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. 

Jungle Speed Does Not Equal Win

Since the Mundo craze that began after IPL a few months ago, the only thing summoners seem to care about when it comes to the jungle is jungle speed. Sejuani’s free week made me decide to pick her up (and buy a skin to prove I’m not a noob :) after not playing her since she came out, and I am having a blast and participating in some very one sided matches.

Nowadays, when people discuss junglers and their relative strengths, the first thing they say is “this champion has a slow jungle” or “this champion’s jungle is faster than that one” as if a jungler’s worth in League of Legends is only the speed with which he or she can clear the jungle.

This is simply ridiculous and a result of a ranked solo-queue mindset that is cancerous to both the fun of League of Legends as a game and it’s purity as an eSport.

Solo-queue creates some REALLY bad habits in summoners. Firstly, everyone attaches far too much importance on the first 5-10 minutes of the game, aka the “laning phase.” Summoners select champions, runes and even masteries based on their expectations of who they will be laning against.

How many times have you seen a solo-top lane summoner purchase ninja tabi because their opponent is AD? Even when in team fights Mercury Treads might be more important?

Since the pros discovered how to lose with Mundo, all they talk about is his fast jungle speed. And although it pains me to admit it, Mundo is really, really strong in the first 15 minutes of a game, but once team fights begin, I think he’s extremely weak and therefore a bad choice.

The reason I’ve always been a fan of Nautilus (who is receiving some attention at the pro level and likely receiving a nerf because of it in the upcoming patch-sadface) is not because of his jungle speed but because of the utility he brings to teamfights.

People in solo-queue are looking for a reason to give up. They let early ganks and kills make them think the game is lost. This is why jungle speed is considered valuable, and it’s a very bad reason.

Team fights win and lose games. Not jungle speed. 

Episode 23: “Congrizzle 4evzzz” by The Very Most

For this episode of Low Elo I wanted something upbeat and happy sounding. I combed through the collection and came accross something with such strong power pop sound that it made me vomit a rainbow.

The Very Most are an indie pop band led by Jeremy Jensen and founded in 2002 in Boise, Idaho. Influenced by Camera Obscura, The Beach Boys, and the poppier side of Built to Spill, they were, until a year ago, the only indie-pop band in this Mountain West town of around 200,000 people. Naturally they were a little lonely. Thank goodness for ye olde internets, which has allowed them to make lasting, important connections with like-minded pop enthusiasts from around the world.

Download “Congrizzle 4evzzz” by The Very Most