I am appalled by Riot's choice to remove Vandal Twitch from the store
So I've been a Twitch main since season one, back when Twitch had three purchasable skins, at least a thousand games of him later, even maintaining a Twitch guide with almost a million views, it looks like I'll finally be able to own all of them with the RAF changes. Anyways, you can imagine how I must have felt after getting the Twitch visual update, especially with his recolor skins becoming much more unique. However, there was the ugly duckling of the visual update, and that skin was Vandal Twitch.
Going to be completely honest, the first thing I think of when I see the new Vandal Twitch is "Trailer Trash Twitch". The skin received a lot of negative feedback, warranting vocal refund requests. In the end, all we got were the shades back, and the fact that they weren't considered staple to the original concept goes to show that whoever worked on the skin had either no idea what they were doing with it, had time constraints, it was the last skin to be remade for the visual update and fatigue hit, I don't know and I can't speak for them but by no means is Vandal Twitch as good as it should be.
I think by this point, most people agreed that the skin needed more than just shades, it needed to be redone completely. And considering that this was being done to a skin already owned, loved, and mained by a lot of Twitch players (in particular, a friend of mine with as many Twitch games as me had mained the skin up until the visual update), it's not fair to force this below average quality skin on players who prefer the original, hell, we were better off being given the original skin back instead.
We held off our judgments, shared ideas of what the skin could have been, had hope that maybe the skin would be revisited, or at least, our pleas for the original concept would be heard.
What a shame it is then, that Riot decides to throw it away today.
Vandal Twitch will be tossed in to the legacy vault (the trash bin) on December 2nd. Hell, guess this also means we won't get a splash to reflect what the skin actually is, either. "Sorry we ruined a popular Twitch skin, so instead of fixing it, we're giving it a fake limited 'legacy' value to make people think it's good!" And honestly? It's not a bad idea to throw older, uglier skins away. But this skin came out THIS YEAR. There is NO REASON to legacy this skin other than a refusal to fix what Riot broke out of disregard in the first place. So now Twitch, who already only has two purchasable skins, will be down to a whopping ONE skin in the store until Pickpocket Twitch is released, in which we'll be right back to two skins until his SSW skin is released whenever that actually happens.
And yes, I understand that it really isn't cost-effective to make a skin for a third time. But what Riot is doing to the fans of the original skin is just cruel, and trying to give it a legacy value is a terrible means of apology for abandoning it. I'm not even trying to be greedy, I really did already buy the RP for the entire next set of skins, but I'm going to be blunt. If we're not going to get a Vandal Twitch remake, or get the original skin back as a classic, Riot's REAL apology should honestly be:
"Sorry we screwed one of your favorite skins up, but it’s not cost effective to go back and fix it so all owners of the pre-VU Vandal Twitch, have this awesome new skin for free instead."
Riot has done sweeping credits for skin owners before, and asking for the new skin instead is even less valuable than that, considering that Vandal Twitch was 975 RP and this new skin is 720 RP, 720 RP that HAS to be used to purchase a specific skin.
TL;DR: New Vandal Twitch sucks, Riot's throwing it away and trying to pitifully apologize for it with legacy value status. Vandal Twitch should be remade or owners of the original pre-VU skin should be credited with Pickpocket Twitch.** THE ENTIRE POINT IS THAT PRE-VU VANDAL TWITCH WAS TAKEN AWAY FROM US AND WE WERE NEVER CREDITED FOR IT.** At the very LEAST, give us the OLD Vandal Twitch back.