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(TL;DR at the bottom) As all of you probably know there's a narrative story similar to Spirit Bonds in the client right now, showing how the new Sentinels are formed and deployed across Runeterra in order to stop Viego and save the world.
This is meant to be this year's biggest event, spanning across multiple games, and I'm sure it took a lot of effort to create and put the narrative experience on the client.
I was surprisingly disappointed to see how grindy the event is turning out to be, especially after the backlash from this year's PROJECT event, which was already grindy, forcing players to come out with stuff like exploiting Coop vs AI games in order to reach 1 million damage. Let me give you guys a quick rundown of how this event works and why it is so grindy:
The first week, there are THREE regions to be completed (Demacia, Noxus and Freljord). Each week after that, two more regions will be added, up to the fourth week.
The number of points needed to complete each region increases substantially, up to 3200 in the Shadow Isles. Yes, you get more points as the event goes on, but that is completely offset by the absurd amount of points you need anyways. There are also some quests which will be added in week 3, but still, it is an ABSURD amount of grind.
It has already been three days into the event and I'm sure the vast majority of people hasn't even completed the Demacia region, let alone the other two which are supposed to be completed this week.
In reality, it takes like 2 to 3 games (it really doesn't matter if it's ARAM, SR or Unsealed Spellbook) to complete one of the 4 checkpoints present in each region (Demacia has 7 but the other regions all have 4). This leaves us, assuming a normal playstyle, with 43 checkpoints to complete in the whole event. That is, again, with the previous assumption, between 86 and 129 games. We can say that, on average, most players will need at least 100 games in 4 weeks. 25 games per week.
Well, this is a lot of games obviously, but the fact that there is a whole story and in-game experience locked behind it makes no sense. So then, I ask: Why bother taking such a big effort in making Rise of the Sentinels if the majority of the playerbase isn't going to complete it anyways? Most players don't even care about the lore that much, so for those, it's just a pain in the ass to grind for 300(!!!) pitiful tokens.
Who thought shipping such a good story and immersive lore experience locked behind a grind was a good idea? It makes completely no sense at all.
Again, this hurts both Riot and the playerbase alike. If this story is promoted in order to make players more invested in the lore of Runeterra and promote the new skins, it's very poorly implemented because most people won't get to see the story at all, or see how their favorite champions become Sentinels, thus promoting the skins themselves. It hurts the players because such a long grind in order to get 300 tokens and a few generic emotes and icons is not good free content.
Lastly, how can this be improved? It's actually in the simplest way: Increase the number of tokens per-game, in between 33% and 50%, so that in average, it takes 1 or at MOST 2 games to get a new story chapter. They could have even dismissed all the complex sentinel point system and make it so that every one or two games you play, you get a new story chapter (it makes no sense here, it made sense in Spirit Bonds since you were advancing each champion's story).
I can completely see Riot saying that "players lost interest in Rise of the Sentinels and the majority of them didn't engage on the narrative experience" after this event and never do this again, just as they did with PvE modes. Yikes.
TL;DR: Most players will need to play 100 games in 4 weeks to complete the event. Such a grind in order to get 300 tokens and see the story of the event will make most casual players lose interest and drop the grind, making Riot lose on promotion of their skins and wasting their developers' efforts, therefore making it counter-productive and missing its target audience and focus.
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