Appreciate this reply at least, even if it doesnt lead to direct changes, FWIW even if it feels like content is being up sold I at least feel I’m getting a bang for my buck most of the time.
Thanks for the feedback Spideraxe30. We’re constantly keeping an eye on whether or not players feel like they’re getting their money’s worth so it’s meaningful to hear that from you.
This post just leads to other questions:
- Are these players getting teased/bullied for buying/using a "low tier" skin and just don't want to deal with that again? This happens a lot with F2P games, it seems.
- Are these players truly not interested in "lower tier" skins because of a perceived lack of quality or effort from Riot? (They cost less, so obviously Riot must not have worked as hard making it as a higher priced one.)
- Were the skins really of a lower overall quality (effort, concept, marketing) than one that costs 1350, hence why players don't want to purchase them?
- Was Riot's decision to not raise the overall standards of a 975 skin to a 1350 one and keep to that price point instead of just focusing on the 1350 tier a researched factor in why engagement is so low?
- Is the 975 RP cost too confusing for players when a $10 card gives 1380 RP?
I have no problem believing the data says that players aren't engaged in low-cost content. I have no problem believing that the data says that some champs aren't worth making new skins for. I have no problem believing that the data says anything you want it to, because the data can be skewed in any direction you want it to be.
Frankly, I'm more interested in seeing if anyone at Riot's PIE team ever asked "why" instead of just accepting what some data-driven corporate pencil pusher says is real.
You make a very solid point here. While we look at data and statistics in order to understand what players are engaging with, that data doesn’t tell us the why. This is why we combine quantitative methods like looking at raw numbers and qualitative information from talking to players in playtest labs as well as surveying players across different regions globally.
To answer your overarching question directly, yes we ask why, and we’re very careful about taking data at face value.
Hey /u/Bellissimoh, we've talked before about the lesser-played champs, I have a question about the engagement/satisfaction points:
Is there a difference in engagement/satisfaction between older and newer champs who receive a 750 skin? (As in, will a player of an older champ with a ton of pre-existing skins report a different level of satisfaction compared to a newer champion with 1-2 skins?)
Regarding champions with already "beautiful" skins (Cosmic Reaver Kassadin comes to mind), how are decisions made surrounding making newer skins for them? Like, people on this subreddit in particular say (quite often) that they don't see a reason to purchase another Kass skin again because of Cosmic Reaver being so amazing. I've heard the same thing about Muay Thai Lee Sin.
Great questions.
To the first question. No significant or noticeable difference. (Which is why for any low play rate champ skins we make, they will be of at least Epic quality)
For the second question, whenever there is a skin that is high satisfaction for the players of that champion, the biggest influence it has on our decisions is working to understand what about it players liked to inform future skins for that champ, but also taking note of the thematic space it takes up in order to ensure we differentiate moving forward.
Also while people cite things like you mention, not everyone is happy or pleased with every skin. There may be a player or set of players that love Cosmic Reaver Kassadin, but there also Kassadin players who don’t like that skin as well. Hence the difficult job of trying to find thematics and executions of thematics that hit as many players as possible.
Read moreHave you guys ever toyed around with the idea of letting people spend 720 rp to get a random 1350 or 1820 skin? I feel like it'd make you more money overall.
Mentioned above but this is where things like Your Shop or skin sales come into play. Also many people do engage with loot in order to get skins at a price that is on average lower than purchasing one directly at the trade off of agency and choice of which skin.
My issue isn't that I feel locked out of cosmetics because of the higher price thresholds, it's that a result of Riot focusing on higher tiers for skins is up selling.
This is valid feedback. It’s also why we try and regularly deliver lower price purchase opportunities like Your Shop.
Definitely taking note of this sentiment as time goes by. Thanks for sharing it with us.
Hey folks. My name is Bellissimoh and I’m the Product Lead for Personalization on League.
“People don’t want 720s.” Over the last several years we’ve seen really poor engagement for this category of skins. Not only do we not see people engage with them but also in surveys players cite them as being lower quality, being unhappy with them when they purchase them, and wish their champion had gotten a 1350 or 1820 instead. Don’t get me wrong, while there are players do like 720s, they’re just not of a large enough audience size for us to focus on. (As an example, many of our lower play rate champs have larger audiences than the folks who show up for 720s)
Another thing that we look for as far as measuring player satisfaction and engagement on skins is how many times people use a skin in-game when they own it. 720s also really under index here.
So in summary, people don’t really buy them, when they do they generally aren’t happy, and don’t use them nearly as much as Epic or Legenda...
Read moredying game btw
Came here to see this comment. Was not disappointed.
Love those Qs
Yeah I’m a big fan of the Q and the sound effects on hit. :)
Thanks! The new Nami and Morgana skins are exactly how I imagined the Sakura Kingdom to be and mentioned it to you in above reply.
I am so happy that you guys are already looking into this theme.One more request - please include Ahri and Lux in this skinline. I really want them to get a beautiful sakura princess skin with pink flowers and petals on their clothes and animations.
Or like they are mermaid princess (not Atlantean skinline), colorful and vibrant, lengthy and voluminous hair. Think Meera from Aquaman movie.Love you!
Hope you enjoy the Nami and Morgan’s skins. Can’t promise you more in this exact theme but can promise that we’re constantly trying to find ways to deliver more and hopefully hit themes that players enjoy. :)
Morgana flies in her homeguard animation, despite preaching about how she chains her wings and walks the soil to embrace her humanity.
