Retaining Custom Item Sets: Proposed Solutions for Current Problems w/ Recommended Items & The Shop

(Buckle up kids, this is a long post. TL;DR at the end. This is my 2nd time writing this because my computer promptly crashed before saving or submitting it the first time, but I feel strongly enough about the issue that I’m willing to write it again. This isn’t intended to be a mindless rant about how Riot sucks or that I’m so much smarter than Riot or anything like that, because I really don’t think that at all. I give Riot my undying loyalty and respect, which is why I feel the need to make this heard. I Posted this on 3 different boards & was redirected every time, so I hope this is the right one.)

It has recently come to my attention that Riot has announced that Custom Item Sets are to be removed from the new client, and the ability to Customize Item pages through the client will also be removed and discontinued. As an avid Custom Item Set user, this is extremely upsetting. I have around 30 or so Item Sets that I use and I personally find them all to be very effective. I am also aware that only ~1% of the entire LoL community ever even utilized item sets, which makes it very difficult for people who’ve never touched a Custom Item Set, to be able to empathize with those who enjoy using them. However, before I can talk about Custom Item Sets, I feel that there are more pressing issues lying within the current Shop and the default Recommended Pages that have to be addressed first. Personally, I believe that the current in-game “Shop” should function more similarly to that of a real life “store”.

1. A real store must advertise and organize their products effectively. A store cannot expect their customers to find what they’re looking for when their popular small products are stored wayyy in the back. The “Recommended Items” page for every champion has its Consumables listed at the very bottom of every page in the Shop. This makes purchasing Vision Wards in particular, mildly annoying, in that you’d have to slightly scroll down on the list to even see that it’s available for purchase. I believe this to be the main cause for the average substantial lack of Vision Wards purchased at almost every elo. Example. In this photo is a Challenger player navigating the Shop with the Recommended Items page open. For context, he successfully 1v1’s the enemy laner, and then greeds out and dies to a clean-up by the enemy mid-laner, because he had no river vision. He ends up buying a Phage + Biscuit, even though he has just enough gold to buy Phage + 1 Vision Ward upon respawn. He knows that vision wins game. He knows that Vision Wards are valuable and important. And he knows that purchasing Vision Wards would prevent similar instances in the future, yet he doesn’t buy the Vision Ward, which might just be him not caring, or it could definitely be because ironically, he can’t even see the Vision Ward in the Shop. How is the average player, or even a Challenger player, expected to continuously purchase Vision Wards when they’re located at the extreme bottom of the Recommended Page, to the point where you can only see a sliver of it?

2. If a store labels a product, it needs to be accurate. Items labeled as “Essential” have to actually be essential to the champion. The terms “Recommended” and “Essential” imply that you should buy them every game because they’re essential. “Hey I recommend this item. It’s really essential and you should always buy it.” For higher elo, this generally isn’t an issue, but from my experience with lower elo and new players, some will treasure the Recommended Page like it’s a holy scripture, and that’s not necessarily their fault, because they’re simply following advice. Example: Nasus – Essential Item: Frozen Heart. It should be obvious to experienced players that it is objectively wrong to rush a Frozen Heart against most AP top laners: Rumble, Malphite, Singed, Kennen, Swain, Cho’Gath etc. But new players and low elo players will rush it anyways simply because it says “Essential” with no other explanation. So why incorrectly label Frozen Heart as an “Essential” item when it clearly isn’t? Singed still has Tear of the Goddess as “Essential”, even though Rylai’s is staple on every sane Singed player. The list goes on and on. The same goes for “Situational” items. A lot of these are outdated by several months and actually aren’t even semi-viable items to build under almost any situation. Example: Nasus – Situational Item: Titanic Hydra, Situational Item: Bloodthirster. Why have items that are extremely far out and off-meta listed when you could list actual situational items that are nowhere on the current page. Banshee’s Veil, Zz’Rot Portal, Randuin’s Omen, Sunfire Cape, Boots of Switness, Merc. Treads, Righteous Glory, even Youmuu’s Ghostblade and Ohmwrecker have all definitely been both more situational and more viable than Bloodthirster and Titanic Hydra have ever been for at least the 2 years that I’ve been playing LoL. A simple, brief explanation of why you would build an item would do wonders for a lot of people and have no impact at higher play. Example: Nasus – Recommended Item: Frozen Heart “Take this vs a lot of AD and Attack Speed and to stack more” rather than “Essential”. Hextech Protobelt is also rather amusingly considered a “Defensive” item under Kennen’s Recommended Page, which I guess is kind of true, because the best way to defend yourself is to Protobelt into the entire enemy team and kill everyone. Items need to be labeled correctly, if at all, rather than throwing them into a box and slapping a word on them

