Ever since its initial announcement back in August 2019, the Eternals have faced massive backlash from the community due to their blatant monetization. The stats that Eternals provide are achievements that players earn, which should have been offered for free in player profiles. As a result, Riot Games delayed the product release until now for an official sale, and unsurprisingly, it’s just more expensive with little improvement in quality.
First, let’s talk about what the Eternals bring to the table; you have to pay to own a tool that tracks your achievements in League of Legends. This is akin to paying someone daily to count how many bowls of rice you eat, how many cups of water you drink, or how many hours you game—completely wasteful.
This also leads to the next absurdity where the stats tracked by the Eternals are incredibly unnecessary. How many people, including you and your teammates, care about how many large monsters you’ve killed or how much damage you’ve dealt to enemy champions? Or are you just concerned about whether you won your lane in League of Legends or if you had enough damage to take down your opponents?
“But we have the VIP Eternals package, which has many interesting stats – Riot 2020.” Indeed, the new stats and achievements offered in the VIP Eternals package are more interesting than the bland ones in the standard package. However, this time, only you care about the content in the Eternals; you don’t even get tools to showcase your progress to others. Instead, all you receive is a bit of decoration on the “Mastery 7” that is already free.
The question is, is the money you spend on the Eternals worth it when you only receive a bit of decoration added to champion mastery? The answer is definitely no; if you spend money, the reward should match the investment. Just think, with over 1000 RP to buy the Eternals for all champions, but if you only play regularly and unlock achievements for less than 10 champions, it’s way too wasteful. Meanwhile, with the same amount of money, you could own several Ultimate skins, which are far more valuable.
If the Eternals do not provide skins or direct rewards, at the very least, they should help players gain knowledge and improve their gameplay. Unfortunately, this will not happen or worse, Riot Games hasn’t considered this. Indeed, if you put the Eternals next to DOTA Plus from DOTA 2, Riot Games’ product is nothing but a joke.
First, DOTA Plus provides players with extremely useful knowledge for those new to a champion, such as how to build items according to the current meta. It even suggests picking champions that fit the team composition and identifies the most suitable lane for that champion; Valve’s product even calculates the win rates of each team over the course of the game. In short, DOTA Plus helps you learn to play the game, not just something to show off.
Additionally, DOTA Plus’s skill showcasing system far exceeds what Riot is developing. When entering a game, a player’s champion mastery will always be displayed on your hero icon, allowing opponents or teammates to instantly know that the player is indeed proficient with that champion. Even player ping actions also show mastery levels, giving teammates peace of mind that the player is not “calling out lies.”
Even with the Shards collected during DOTA Plus quests, you can trade them for extremely beautiful “golden” item sets in the shop. This is the most significant advantage over the Eternals; Riot Games has no special reward system for the Eternals, and what you receive is merely spiritual. Meanwhile, unique skins and emotes exclusive to you—what players desire—are things that Riot hasn’t even considered.
Although in Vietnam, to unlock all Eternals, you would have to spend 1111 RP, around 500,000 VND is a relatively large amount for most players, but what you receive is almost nothing. Perhaps for many people, it’s better to use that money to buy skins or crates to satisfy their collecting interests rather than waste it on the Eternals.