Some feedback about Worlds/Halloween/KDA "trinity" event I want to share

Hi there. Large bad-english post incoming. I'd like to talk about the idea of battle passes.

The first time i saw the trinity (Worlds-Halloween-K/DA) event trailer i felt very exited. Bought the battle pass (but it will be better to call it a "grind pass") at start. But then.

Every time you play the League of Legends in standard circumstances you feel yourself free. You play because you want to play. Right now. You're in the mood for this, you have time for this, you have friends for this (or not). So every game feels like result of your own wish to play. But after buying something like grind pass circumstances starts to put pressure on you and force you to play. You understand that you must grind tokens and play the game. Especially with hard time limit to every part of trinity event. You need to play even you're in bad mood or have some problems with time. And you need not just play! You need to win with high grade. This is very negative experience in my opinion.

Designing something like battle pass in League is very hard task. I understand this and there are some problems and issues which you can't fix easy. There is a list of things which I don't liked in trinity event.

1 - There was a lack of information about time limits for every part of trinity event. Maybe I'm just blind but I never seen any information about unavaliability of Worlds content (championship skin frames and chromas) after start of the Halloween event. I wanted to buy the gold chroma for Thresh but I didn't. Just because I missed moment when it disappered. _I hoped that there will be opportunity to buy it during Finals, but nope. _

2 - With all these time limits you are in a very stressful position if you don't buy orb packs with bonus tokens. Prices of content are high. If you want Worlds content, you understand that you will miss something from Halloween or K/DA. If you want something from Halloween or K/DA, situation is similar. If you want Prestige Kai'Sa you must grind every day and hope you will grind it successfuly.

3 - You must win with the highest grade if you want more tokens. This is most questionable and toxic thing in my opinion. I understand the core idea of this mechanic. Riot wanted to award you if you play more successful. But in other hand it looks punishing too. This thing adds more salt to your losses in games. If you lose without any events - it looks like "oh no I lose I was very bad (my team was very bad)". If you lose during trinity event with grind pass - it looks like "I played 50 mins, lose and my rate is low. I got 3 tokens for this hard and disappointing match." You start to lose the passion of playing. It's not about win or loss now. It's about how tokens per game you will got. If a match takes too long - you want to finish this as soon as possible. If you understand that you're losing, you don't want to fight and tryhard - you want to surrender, got your 3 tokens and try another time. In other words, this battle pass moves the whole game in other dimension on psychological level - League of Grinding.

4 - S-grade hunting also affects on teamplay experience. Being motivated by high amounts of tokens some players start to play for grade. Your jungler-assassin with 10 kills but low cs can start farm jungle and don't want to help your team. He don't want to die and risk and he don't want to finish until he'll farm some creeps.

Complex of all factors which mentioned upwards creates very strong forcing to donate and buy. Yeah we finally got to this point. I know and you all know - League is free game. You can play as long as you want. There are no pay-to-win things and this is great. You can buy every champion you want to. Only thing which costs money is cosmetics. But when I donate - I want to say "thank you" to developers. I want to buy something for my favorite champions too. Something material. I don't want to buy these shiny lootboxes because there are way more meaningful ways to spend my RP. But design of trinity event forces me to buy it. I can't got all this limited content. Or atleast most part of it. Even if I'll grind like madman. I just can't. These time limits of events make frustration and pressure. I want all gold chromas. But I also want all event ward skins and prestige skin. I feel myself forced to buy orb packs to got some bonus tokens. But I don't want the lootboxes - I need tokens to got everything. So my collector trait of my personality makes me sad. Buying grind pass forces me to play hard and hunt for wins and high grades. But it's not enough. I also must to buy orbs. As I mentioned upwards I wanted to buy Thresh chroma. When I realized that it's unavaliable for me I lose part of motivation and spend most part of my tokens to champion shards.

I understand that every business company needs money. Using human behavior weaknesses is good for profit and marketing, but it's kinda cruel and inhuman. Leave these technics of Master Skinner to Blizzard, please. All these limited bundles with limited icons/borders. All these bundle-exclusive ruby chromas. All these grind passes and lootboxes packs with additional tokens. All these hextech and prestige skins. These time-limited/exclusive things abuses psychological weaknesses of your players. I hope that you will find some ways that more gently motivate us to buy content. For example - skin variants is good thing in my opinion. You spare your resources a little - we have more options to customize our champions. Maybe some players are frustrated by this. But they are frustrated not by whole idea of variants. I think problem is that you made variants for existing skins. Players just want to see new content and new skins - like you made with Leona. Not only many variants of most popular skins on most popular champions.

I don't like SG skinline but if I'll buy all your Eclipse-variants for Leona. And I want to see more new skins with variants in future.

Thank you for reading this and have a nice daytime