In their latest moves, Riot Games has titled their Ask Riot post just hours ago as “Another Lux skin? a.k.a Another skin for Lux?” This is their official response to the long-standing community questions about why certain champions like Lux and Kai’Sa frequently receive new, well-invested skins while others do not.
Riot, of course, doesn’t want to offend anyone and has spoken a lot about announcing new skins for champions that haven’t had one in a long time, like Ornn and Bard. However, the point we need to note is that Riot always prioritizes creating skins for champions with the highest player counts. Lux is used by many gamers from Gold rank down, while Kai’Sa once had a 50% pick rate. This explains why they have so many skins released continuously.
After this article was posted on the League of Legends Reddit forum, many mixed opinions emerged; some supported Riot as they clearly had a point from a business perspective, while others were outraged that their favorite champions lacked skins. However, the most supported opinion was that making skins for popular champions is fine, but creating too many skins for strong champions with “toxic” abilities and playstyles is what is most blameworthy.
The issue is never about making skins for famous champions; it should be about creating a bunch of skins for a group of champions with high pick rates while ignoring others. Now it’s no longer a problem because Riot is doing both, I guarantee the number of complaint comments will decrease significantly.
Your friend underestimates the power of this forum when they see a popular champion get a new skin while ignoring others.
I just go crazy when I see champions I don’t want to play against becoming more common; those champions are extremely toxic. Urgot has a skin? That’s great, but he appears with Tristana who gets direct buffs? Come on. Pantheon has a new skin? Awesome, but he comes with Ekko and Fiora? Seriously?
Honestly, Ekko drives me insane; now I have to ban Ekko in every game instead of other champions, help!
In recent years, Riot Games has always tried to add interesting lore or relevance to the skins they produce. Of course, to create such stories requires many characters to appear, like the Star Guardian skin line, which needs a group of 5 champions, for example. Therefore, alongside a popular champion, Riot often creates a group of skins for several champions with extremely high pick rates.
Typically, such champions are flashy assassins or powerful champions that are buffed, so when they get a new skin, their pick rates increase, and they can dominate matches very easily. This causes annoyance among players; instead of suffering one loss because of champion quality, they have to endure 3-4 matches like that.
The fact that Riot needs money and revenue to maintain the game is very normal; however, they could shift focus to other groups of champions that also have many players but are not as “toxic” as assassins to appease the community. Aren’t Marksmen, Mages, and Supports with plenty of beautiful female champions a real goldmine for them to exploit for skins?
