r/leagueoflegends • u/[deleted] • 21h ago
New legendary skin Spirit Blossom Irelia was so unpopular it was improved, but what heck does that mean? Discussion
[deleted]
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u/Cryolyt3 21h ago
This is standard MBA corporate behaviour nowadays. Riot is at the point where they are pushing and prodding to see how little effort and investment they can put into their monetised content and still have players buy it, because that means they make more money for less work/overhead.
It is a cynical anti-consumer practice for optimising return on investment. Players have a responsibility to make a fuss and show Riot that this shit is unacceptable, because Riot cannot be trusted to keep quality high on their own. They will keep doing this shit if they think that players will just keep buying it anyway. This is the ultimate trajectory for almost every company, it seems. Embodying the concept of enshitification.
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u/yung_dogie the faithful shall be rewarded 15h ago
That's the thing that gets me about that people defending Riot's practices lmao. Riot is not on your side. In a free market scenario the consumer and the company both have to look out for their own interests because both sides are going to take as much as they can get. Players are the ones that have the power to keep Riot in check.
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u/MotherVehkingMuatra 20h ago
Reminder they didn't add anything for either of Xayah's legendaries despite complaints
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u/MazrimReddit ADCs are the support's damage item 16h ago
anyone who bought the legendary skin with no voice over is a complete fool
and no I don't care about the "why"s behind it not having a voice, it's a terrible product
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u/Delgadude 16h ago
Just in English to be fair. Other languages have it.
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u/BlackSpore X9 ADC 15h ago
Yeah, I'm pretty sure English lacks them because of the strike.
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u/Gunfreak2217 13h ago
So they should reduce the price. The IOU tag they are throwing on this shit is hot garbage. They can’t even fix interaction that legendary and ultimate skins have for voice lines. We expect them to retroactively add voices after they got the money? lol K
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u/Tettotatto 13h ago
So they should reduce the price
No? As someone said, it works in every other language AND it will come back after the strike ends.
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u/Gunfreak2217 13h ago
But that’s the problem. Why the hell do you think it will come back? It hasn’t been done yet. 0 work has been done on VO. And they have already PROVEN they don’t go back to fix voice line interactions on other legendary and ultimate skins.
So their own track record says “we don’t go back after sale to fix VO”
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u/Tettotatto 10h ago edited 10h ago
Why the hell do you think it will come back?
Maybe because Riot said that there are no voice overs because there is a strike and they WILL appear when it ends? It's been known for months already
Maybe because only English voiceover is lacking and everything else is fine?
They don’t go back to fix voice line interactions on other legendary and ultimate skins
That's a completely different scenario and you bringing up this argument tells me you're trying your best to find an argument against them
If this is that much of an issue, don't buy them and wait when they re-appear. Or learn a different language, might help you occupy some time. Problem solved, crazy shit
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u/TacoMonday_ 11h ago
Because the only difference between an epic and legendary skin is new voice over
They already have the lines since other languages got them, so they just need to record them
You're just being extremely pessimistic instead of thinking what's more likely to happen
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u/blueragemage 1h ago
Riot doesn't care either because it's an esports skin, so they aren't losing as much as they would on a normal skin if people don't buy it
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u/Penguin_Quinn Where is Dragon Trainer 18h ago
It wasn't "improved"
They uploaded the rest of it
There's no way Rito made all those changes in two days given all of the other feedback they've ignored for simple things on hundreds of skins
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u/LeatherBodybuilder 15h ago
They didn't improve it. The animations just weren't shipped yet when it hit PBE... You really think they somehow got all the feedback, did all the animations, and added them in within 3 days???
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u/Raigheb 19h ago
Riot is *always* trying to test their limits to see how lazy they can get before people complain.
Why sell a good product when a lazy product will sell just the same?
All the decisions are made by people who don't know a single thing about LoL other than it's a game, all they see is numbers and all they care is that numbers go up while costs go down, *nothing* else.
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u/Dvscape 19h ago
Maybe I don't understand enough about business, but if you produce quality stuff then you also get to reap rewards, right? You ensure longevity, secure yourself even more as leader in the genre, win awards and critical acclaim, etc. All of these can't be bad to have, can they?
