Surprisingly interesting week from Meddler, the skin line stuff was very insightful to read.
Would be cool if they included a few more examples in there. I assume PROJECT is in the same category as Star Guardian, but would be interested to hear how other tech lines perform.
Project's a bit less consistent than SG, though still a very well liked skin line. We think a lot of that is based off champion choice, with some of the champs we've done in recent Project releases doing well and others not hitting the mark.
A lot of the information might be confidential given that skins are a big part of their day-to-day revenue, so they can only give vague descriptions and relative rankings instead of actual numbers.
That's the case yeah. We'd like to talk about this stuff more so you folks get better visibility into how we're making decisions. There are some things we can't share publicly though, hence the degree of vagueness.
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As per the start of the post:
"A Recap
This year RiotScruffy and I are alternating posts. He’ll cover in depth balance and other gameplay topics every second week (Quick Gameplay Thoughts). I’ll cover a wider range of issues in the other weeks (Quick LoL Thoughts). My posts will sometimes contain gameplay content too, though usually won’t."
We completely understand some people are just after gameplay content only. We're separating our gameplay heavy and less gameplay heavy posts as a result to make it easier to just skip the ones that aren't of interest to you personally.
Hey man hope you've been well.
What are your thoughts on VALORANT like agent contracts for League champions?
Cheers :D
We think our Champion unlock process is showing its age a bit and are interested in trying out some different approaches to it. Sett's Calling Card was our first test in that regard and we've got plans for another test this year as well.
VALORANT like contracts aren't currently something we're thinking about, but wouldn't rule things like that out entirely in the longer term.
I'm still pretty sad Pool Party Pantheon didn't happen. It'd match Leona and his ult would be really good for the effect- it looks like a big dive with wave effects already.
Maybe someday? Can't make any promises, but Pool Party certainly seems like a skin line with one of the broadest appropriate champion pools.
sad to hear about sugar rush, i'm very happy about evelynn skin and her chromas, braum's was really good too
Yeah, we were very sad to see Sugar Rush not perform well too. We went back to it because we really wanted to see it succeed and didn't want to judge too much off its first run. Unfortunately there just doesn't seem to be enough hunger there for the theme compared to other options we could deliver instead.
They’re gonna talk about visual clarity and skins in the same blog post, but not mention how awful visual clarity OF skins has degraded over the last couple years?
Of course everyday players may not have problems but I play this game on again and off again repeatedly and every time I come back there are champions I can’t recognize that blast me with skills I’m not expecting because I think they’re someone else.
Even while I’m playing, dumb translucent sparkly effects harass me all day in ARAM because of how poor the visibility is. There’s no definition to these effects, and while it may be somewhat clear that something is flying towards you, it’s hard to tell what it is or how exactly large it is.
Skin clarity's very much on our mind and being worked on too, though there's no single change as stark as 'we're removing something from a mode' to message right now. We didn't want to leave this LL change to just patch notes, in terms of both visibility and highlighting it well in advance, hence the call out here.
I hope they remove the LL egg from battle pass missions too then
Ah, good call out. I'll check with the team, make sure we do that if it's not already planned. Will probably leave LLs in the token store, since that's purely optional by contrast.
This here is a very important point to which Riot needs to answer
Btw thank heavens LL are being removed from ARAM. Such visual clutter
They finally realized after poor sales of LLs for TFT. Now they will make better quality LLs
LLs on TFT have been going fine for what it's worth :)
I love how they never gave Battle Academia a chance. The majority of Katarina players in my games use her black chroma which looks really good and I see a lot of Graves players use his teacher one whenever I tune in a stream. Strange how it works.
Even sillier is how they are beating Blood Moon. Yeah, most of them look good but this years was fanfic tier.
It won't be this year, we expect we'll go back to Battle Academia at some point though. It wasn't one of the absolute strongest thematics, but was well loved by a fair number of players and we think it's got a lot of untapped potential too.
Any idea on if they'll bring back Battle Academia skins? I imagine they did quite well.
As per another comment here somewhere - yeah, we expect we'll do Battle Academia again someday (though won't be this year).
theres no potential for TFT to get its own client? like its not a different game mode like aram or treeline, its a completely different game
It's not impossible we do so some day. TFT and LoL MOBA share an awful lot of functionality though. Disentangling the two would mean a substantial amount of dev time as a result. From the player perspective that means the benefits from separating the two would need to be higher than the benefits from having those same devs work on other stuff for both TFT and the MOBA side (new features, bug fixing, performance improvements, new content etc).
Do any Meme like skin lines such as Sugar Rush, Pool Party ever do that well compared to the more serious skin lines? Also isn't a lot of the hunger linked to the champs? Other than Braum, Eve, Zilean and Ivern are all hugely unpopular, so surely the skinline would never sell well because it has no additional lore/in depth skins live Coven or SG and the champs selected didn't really fit the theme and were unpopular? Probably can't say but is there any correlation between skin theme and champ popularity? I'm wondering if you gave sugar rush to Ez, Yasuo and Lux, it would be the best selling skin line yet.
Some meme skins do well. Star Guardian Urgot's a great recent example.
In terms of hunger and popularity - our expectations for player interest in a skin are based off the popularity of the base champion, so we're not expecting Ivern, Zilean, Braum etc skins to be as popular as those for Vayne, Lux, Lee Sin etc.
Lack of depth/lore for some skin lines - agreed, and that's where the reboot approach comes in to try and get depth like that into skin lines that would benefit a lot from it.
What have been the relatively newer skin lines that could be looked at for continuing development? I was trying to think the other day what new skin styles have come out and I can mostly think only of continuations of existing themes
We've got a handful of completely new skin themes you'll be seeing over the second half of this year.
For recent ish skin lines I'd call out Coven as a strong example of what good looks like personally.
i feel like SG Urgot is an exception, because that was such a huge meme
Fair. Corgi Corki's another similar case, including being well loved amongst even non Corki players for what it's worth. Beekeeper Singed and Beemo older but good examples too.
At least seperate TFT and League missions, pretty please.
I tried TFT and never want to play it again but it keeps popping up in the missions tab.
I just want to see my League missions seperately.
Yeah, that's a fair call on the missions tab especially, that's not a good enough experience right now.
Can't make promises, but will be chatting with people about that one.
What about oddissey skyline? As I can remember both oddissey and galaxy slayer zed was poppular(feels like every kayn and zed mains use this legendary skins), this skinline gonna have new ... skins? u/RiotMeddler
Odyssey's on our list of thematics to return to at some point.
Can't make promises, but will be chatting with people about that one.
What's there to discuss? Just add a check box asking if player wants to get TFT mission notifications. It's not rocket science.
Actually, it's probably just as hard, considering we're talking about Client team.
Yeah, it's not about what we want to do, but about when it will be feasible to do it. And, as you note, the Client is not an easy thing to work in unfortunately.
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