How to Print Money: A Hypothetical Proposal for Accessories in League of Legends

My Minecraft character wears a lab coat, a motorcycle helmet and ear buds.

Smartphone covers, MMO avatars and Facebook profiles; in a world where everyone has the same stuff we enjoy little as much as we do making the common feel like our own creation. League of Legends is no exception.

Customization isn’t just cosmetic in League of Legends. Sure, champion skins are terrible fun but there are also endless rune page combinations that require the meticulous collection of these tiny stat boosts and masteries can mean the difference between earning first blood and being bled first by an opponent.

But is it enough? Without regard for the competition, I find myself asking whether or not I’m truly happy with the level of customization in League of Legends and when I measure the options against what they could be I have to admit that even my new Pulsefire Ezreal skin starts to feel a little tired. The future I see is bright, however, and appropriately it all starts with a pair of sunglasses.

The Pitch:

Imagine locking in your favorite champion before the game begins, choosing your favorite skin and then choosing a pair of dark black sunglasses from a scrolling list of items in your inventory. The game loads and the portraits remain the same but there he is standing at the fountain: Cotton Tail Teemo reporting for duty from behind a pair of black, Blues Brothers-style shades. And that’s just the start of things to come.

Reverse Annie in a cowboy hat.

Garen in a trucker cap.

Anivia with DJ style headphones.

Bling on ALL of the yordles!

The best part of it is that your accessories will work on every champion you own. Sure, some will look less impressive or may not show up as well on certain champions but the thought of a holiday skin lineup with an accessory or two to choose from that can be used on every champion you own to show your holiday spirit excites me a great deal.

The Project:

There’s an initial investment that has to take place for this to work.

Character riggers will have to not only add anchor points to every existing champion model in the league but they’ll need to assign values to each champion’s anchor point based on relative size. This way, accessories will have a spot to drop onto the existing models and they won’t be too large or small for that anchor point.

Then there’s the modeling, skinning and tuning of each accessory. If the previous job was done well, adjusting each item’s fit to the champion models should be a simple matter of allowing it to inherit the values assigned to that model for the particular anchor point. When special circumstances occur, additional values can be added to fine tune the fit of the accessory.

Once the accessories are built and placed, it should only take a span of 5 minutes to adjust the way any single accessory fits a champion and should only be required on models that have exceptional strange proportions or qualities to them.

It is plausible that a single talented designer could oversee accessory development as a full time project and they could operate by recruiting individual artists and riggers with available time between other projects to contribute.

Profit:

The three main avenues to generate a profit from accessories are to sell them a la carte, package them into champion bundles and include them with certain skins. They can also be given out as incentives or rewards for hitting milestones such as 1000 wins, scoring a penta-kill or achieving certain elo ratings.

By packaging certain accessories with special skins, players will have a further incentive to purchase skins for champions they don’t often play. The same goes for bundling accessories with new champions. In either case, the accessory should be linked to the champion or skin; a seasonal holiday skin might come with a Santa hat or other accessory appropriate to the holiday while a champion release may include an accessory that is emblematic of that champion’s default skin.

Accessories could also provide a new level of incentives to leverage in projects to impact community behavior, social media adoption and player retention.

TL/DR- I want Teemo with a Ruskie Cap and Matrix shades.