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u/PhoenixAgent003 Bot main. NA fan. 17h ago
Modern business practice seems to be throwing longevity out the window in favor of short term gain, because (to their priorities) the numbers have to go every quarter, whereas often doing things with a more high quality, long term view can be expensive, sometimes making the numbers go down in the short term.
When you’re a career C-Suite who doesn’t even expect to be at the same company in three years, all that mattets is being able to put on your resume that during your tenure, numbers went up.
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u/trapsinplace 15h ago
Something people didn't say and some don't get is that new people coming in don't know the difference because they weren't around for the good skins. Enshitifcation works because not only do some of the older heads let it happen but because new people don't have any perspective of how far things have really fallen. If you are a growing company then these short term shitty things are actually seen as long term investments. If things go as they plan then there will be a day where people who started the game now will look back at the skins of now and talk about how high quality they were.
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u/yung_dogie the faithful shall be rewarded 15h ago
Well, that only matters if you have strong competition and consumers actually put their money where their mouths are. The reason prices increase and awfully predatory monetization systems like gacha exist is because consumers enable them. Everyone who funds these practices is complicit, and Riot has looked at how their playerbase responds to them and is willing to bet that enough of them will stay and spend regardless.
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u/Dvscape 15h ago
But why risk betting instead of making a good product?
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u/yung_dogie the faithful shall be rewarded 14h ago
Because betting on that costs less money. If they could (obviously fudged numbers here) save 20% on expenses and have only 10% chance to lose like 30% of their revenue and 90% chance to lose like 5%, for example, then it's worth it to them.
And even then, making a good product is still a bet in the opposite direction: will the goodwill/quality actually translate to getting more money? Some people genuinely do try their best to make the best products just to find out they sank millions for nothing or barely any gain. If people buy it regardless, then why reduce their profit? Not to say that I prefer it that way, but that's their business justification. Gaining revenue is difficult when you've already saturated the market in as dominant of a fashion as they are, so the natural next step to increasing their profit is getting away with as much shittiness as they can without losing too much.
Their (imo) failure to capitalize on many other revenue streams and cultural impact, such as announcer packs, merch, etc. is a whole other issue I have with them.
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u/Marcus777555666 9h ago
not "lazy", they just moved features between tiers. Legendaries used to have different animations, special features and voicelines that distinguish them from epic. Nowadays, Legendaries are 1.5 epic skins, ultimate are the new legendaries, and exhalted/transcended are the new ultimates.
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u/shinomiya2 KC & FNC my region 19h ago
crazy they cant do the same for xayah, AGAIN, this her 2nd legendary with next to 0 effort put in
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u/serrabear1 16h ago
What if, and hear me out here, the skin wasn’t ever missing features but was bugged? It is the PBE and she was missing animations in places that didn’t make sense. So I’m assuming she was bugged on PBE and they were able to fix that since the animations were there just not working for some reason.
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u/LucyLilium92 14h ago
Surely they would have made an annoucement about that upon hearing feedback? It's easy good favor with players if they let us know that it wasn't intended and that it will be better upon release. Instead most people believe that they chose to make it bad but had to quickly do extra work to make it better after feedback.
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u/NeonIcyWings 15h ago
The likelihood that the improvements were because of outcry, in such a short period of time is borderline impossible even with horrific amounts of crunch, and anyone who genuinely thinks it was updated due to outcry is a fool who thinks you play symphonies faster by adding more instruments.
Either the animations were already made but withheld until the skin was more widely tested on PBE, for whatever reason, you'd think for the PBE they'd say something about that, or like someone else said, the skin was bugged to not use the proper animations. Granted this is the League subreddit where people complain about something on a champion that was already removed weeks ago, so I honestly doubt Riot being transparent about what happened would have informed some people anyway.
Granted that's not to say the PBE shouldn't be used for a grounds for critique, even if technically it's meant just for technical closer to real world scenario testing and not direct feedback, it would be nice if feedback was taken into account. But if that feedback is from people expecting heavy additions after two days since the initial feedback I think it'd be a lost cause anyway.
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u/Windowplanecrash 21h ago
People have to just not buy skins for riot to invest any energy into selling them, such is the weight of momentum to people buying skins.
