Red Post Collection: State of Skins and Events, Sunsetting Clubs & more
Today's red post collection includes a dev blog on skins and events, including early peeks at new skins for Aurelion Sol, Zac, Singed, and Lee Sin, the sunsetting of Clubs at the end of the season, new merch, and more!
Here's a new dev blog from Riot Bellissimoh on the states of skins and events - "An update on Ultimate skins, Legendary skin animations, thematics, events, and more."
"Hey everyone, Bellissimoh here, Product Lead for Personalization and Events. Wanted to take a few minutes to check in on the promises we made at the start of the year, walkthrough our current thinking about skins and events (including thematics, Ultimate skins, and Event Passes), and highlight some opportunities we’d like to tackle in the future.
More Skins Each Year
At the start of 2020 we made a commitment to increase the number of skins we make per year. In 2019 we shipped just under 100 skins, and our hope this year was to ship around 120. We’ve had some significant challenges in the past six months with COVID-19, and we’ve also undergone a massive transition to work from home.
This all being said, we’re delighted to let folks know that we’re still on track to hit our target of 120 skins. In fact, it’s looking like we’re going to be able to exceed our goal and hit close to 140 skins by the end of 2020.
Now outside of our commitment to just increasing the raw number of skins, we also called out along list of lower play rate champions that haven’t gotten new skins in years. We’ve hit most of our targets on that list, and are likely on track to hit the remaining three.
And since things have been going so well with production, we’ve been able to add eight more champs who haven’t gotten skins in a while to that list. As long as everything goes as planned, we expect to deliver skins for the following champs before the end of 2020:
Singed
Though many in the Resistance find Singed unsettling, few can deny his efficacy in pushing back the machine threat. For Singed, the only thing that matters is driving back Viktor’s creations, whatever the means.
Aurelion Sol
Aurelion Sol will be appearing in a brand new thematic that we’re currently calling Dragonmancers. Aurelion Sol awaits the ascent of a warrior worthy of receiving the power of the storm.
Zac
Never content with his extant creations, Viktor’s latest innovation has forged an experimental alloy that shifts between liquid and solid states. Incredibly flexible yet nigh-indestructible, the new zoophagus assault constructs, or ZACs, spring onto the battlefield, harvesting and consuming any resistance that stands in their way.
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.
Evaluating Skin Performance
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.
New and Revamped Thematics
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.
Legendary Skins
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.
For High Noon Senna, we recognized that this was another fairly new champion with a lot of animations that were already very high quality. In this case, the team had come up with a really sick idea to take her gun and allow it to transform into a horse for her to ride. While this was a great idea and really drove home the fantasy of High Noon, the team recognized that it would be a huge time investment and would take up a large chunk of our planned animation work for the project. We went for it anyway because our bet was that players would notice the Gun Horse way more than minor tweaks across all her animations, and based on player reactions, we think that was the right choice.
Now this doesn’t mean that we’ll always invest our time this way. For more recent Legendaries for Ahri and Thresh—two older champions with much smaller animation sets—we were able to meaningfully update all of their core animations and have extra time and budget to add transformations for each.
In short, we want to make sure that we invest our time on Legendary skins in ways that stand out to players and are noticeable by the mains of those champs. Expect us to continue to tailor our time per champion and optimize for creating an in-game fantasy that stands out, both in animation efforts and things like VFX, SFX, and modeling.
Ultimate Skins and Skin Tiers
Speaking of in-game fantasies for our skins, let’s take a minute to talk about skin tiers, and specifically about Ultimate skins.
Whenever we set out to build a skin, we often discuss which skin tier something should be. Major considerations or factors in that decision are things like:
How far can we take this idea or the execution of it?
Does the base champion's VO match or feel out of place in the target thematic?
What creative ideas do we have for new animations or VFX?
What creative hooks or interesting ideas can we center the skin around?
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