Following a series of changes to the new League of Legends Winterblessed event pass, Riot has come under fire for removing some of the best rewards from the paid track. In response, experience designer Jordan ‘BarackProbama’ Checkman has doubled down on the decision to remove both the grab bag and orange essence, writing that Riot’s intention “isn’t to scam people.”
As I reported yesterday, League of Legends‘ new Winterblessed event pass is missing the highly-coveted grab bag at level 30, and orange essence at level 46, both traded out for different banners. To many, this felt like a “nerf,” especially given the sheer amount of skins and loot that you obtain via the grab bag alone.
In response to player complaints, Checkman has stated that Riot’s intention “isn’t to scam people,” and instead claims that the team has heard feedback that a lot of the MOBA‘s playerbase really like banners, and want more of them.
“In previous passes, we saw that players really enjoyed the banners, so we are experimenting with different formulations and distributions of them,” he writes in a Tuesday, November 28 Reddit post. “We are also experimenting with offering more event-themed rewards and fewer currencies/loot with the assumption that passes with stronger theming would be more rewarding to y’all. I wouldn’t call it a nerf though, more of a value transfer.
“Yeah no question that for most folks skins [are better than] banners in general. But [a] random skin for champion you may not play may be worth more than [a] banner you can 100% equip and display may be closer to equal is the thinking.”
A second post was quick to criticize the idea of equating the banners to grab bags, to which Checkman replies “I guess the part I’m not fully in agreement with is that they are not a reward themselves. We typically value a known cosmetic more highly than an unknown one (I can go more into this if that’s helpful!), and have a rough value attached to most of the things on these passes. This is a value-neutral move. But look, if people tell us that their calibrations are different and grab bags are worth 2x a banner in their mind that’s fine, we can work with that.”
The second response rounds out with “we’re going to try things from time to time and the point isn’t to scam people it’s for us to learn what folks like so we can make things better.”
At the moment, both of these posts, and the third that discussing the idea that skins are, for most, more valuable than banners, have 96 downvotes across the board, which probably says all that it needs to.
It looks like Riot will continue with the current iteration of the Winterblessed event pass, and make amendments to the system in League of Legends Season 14. Personally, I thought event passes were fine as they were (maybe they even needed another grab back), so if Riot chooses to revert it back to how it was with Lunar Revel or Soul Fighter, I’ll be relatively content.
If you were relying on the grab bag for some new cosmetics, you can check out which League of Legends skins are currently on sale. Alternatively, if you’re looking for something a little snazzier, the League of Legends Mythic shop is the one for you.
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