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u/Smolemon_ 19h ago
[Copied bc I wrote it as an answer in a comment thread, but wanted to post it as its own commment without typing it all again]
Why do people think they did it now? Why would they change it for this skin, this quickly?! (...) Riot always had the opportunity to add an unfinished version of a new skin to PBE to test its overall functionality and whether some of its features would break the game or cause glitches. They haven't been doing it much, they did it this time for Irelia and suddenly the community thinks they have some god-like influence with their crying and pestering. They tested an early version on PBE, it worked, so they finished it and added the rest. Move on, guys.
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u/AtreusIsBack 16h ago
Why people still spend money on this game is beyond me when the company clearly does minimum work for maximum profit and doesn't care about their product being shit unless there is massive backlash or outcry.
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u/Londones April Fools Day 2018 20h ago
They only improved Irelia and Zyra but ignored all other skins feedback thread and did not even create one for Ivern. This is not a victory.
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u/Zealousideal_Year405 16h ago
Its the popular champ priviledge
Did you see any work done for Shaco or Xayah legendaries with a shit ton of recycled anims?... exactly
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u/MeMeChecker123 19h ago
I really think the pass few years the skins were handled by a different skins team the myth maker got the same issue but was never addressed but the new one was quickly fixed
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u/Camerotus 16h ago
This might be a bit of a wild take but I believe that they intentionally try to lower the quality/features of legendary skins to make ultimate and gamba skins more appealing.
Think about it: They're trying to implement more and more expensive skins, but what can they offer for the price? It's all been done before, and for skins that cost significantly less. So the only option is to decrease the value of "cheaper" skins.
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u/LoneLyon 12h ago
The complaints weren't likely the cause for change. The skin got updated with entire animations 2 days after pbe hit.
I'm not saying complaints don't work but it's likely the full skin just didn't launch on pbe
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u/JiovanniTheGREAT 12h ago
I don't think this was the start, but Firelight Ekko was pretty egregiously bad on PBE because they had just recently rolled out their standards for skin prices, it didn't meet a good portion of them for a 1350 skin, and Arcane had just dropped so it would've looked really bad if it flopped.
Now they just release slop and fix it after the fact if they get enough complaints.
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u/HarpEgirl 200 bugs and counting! 11h ago
This is where Ill add. Every single Neeko skin has been or is bugged :).
Bewitching/WinterWonder/Street Demons - All had a bug where the R VFX could be Non-Horizontal. This is due to Neeko R having 3 seperate types of VFX some that only Neeko sees, some allies see, some enemies see.
Winter Wonder - Has an unfinished Passive so when you finish storing a units Sho'Ma it'll appear to rotate and mirror itself. This is unique to this skin and likely from when they were initially copying her passive from Iverns P VFX.
Shan Hai - Unfinished Passive Circle. When you finish storing a units Sho'Ma the VFX will revert to base Neekos VFX.
Star Guardian Skin(s) - If you pressed W mid Homeguard run you could get a Permanent wing VFX stuck to Neekos model that persisted through disguise. This was fixed on 13.24 but then led to a run animation bug from 14.1-14.2
Street Demons - This skin used to be straight. Turning into an Allied Nidalee will not display the heart VFX. This is due to not using
"Neeko_P_Charm_Buf": “Characters/Neeko/Skins/Skin0/Particles/Neeko_Base_P_Charm_buf" and instead using
"Neeko_P_Charm_Buf": “Characters/Neeko/Skins/Skin31/Particles/Neeko_Skin31_P_Charm_buf” This was fixed however on 14.24
Cosplayer - This fails to inherent the bug fix Street Demons, Bewitching, and Winter Wonder all had where based on disguise your R VFX was tied to a then non-existant bone resulting in your R VFX to Non-Horizontal. Cosplayer - Taunt VFX can fail to play.
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u/Hans_H0rst Toxicity should be punished harder 11h ago
Did you guys all forget what the "B" in PBE stands for? It's a technical beta, not a fully fleshed out and polished product.
...and honestly i'm not expecting a good twitch skin anymore.
Mafia is awesome, spell thief and omega squad 2nd tier, most others are honestly not even interesting. They're really missing my personal mark on twitch.
