End of season honor reward looks like a letdown.
The special rewards for going up in honor level were:
- Honor capsules
- A mysterious end of season reward
At first I was excited about honor capsules, but then I found out their droprates were limited by your key drop cap, and then a new 1 per 3 week cap (why is it also capped by key drops after that second cap was implemented?) which was so easy to hit that there was basically no benefit to having an honor level of 4 or 5. I pointed out that these incentives for positive behavior were not really exciting and people claimed the end of season reward would make up for it.
So what is the end of season reward? A ward skin. I'm not impressed. I believe at one point a rioter was hyping up the reward before we knew what it was with the phrase "it's not just going to be a summoner icon," and while Riot has technically fulfilled that requirement, I would say a ward skin is a D- effort that barely satisfies the advertisement. Ward skins are not very visible to other players, kindof a pay2lose mechanic by giving the enemy more information about who placed the ward, and you can only use one per game so everyone is already way oversaturated with options (We're even getting another end of season ward. If I like victorious more then I basically got nothing for honor).
I was actually expecting something like a small burst of honor capsules based on honor level, maybe even a gemstone for honor level 5. I know Riot doesn't like giving out too many free skins, but we're talking about ending the competitive season, a once-a-year event to celebrate our accomplishments, and a reward for good behavior to encourage an overall higher quality community. It seems like one reward of that size per year is plenty justifiable.