Mission Proposal: Free LP
I'll be upfront that this is basically begging. Proposal:
As a Mission, offer 5 League Points to players once weekly in exchange for playing the Featured Game Mode.
Context: I'm a guy with a full-time-plus job teaching high school, so I don't usually get to play more than one or maybe two matches per day if I'm also planning to get enough sleep. On the weekends I can sometimes squeeze in a few more, but often I play even less then because I'm visiting friends or celebrating holidays or whatever.
I'm currently ranked Silver 1.78 in Flex, which I prefer to play (as a solo) because I find there's much less toxicity. Over Spring Break I got to Gold promos... three times. Then I had a losing streak and have been bouncing back and forth from S2-S1 since. It's really disheartening to play a game and get, say, 17 LP for an hour-log slugfest that you barely pulled off, then lose 20 LP in 20 minutes because fillintheblank nonsense occurred. Almost as bad is landing at 99 LP!
Detailed Proposal: Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm offers a loot box in exchange for 2-3 rounds of their weekly-rotating Brawl modes, similar to LoL's Featured Modes. These matches are typically shorter, so playing a few of them is only a slightly larger time investment than one "standard" match, especially since ranked queues are a bit slower in HotS. Their loot boxes, like Riot's, contain merely cosmetics, but the idea is that by offering free stuff you can keep Special Modes populated for more than just the one try-out round that might otherwise happen. It also encourages people to cool off between Ranked sessions; good for mental health.
My request is to offer this as a once-weekly Mission: play 2-3 rounds of the Featured GM and choose your reward: +5 LP redeemable at your next Ranked win, a Key Fragment, and/or 200 IP.
Rationale: Some players don't have time to play as much, but still want to advance at a decent rate, or open Chests, or unlock new champions as they come out. Honestly, all I really want right now is to make it to Gold. You could turn the +LP option off for anyone ranked in Gold or higher. I feel that this wouldn't totally skew the ranking, since we only have about 40 weeks in a season. That makes the maximum output 200 LP, or ~2 ranks, and people still have to win their promo series. This just helps them get there.
Alternate/Additional Idea: Give +1 LP for every 5 minutes in excess of 40 minutes of game time, win or lose. This doesn't help as much, and might be prone to abuse, but as I said above, it hurts the most when long games turn out to be low-yield or high-loss. The calculation for LP, especially in Flex, often feels unrelated to players' performance. If a game goes long, that generally means the teams are playing pretty evenly, and it would be nice to get rewarded for enduring in a high-stress match. Positivity is key! (During my slump I tried playing SoloQ. 4 of my 5 games had people calling for 15 min surrenders, and we won two of those!) I don't think +4 LP would encourage anyone to make games last over an hour, but if you see abuse you could cap this at 5 or 10 cumulative per week.
Thanks for your consideration!
P.S. I find it unfortunate that "positivity" gets flagged as a misspelling on LoL boards.
