[2021] Riot Animations: Temporary cosmetics?

Riot brought a lot of life and storytelling with LoR. Being immersed with Stories, Animations, and more characters.

However I noticed after every expansions, Riot brings in new animations and immediately withdraws some of them on the next patch. It pretty much imo takes out the life of the game. Are these just temporary cosmetics? What's the point of taking them out? Does it add too much memory that it could crash the game?

Don't get me wrong that animations were enhanced in the game from the spell stack. Spells in beta resolved from left to right one by one. But now, spells resolved faster and computes proactively when the units are involved in the spell or not. Just that why do some of them are taken out instead.

ie. Barrel Animations - remember when barrels were at the center of the screen and flew towards your board space? Now the barrels just add count to the number of barrels you have

Zoe Nexus Strike - on the release day, a star flew across screen and creating supercool starchart. If you had one, it would still swing by. Now its just an ordinary create card animation.

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Hi u/TheHenoy, this is a good question; changes like these happen for a bunch of reasons, so it makes sense that it's confusing as a player on the receiving end.

Some of them are purely about pacing and time for players, like making spell animations overlap one another (sometimes). Every cool animation we add takes up time and space, sometimes many times every game and hundreds of times a day for a player. There's a balance we have to find.
Others are about clarity and game mechanics. We experimented with a lot of variations on how Barrels might work, and feel like we've found a good balance where they're clear, they don't take up too much board space, and people don't spend too much time watching the same animations over and over again.
Rarely... it's a bug. Zoe's animation we just screwed up a bit, which caused some bad hangs for players. It's just "in the shop" and it'll be back as soon as it's fixed!

I'd like to emphasize that none of these were intentionally temporary. We actually really hate removing cool visual moments from the game... we think they add a lot to the gameplay experience, and if someone out there is playing with those cards and really enjoying those animations it sucks to take them away (even for a patch or two). But there are lots of tradeoffs we have to navigate, so keep helping us by letting us know when you think we've done it wrong (or right!).

edit: 1 year update, still bad at formatting on reddit

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