/dev: Skin Thematics and Champion Fantasies

Hey everyone, we’re the Skins team! We’ve heard a lot of questions from players in the past about how we choose thematics, which champions go in them, and why, so today we’re going to answer a lot of those questions and shed light on our current philosophies. 

Skin development is a balance that’s constantly changing. This is going to be an iterative process, and we appreciate your feedback not only as we find the sweet spot for each thematic, champion, tier, and type of player, but also as that sweet spot changes over time. We expect to have hits and misses, but it’s important to us that you know that we’re committed to that journey. So, let’s talk about how we’re thinking about skins right now.

Champions First

Over the last few years we’ve been focusing on releasing more skins for every champion, in an effort to keep the 1000-day club from returning. So our efforts have been aimed at output and efficiency to make sure that no champ went too long without a little love. And this worked pretty well, but unintentionally, we started focusing on just getting skins out the door, and not as much on the base fantasy of champions. Now, we’re recalibrating a bit and dialing in making champions shine with their new skins.

We’re calling this approach “champions first.” Meaning that we want to look holistically at a champion’s fantasy and at what’s missing from their current skin lineup so the new skin feels fresh to their mains and casual-enjoyers alike.

This means that instead of just saying, “Who fits in this thematic?” we’re also asking, “What’s missing from this champion’s catalog? What could be really cool for them?”

This is an important distinction because when we were making thematically-driven decisions, your Caitlyns, Luxes, and Ezreals are more often good fits for more thematics because they’re less-niche in terms of appeal and they are generic enough to fit into a lot of thematics. It’s a lot easier to slot Ezreal—who’s practically just a weaponless guy—into any theme than big, horrifying, crab-man, Urgot.

But by looking at the champion and their catalog first we can find those sweet spots a champion’s missing. That said, there are times where we need to subvert a champion’s base theme to create something pretty novel. Urgot’s skins often rely on some flavor of body-horror, scary crabby boi. But PJ Guardian Cosplay Urgot is... definitely not that and fills that silly, whimsical gap in his catalog.

So with us re-focusing on the champion-first approach, we’re able to identify both really serious, cool opportunities for champions to make their fantasies more fleshed out, and silly goofy moments where we can go, “What if Azir was a bird attorney?”

Spoilers: It looks like this. Coming Soon™.

Thematics 101

Something we’ve heard a lot is that y’all want to know how thematics are chosen throughout the year. The TL;DR is that we need a wide spread of vibes throughout the year. For example, coming off of Anima Squad we wouldn’t want to go right into a thematic like PROJECT because they’re both sorta futuristic tech-based.

Similarly, when looking at which thematics to use for bigger moments throughout the year (like the summer event or Worlds), we also look for ones that have a world that can be deepened. Because while some thematics are popular, they’re not really that deep.

Consider the Bees skins. They’re popular and adorable, but you don’t really need a whole universe built around cute, buzzy lil guys.

These smaller thematics give us unique opportunities to find some cool champion-first approaches too. Both in ways that let us expand on their base thematic, and to make some truly unique skins like Rain Shepherd Milio.

Similar to how we said that we wouldn’t release similar vibe skins one after another, we don’t want to rely on the same big thematics year after year. Otherwise we start to experience thematic fatigue—feeling like things are repeated over and over, whether it’s the same skin or just something that feels too similar.

Adding to this, we also want to make sure that we are still offering a wide range of vibes because preferences change in each region. For example, North America and Europe tend to prefer more xX2edgy4meXx skins with an otherwise nice mix. But in other regions, like Korea, we see a lot more player preference for more elegant, beautiful things. We have to weigh this when making thematics as well, because while we all love a little edge, we want to avoid it feeling like a middle school cafeteria.

Besides, experimenting with these smaller thematics might lead us to something that could be expanded upon and become something truly cool. A great example of this is Star Guardian. The Star Guardian Lux skin was originally just... alone. And then because players loved it so much, it turned into a REALLY cool thematic we could expand on in the future.

Skin Tiering

We also want to talk about who gets what tier of skin. One of our goals is for all champions to get skins of various tiers, but this is admittedly when the process gets a bit more complicated. Higher tiers should provide more immersion, so they take more time and effort to make. And speaking from a business perspective (because we have to keep League on and running), it’s more challenging to make higher tier skins for less popular champions.

That said, every champion matters. We don’t want to say, “Sorry -insert champion here- mains, you’re never getting a Legendary skin.” We work with players by soliciting feedback before we even start development to see what you want, so we can focus on making skins that are worth it. We’ve touched on this a bit in the past, and a lot of it still rings true today.

We conduct a ton of research to help us understand how y’all think about features and how valuable they are to you by using focus groups and sending surveys (and generally keeping an eye out on social media, Discord channels, and forums). The interviews we conduct with players helps us best understand what’s most valuable to you not only in general, but on a champ to champ or tier level basis. This means adding even more focus onto the things players have said they really want, but scaling down investment in areas that y’all told us are less valuable.

We want you to tell us what aspects of skins are a flop and which ones slay. Sometimes when making a Legendary, we build out a new feature we predicted would be appealing only to find out other aspects were more exciting. Delivering what matters most is very important, especially as the complexity of champions has changed over time.

Results from player feedback on Feature Values for skins (this can shift in regards to execution and thematic)

To quote The State of Skins (2020), “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.” 

It’s still essential for higher-tiered skins to deliver more polish and pizazz than lower tiers, and we’re not looking to shift the level of value for players. But by attempting to force each skin into cookie-cutter specifics assigned to each tier, we end up not only investing time in aspects that don't elevate the skin for that champion, but also limit the room we had to give players what they were actually looking for. Hearing from players through means such as the research above, and post-release feedback helps us best target these features.

Okay, speaking of what you’re actually looking for, these champions will be getting (or have already gotten) their first Legendaries this year:

• Aurelion Sol

• Vi

• Viktor

• Seraphine

• Aatrox

• Sylas

And while we’re talking about skins, let’s go ahead and share the upcoming Prestige List as well.

• Zeri (Event Tokens)

• Diana (Event Tokens)

• Swain (Mythic Essence)

• Caitlyn (Event Tokens)

Cooldowns

There’s one more thing we want to talk about before we go, and that’s skin cooldowns. Every champion has a different skin cooldown based on their popularity. Basically, this is the amount of days between each skin. This is some nerd stuff, but we use a data science model to take into account a variety of factors (pick rate, playrate, past skin sales, etc) to calculate the target date for each champ.

That time is shorter for champions who are higher in demand, which means that it’s even more critical for us to make a cool skin for a champion when they have a longer cooldown. For less-popular champions, we try to keep the max cooldown at 1000 days, but ultimately our goal is to give you a skin that you want.

When champions start approaching their cooldown, we look for solid upcoming opportunities, but the last thing we want is to force them into a thematic that doesn’t do them justice. We’ve done this before, and it just feels bad. We’d rather extend the cooldown slightly past the 1000 days by a small amount rather than give you a skin that’s disappointing just to refresh the cooldown timer.

Because, realistically, if you had to wait a few years for a Skarner skin and then you got “Ducks,” Skarner mains would probably be like, “What the @#^%?” and rightfully so. (At this point of writing, we were derailed for several minutes by the idea of a Ducks skin line…)

So…

As always, please let us know what is working, because we do care about your feedback. It matters that the skins we make are fun, exciting, and worth your money. We’re really excited at some of the ideas we’re cooking up and can’t wait to see what you think over the coming days, months, and years. Thanks so much for reading and we’ll see you again soon!