State of Skins and Events

Authored by na.leagueoflegends.com and submitted by AironLawliet
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You can also expect to see more skins for higher play rate champions in the coming months, including a Legendary Lee Sin skin.

A warrior ascetic consumed with an electric passion for justice, Lee Sin climbed the mountain of the storm dragon, hoping to receive his blessing. Having returned from the summit as a legendary Dragonmancer, Lee Sin now doles out thunderous punishment to villains everywhere—ever under the watchful eye of his draconic patron.

When the average number of Ezreal skins sold is about ten times higher than the average Ivern skin, we need to come up with new ways to measure performance. The truth is that when we set out to make a skin for a low play rate champion, our core objective isn’t to support the business, it’s to support a core audience of dedicated players who love that champion. So how do we know whether we’re meeting the mark? One of the main lenses we use is data comparing between how many champion mains purchased a skin versus how many occasional players picked it up. For the graph below, “high playrate accounts” refers to the mains, and “low playrate accounts” refers to the occasional player of the champion. Let’s take Pool Party Taliyah as a recent example:

Here we can see that almost 30% of players who main Talilyah showed up and purchased the skin—it was one of the best performing skins in recent years when it comes to mains purchasing it. Conversely, Pool Party Jarvan performed poorly not only for champion mains but also for non-mains. Did we make the wrong thematic choice? Was the creative execution in-game not up to snuff? Do Jarvan players just not really dig the aesthetics of Pool Party? All of these are questions we need to dig into deeper to really understand.

Let’s go back and see what this view shows us about a highly discussed skin from 2019, Dunkmaster Ivern.

Looking at this view, an initial conclusion might be, “Ok, looks like a lot of champion mains showed up and purchased this skin,” but you might also ask, “What if Ivern players were just starved for content? What if they begrudgingly purchased this skin because they haven’t gotten one in years, but in actuality hate it?”

This is where we turn to other tools like player surveys to help ensure we understand not just the behavior (purchasing and equipping), but the sentiment: How did people feel about this content? Our success bar for low playrate champion skins is a combination of purchase rate and sentiment measurements. In the case of Dunkmaster Ivern, we found that while there were players who were genuinely happy with this skin, many Ivern players wanted something darker. For a majority of Ivern players who’d been waiting for years for a new skin, Dunkmaster Ivern was a disappointment.

Once all of this information is compiled, our skins teams perform a cross-discipline review of what they think could be done better next time or discuss what key elements could have contributed to success or failure. All of these hypotheses are then set to be tested on new skins we make in the future, all part of a never ending cycle of creation, iteration, feedback, and improvement.

Thematic development is the creative process we use in order to imagine new worlds. We want to do more than just sell skins—we’re trying to create character fantasies that have real substance and are worthy of your passion.

In 2019 we started construction on a few new thematics that we hoped to release in 2020. So far we’ve released three new thematics: Mecha Kingdoms, Spirit Blossom, and PsyOps. We don’t expect every new thematic to be a hit, but based on your reactions to Spirit Blossom, we think we’ve found something that players around the world want to see more of.

We’ve also spent some time touching up some of our yearly thematics like Championship. There's been a lot of love for Championship skins over the years, and we want to make sure we're staying true to that identity while keeping the line feeling fresh and exciting. This year we're bringing in more elements from the look and feel of the Worlds 2020 Event, and we expect this thematic to continue to evolve alongside the event in years to come.

Our team is hard at work on several new thematics for 2021 and some hot takes on some older ones. And there’s still one more new thematic we’re looking forward to releasing this year.

In 2019, we saw a lot of player feedback around the animations of Legendary skins, specifically players calling out that the adjustments we were making to things like walking or idle animations weren’t noticeable. Historically, we’ve adjusted each and every animation on a champion when we’ve made a Legendary skin, but in recent years this has become a bit more complex and challenging.

The artistic quality of new champions in League has gone up dramatically over the years. As that art quality bar has gone up, the number of animations per champion has also increased.

For example, Amumu, a champion with a much older base, has 16 animations across his entire kit, emotes, and back animation. Sett, a much newer champion, has 159 animations. Aphelios has 298.

So in 2019 when we set out to build Legendary PROJECT Pyke, the team was faced with the challenge of adjusting all 127 animations in his kit. This resulted in a number of base skin animations being modified rather than completely redone, and we received a fair amount of feedback that you wanted to see clear animation changes. Our key takeaway was that it doesn’t matter if we go and adjust every animation if players don’t notice. So we decided to change our approach to how we invest our team’s time into Legendary skins.

Ace_OPB on September 10th, 2020 at 15:21 UTC »

Aurelion sol's splash art looks so goddamn badass. Lee sin and zac also looks pretty impressive.

Drakkros on September 10th, 2020 at 15:19 UTC »

AO SHIN AO SHIN

LooksLikeLukas on September 10th, 2020 at 15:18 UTC »

These zac aurelion and skarner skins are straight up bangers