Don't look too hard.
Literally unplayable.
I phrased that really poorly oof. A while back, there was a blog post about "finding your lunch table" which was about champion correlations and clusters of champions that people would be likely to play if they played a given champion. It's really out of the blue, but I remembered after seeing a post on reddit and kind wondered what would have changed since then in regards to clusters. It was a bit of a longshot but was kinda curious if there was any plans to do a part 2 or something.
I would imagine clustering could change over time. Especially as balance changes or reworks change play patterns or update the champion fantasy.
I wouldn’t know though for sure that would be a question for the champions team. :)
Oh, I wasn't referring to getting votes from Reddit, that would definitely not be representative of what a given plauerbase wants for their character. I was referring to something like the skin creation process where people voted for the Resistance Illaoi and Little Devil Tristana skins. Iirc, for Illaoi, there was even a subsection breaking down the vote specifically for Illaoi mains. Im sure there's a reason why it isn't used, but I've always thought that something like that process would be useful for the niche characters.
In cases where we have a high degree of uncertainty or if there are multiple concepts / thematics that we think are good we’ll often do player labs. Tests where we bring in players across different regions to get a better sense of what they like or don’t like.
Can I ask how is it decided to "ban" a champion from getting a skin these days because back in the day Yorick, Urgot, Poppy, Taric, Sion were having years of ban, but now we get skins for Mundo, Nocturne, Udyr who are all on the rework list? Isn't that subverting the "put an additional plate on the champion update team workload" statement?
I’m not sure I’m following your point.
Champions are not banned from getting a skin. They might be put on hold when we know and have confirmed that a particular champion is getting a rework. Ex: Morde
In 2017 this blog was posted, which more or less admitted that champs are not getting skins if they are high on rework list. https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2017/05/dev-state-of-skins/ but right now champs who are high on it still get skins like Fiddle, Mundo, Udyr, Corki...
There’s a difference between on the backlog and actively being worked on.
We typically don’t make new skins for champions that are in the process of getting reworked. Those that are on the backlog but won’t start for some time are generally fair game.
It all really depends on the champion, the timeline for the VGU, and how far out that VGU actually is.
I have a question regarding the most recent Elderwood skins, hope you can answer. Kindred mains were asking for an Elderwood skin for the duo, due to an amazing skin concept done by VegaColors (I'm pretty sure you guys have already seen it), and Super Galaxy Kindred came out three years ago (May 2016). With that in mind, what was your thinking process when deciding which champions will receive this year's Elderwood skins?
Considering that Ahri got her last skin less than a year ago (with Prestige Edition that's still available with PP) and Nocturne looks more like Coven, it could've been a perfect opportunity to make Elderwood Kindred happen (and release Elderwood Nocturne exactly as it is right now but next year and renamed as Coven).
I don’t know if there’s going to be an answer you’re going to be satisfied with here tbh. You want a new Kindred skin and we didn’t make one for this set of Elderwood skins unfortunately.
We haven’t forgotten about Kindred and I hope that our next Kindred release meets the tastes and needs of as many Kindred players as possible.
Can I ask how difficult it is to make a skin for Urgot? I do not want to sound rude, but we do not want to wait 2000 days for another skin. :(
What our discord and reddit server psyched about right now is being divided with the following skins, based on amount of mentions: Evil Star Guardian (serious at this, I want it too, he'd be like Syndrome from Incredibles who IMO is amazing supervillain), Dark Star, Mafia, Burgot, Battle Boss, Pool Party (water gun knees), Snowman (remember Little Elf Teemo concept art? carrot gun knees), and my own personal suggestion: a six-legged Spider themed Halloween skin.
Spidgot: A six legged spider monster who shoots webs from everything. Q would be a larger cocoon drop, W would be rapid spiderweb shooting, E would be same as other skins, just maybe make it look more spider-y, R would shoot a large web into a second mouth that is his stomach and the pulled in victims would be consumed.
Thank you very much, if you at least gonna comment on the first paragraph. I have always been curious to know this information.
We don’t want you to wait 2000 days either. We’re working hard to ship more skins per year, which will hopefully help us cover more champs in a given year.
Do you think that using something like a tweaked variation of the choose-a-skin contest would be optimal for more niche character fanbases?
Voting on something like Reddit, while helpful, only gets information from a narrow slice of the entire global audience.
We’re looking at a variety of tools to help better inform our decisions moving forward.
On another topic, do you know if riot has anything planned for the lunch table thing? I always thought that tool was interesting and you seem to like a lot of champs that I do, so I wanted to see how the rest of the community is in regards to this.
Sorry I’m not sure I know what you mean by “lunch table thing”?
Would he be the hardest champ to make skins for? I know rumble and zyra are hard as well but they have more skins.. so I'm guessing Zac has the hardest rig to work with?
I would say he’s more difficult conceptually than technically.
Zyra is hard because of raw amount of assets and animations, Zac is more “what thematic makes sense and can be clearly communicated but also be different than his base / chromas?”
Last time I heard this in the riot pls we got the joke that is dunkmaster Ivern.
Not holding my breath for this kind of stuff anymore
Skepticism makes sense. Hope we convince you otherwise in the future with our actions and releases.