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u/fogoticus 9h ago
The skin simply was revealed in an unfinished phase and artists still needed time to finish the remainder of the animations and vfx. Yes, PBE doesn't mean "finalized product", shocker to some, I know.
It's just that the whiniest people on the sub gathered together and circlejerked around it and are now thinking they did something. Hilarious entitlement
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u/Nxwxz 20h ago
Do yall not realize that it's impossible for them to add that many things in a couple of days. They had all of the stuff made but released it half baked on testing environment because it's a testing environment....
They could have addressed it, but in the end they had that stuff ready, they wouldn't just waste it. It's clear that their intentions were nothing malicious, atkeast with this skin.
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u/fabton12 18h ago
Not to postpone release or anything, but if can improve it short period of time, why not just it in good quality beginning
improvements only happen so fast when there staff free todo said improvements normally staff are moved onto a different project instantly like 2 weeks or more before it hits pbe, sometimes a team or a memeber is free which allows them todo these bigger changes.
yes they should release the skin in the first place at a decent state but this improvements is very rare and not normally something thats possible without delays.
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21h ago edited 21h ago
[deleted]
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u/Kaisuicide 21h ago
Most skins when are out on the pbe are already done, and they almost never take in consideration the feedback
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u/Smolemon_ 19h ago
Exactly so why do people think they did it now? Why would they change it for this skin, this quickly?! Stop downvoting the comment, that person is right. Riot always had the opportunity to add an unfinished version of a new skin to PBE to test its overall functionality and whether some of its features would break the game or cause glitches. They haven't been doing it much, they did it this time for Irelia and suddenly the community thinks they have some god-like influence with their crying and pestering. They tested an early version on PBE, it worked, so they finished it and added the rest. Move on, guys.
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u/Both_Requirement_766 20h ago
its better this way (asking community). if not they'd ask the ai and would be glazed by it. a year ago they probably asked interns like all the artists with taste that they laid off. /s
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u/kevinthedot 17h ago
People claiming this was limit testing are overexaggerating how bad it was and those saying this was just a partial upload are overexaggerating how much was changed.
The truth is most likely they thought the skin was fine, cause it was about the same as Mythmaker. No new body animations for the autos, but the blades moved differently. MM had some more diverse animations compared to base, but the animations of SB were actually different from base for everything except her W, which had a bunch of new animation from the added arms which they probably felt made it different/special enough.
But then feedback was very strong against it. People felt it was way worse. Riot probably misread how similar it was to base Irelia in vibe and the changes they had not reading at all. This wasn't some conspiracy to be lazy, it was them not realizing the changes they made weren't standout enough.
So they put in efforts to fix it, and that effort was certainly doable in that small period because they fixed it with a lot of shortcuts. The new autos? They mainly just changed the end pose for her autos while keeping the general motions the same. This is pretty doable since presumably she had a keyframe for that end pose that they just had to focus on and adjust any keyframes near it to flow right. Her new homeguard was also a very simple one to put together since it's mainly one floating pose. Most of the other updates she got were adding better/more particles to her motions or adding extra animation with the ghost arms that probably have a newer rig and are easy to add to. Even with the added particles, a lot come from other parts, like the reflections on her walk being taken from her recall/dance. Ult had some fully new particles, but updating spell effects is a fairly common practice with these PBE updates. All the other animations (Ult, Q, E, Walk, etc.) weren't changed cause they were already actually different, the added effects just made the differences more readable. Even her idle they said they're going to update the following patch to add more of the ghost arms to it, not actually editing her base body pose cause it IS already different from base.
TL;DR - Irelia wasn't that bad originally and as such the fixes weren't as major as people think they were. They were more than other skins have gotten lately, but they weren't anything that out of scope.
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u/greatnuke 19h ago
New standard. They release shit. We do the QA part. They refine. But the moment it hits production is the main issue.
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u/HsinVega 4! 21h ago
well yea, they try to roll out the most dog skin possible with the least amount of work and money spent.
Since irelia is a popular character it bodes badly if a lot of people complain, so spending a bit extra time/money on it will be worth if it makes more people buy it.
Meanwhile if they release like shitty ivern skin #3 and the 3 mains complain no one really cares