile you wanted. Diana for instance would have magical and durability turned on.

My thinking was that league champions don’t fit into neat little molds so players should have the ability to customize their view. Also note that at this point stat filters had not been implemented.

Well, as we continued to test I learned some things: 1. Stat filters did 90%+ of this job these were doing, were more precise, and more familiar to people. 2. Most folks hated futzing with the attribute filters. They wanted to click one thing as see the items they were looking for.

So I went back to the drawing board and reframed the goals of each system.

The top-level tabs should be easy to understand and get it right 80% of the time. For really strange characters, we added the popular tab, which is data-based and can have anything in it.

Stat filters should be the way in which players can truly customize their view down to very small slices.

Then we had to go about naming them: The method that got the highest levels of instant recognition, even though it wasn’t the most accurate, was by class. Most people didn’t really think about how Fizz was an assassin, they generally understood that he should build AP (mage) items.

So that’s how we got here. Happy Black Friday (if you’re into that sort of thing)!

If I had one thing to say about design in general it’s this: everything is about trades. You will never have a perfect solution that makes everyone happy. So make the best trades you can, be open to being surprised, and make sure you adhere to your goals.