3. A store will always try to sell something that’s available and in demand. There aren’t enough item choices and build paths that are in the Recommended Page. Similar to the previous point, there needs to be a larger variety of items in the Recommend page, to the point where it should recommend more than 8 legendary items to pick from every game. Thanks to the current Shop and Recommended page, newer players generally start to develop what I jokingly call “MOBAFire Syndrome”, in which they will only ever buy the same 6-7 items in every single game per champ. I never understood why the recommended items list only goes on for 3 units wide when there’s obviously enough space to fit 9 items in a single row. Having people switch to sites like Championify does not remedy this. Condensing the page and adding more items to the Recommended Page will make buying the correct items a lot faster and easier for more experienced players to counter-build. More people will remember to buy Randuin’s Omen vs. Yasuo and Tryndamere if the item is right there in front of them. This will also tone down the severity of “MOBAFire Syndrome” in newer players who’ll feel more comfortable in experimenting with a larger variety of items if they’re all on the same Item Page.

4. There currently aren’t enough pages for viable builds. Currently Riot has 1 Recommended Page per champion per map (only one of them really matters). Sometimes Riot will bestow a second page for specific champions for jungle/support pages as well as a solo lane page. But some of these recommended builds are outdated or non-existent. Currently there is no Recommended Item Page for Brand Support, which has been played on the ladder for months, and has now made its debut at Worlds and is currently sitting on a 6% play rate and a 4.5% ban rate. New players seeing people play him competitively are being “Recommended” to start Doran’s Ring. Better players are forced to dig through the “All Items” tab to pick and choose Items, which is inconvenient. Sure we have a Jungle Nasus Page, a Jungle Darius Page, but we have no Brand Support. Or Lux Support. Or Vel’koz Support. Or Jungle Kog’maw. Or Lulu as a Solo lane. Seeing Lux supports at low elo consistently start Doran’s Ring without even knowing why they’re building it can be both frustrating and amusing to say the least.

Miraculously enough, Custom Item Sets have solved all 4 of these problems for me. I keep everything in the Shop condensed and available. I can manually keep everything up-to-date and change Sets according to the META without being forced to use a 3rd party program that does what I can already do, but worse. I can clearly see all of my options that I consider viable in the same place without having to jump around the “All Items” page and waste time typing in the store. I can remember to build QSS when facing a Malz/Warwick. I have a Brand Support page. It really is extremely convenient and saves a lot of valuable time sitting in the Shop and doing nothing.

The main argument against Custom Item Sets is that nobody uses them. Which is true. Only ~1% of the LoL population ever make item sets (assuming NA’s ranked ladder is ~2 million people, that’s still tens of thousands of people btw), however I’m willing to bet that a lot more people use the item set section to view Item information, that is, quickly using the built in item database to view stats on an item without having to pull up a 3rd party site or creating a custom game. This alone is really convenient and makes the Custom Item Sets section worth retaining.

The main reason why only ~1% of people ever used item sets is because you can’t really share them with other people. You can see my runes and masteries, and likewise, I can see yours; but my item sets, for some reason, are kept private so that only I can see them. This unique isolationism provokes neither discussion, sharing, emulation, nor thoughts on how to properly create and use an item set. Here’s a Custom Item set for Nasus, which helped me a lot on my recent successful grind to Platinum rank. I used my own core items that I liked and have them all readily available and on the same page, with similar items grouped near each other and with Consumables mixed with the starting items for easy access. Note the lack of Frozen Heart, Bloodthirster, and Titanic Hydra. I know I would find it interesting if I could access and see other people’s Item Sets, just as you now have access to my weird Nasus Item Set. That alone might even help other people figure out how to use them effectively and push the usage rate well beyond ~1%. It wouldn’t really be giving any information away either, as match history, runes and masteries, are already officially open and public. Another reason only ~1% use them is that they take ~10 minutes to make, which doesn’t really hold merit, considering they’re the same people who play dozens of 40-minute long games, and the feature is 100% optional, unlike Runes and Masteries, which are socially mandatory for Solo Queue.

With all due respect, as a design team, I find that removing Custom Item Sets without likely even using the feature on a personal level is a little bit ignorant. This isn’t just a game mode like Dominion was. This is a feature you’re removing that affects people in ranked Solo Queue on Summoner’s Rift. I, as well as the thousands of others that use this feature, plead you to reconsider throwing this out the window entirely.

If you really don’t want to retain this feature and truly wish to destroy it, I think that at the very least Riot should put forth some effort to update and improve the current Recommended Items page and/or the Shop navigation in general that led thousands of people to create their own pages, and continues to feed the “MOBAFire Syndrome” that many players still suffer from. Don’t just get rid of Custom Item Sets entirely without a replacement or compensation. Take a piece of advice from Viktor, “Destroy, then improve!”

TL;DR - I, and many others, like the idea of item sets and don't want them to go. If they do go, then there should be major improvements to the shop and to Recommended Item Pages, which should improve both convenience, and the learning experience for a majority players of all elos. This would be, in my eyes, a reasonable trade-off for item set users being forced to either navigate through the entire store to buy items, or use 3rd party programs.