Why hasn't riot had a skin contest yet?

Heckin Support·Feb 14, 2016·8 votes·8,134 views

There are so many amazing fan made skin ideas to the point where riot could, and should, totally have a player based contest where they rally up the best skins and let the community vote on which one they want in the game. So many amazing skins that haven't been fulfilled yet come to mind like: http://i.imgur.com/kWmacqG.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/cc/d3/73/ccd373d60c1fe6c4a986460ff77036c4.jpg https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSy0abtpTVN5iiOMCBhhjtHhNpduVaCt7pyR_BnPw6xsKvhE28L

and so many others that would be an amazing fit in league. This should seriously be a thing.

44 Comments

RiotKindlejackFeb 15, 20167 votes

I guess the most immediate reason is that we could never guarantee that the winning skin would be made. There could be copyright issues, it could be inappropriate, it could run into unforeseen problems or just be not practical for a skin.

Recently we ran a voting competition for All-Stars which culminated in the player-vote for a Diana skin which is now in production. That was an interesting experiment in player involvement at a level we can plan around, but at the end of the day we have to see if it results in the best possible skin for Diana players. Personally my thought is that at all times we should be looking to maximise the player value we can put into each skin we make, and that won't necessarily be the case if we leave it up to an online competition to dictate our production.

While that covers some of the why, I think we _could _run a competition and that it would be very interesting and fun. Who knows what the future will bring? Never say never.

Finally you might like to know that we're always looking for great ideas and great artists. Plenty of skins grow from fan concepts. Also the artist of the 'Eclipse Leona', as well as the artist who did 'Daughter of the Sun Leona' and of the artists who worked on the 'Darkin Temple' all work on the skins team now!

Jeddy017Feb 15, 20161 votes

While that covers some of the why, I think we _could _run a competition and that it would be very interesting and fun. Who knows what the future will bring? Never say never.

Yes,for example: "Give us art showing Teemo getting F-ed up by another champ(s).Top ten winners get a free Teemo Shroom."

ElewdFeb 15, 20162 votes

i think the way to avoid copyright and inappropriate stuff, would be to have internal riot voting first to select 10-20 skin art concepts then send those out to the public to vote, that way you can control what can/will be made while also avoiding any copyright problems. I personally am still praying and hoping i can get a snow lily zyra skin. please ;; or maybe just something pretty and lively instead of dark and dreary

Filthy WookFeb 15, 20161 votes

{quoted}

i think the way to avoid copyright and inappropriate stuff, would be to have internal riot voting first to select 10-20 skin art concepts then send those out to the public to vote, that way you can control what can/will be made while also avoiding any copyright problems. I personally am still praying and hoping i can get a snow lily zyra skin. please ;; or maybe just something pretty and lively instead of dark and dreary

Elderwood zyra for the winter themed elderwood skin line? ehhh? EHHHHHHHHHHH?

ElewdFeb 15, 20161 votes

I dont really like the elderwood looking skins =\ i'd prefer something brighter and prettier.

MoonToonExFeb 15, 20161 votes

Pretty much this.

It's how it's done for other games. Company releases a template and allows people to vote on the ones the art team approved.

RiotKindlejackFeb 15, 20162 votes

Remember that a community run vote would statistically end in a very popular champ getting a skin in a very popular thematic. PROJECT Ahri, Popstar Riven or Warring Kingdoms Vi. Most likely something like that; so it's not the way to get the specific skin that you want and ends up being something we would likely get around to making anyway.

Zyra is a very complex champion, so complex and daunting that she requires a legendary amount of work for any skin we make. That's one of the factors we need to account for when making skins and unfortunately it hurts Zyra. She was one of the few champions that hasn't gotten a skin in the last year or so though, so I'd really like to work on a skin for her in the near future.

1Ferdinand1Feb 15, 20161 votes

Can't you chose those champions too?

VanjieFeb 15, 20161 votes

If you had that logic you would not be making ten Tryn skins in one year. Admit it and just come clean . . . you only make skins for select champions and it takes you YEARS to give any other one . . . . that actually needs a skin . . .. a skin . . . . Liss? Has hardly any skins. Karma . . .? OHHH you released a lowered price skin that is worth nothing to her fanbase and is ugly.

MoonToonExFeb 15, 20161 votes

Yeah, it might result in popular champs with tons of skins getting skins in popular themes.

Or maybe popular champs with very few skins will get voted on. Maybe then we Diana players could get Blood Moon Diana. Seems like the only way she can get new skins is through winning a voting contest :'(.

(Glad she's getting a new skin, it's just sad that it seems like she can't get any skin love in the normal process. Would love PROJECT Diana and Blood Moon makes soo much sense that it's just sad seeing it not happen for her with these newest Blood Moon reveals)

ElewdFeb 15, 20162 votes

I know zyra takes a lot of work, i think it was morello who originally said any skins zyra will receive will be the 1350 or legendary priced due to her changing model on death and her plants being their own seperate models. if i remember what he said correctly. Shes my favorite champion in the game so im just biased and want some more skins for her. i just want a pretty skin for her, snowlily for snowdown where she has a appearance similar to syndra's snowdown skin would be so cute for her but unfortunantly i can't draw very well so i can't really draw it out ;; i just imagine her ulti being a giant snowflake and her thornspitter and vinelashor being snowmen ;o;

RiotKindlejackFeb 15, 20163 votes

Sounds good to me! I think Death Blossom would also make a very pretty Zyra skin. You make a good point too; she already has a creepy graveyard skin, a cool fire skin and an esports skin - so she's missing a cute/pretty skin and a trolly skin. She also doesn't have a Legendary skin yet so that could be a real show-stopper.

ElewdFeb 15, 20162 votes

heck she could get a 750 order of the lotus skin that just makes her plants colorswaps and i'd be happy. also her SKt skin makes me laugh whenever i use it cuz it looks like zyra is in a tracksuit and since shes the slowest champ in the game it just makes me laugh so much.

I wish i could just draw i have so many concepts in my head for skin idea's but i can't put them on paper ;; like definantly not Leblanc. where she just has the grey trenchcoat like thing and she has a tophat but has the same goofy glasses blitzcrank has. would be so funny.

RiotKindlejackFeb 15, 20161 votes

Actually it's better for us to make a mid tier skin as even on a 750 it's a legendary amount of work... she's tough!

ElewdFeb 15, 20161 votes

but this just means all of her skins will be of the highest of quality! so im willing to wait because i know whatever skins she gets will be amazing. so i gotta ask, will there be another set of "april fools day" skins this year? because those were some of the goofiest and silliest skins ever and they were great.

RiotKindlejackFeb 15, 20161 votes

All I can say right now is we had a great time making those skins and they were received really well. I think goofy skins are actually a great way to express the fun side of Riot that really charmed me in LoL's early years so I hope we never stop making them.

ElewdFeb 15, 20161 votes

Well that makes me happy, the hope for a definitely not leblanc skin is still there! im looking forward to any goofy skins that come out this year now.

cuddlykitten4Feb 19, 20161 votes

WHY, OH WHY, IS THERE NOT A FARMER NASUS SKIN. THE KITTEN WEEPS THAT THERE IS NO HOE WEILDING NASUS THAT STACKS OFF HIS ENEMIES WHILE HIS STRAW HAT DENIES THE GRUELING SON. HE JUST WANTS TO TILL THE GROUND WITH THE BLOOD OF MINIONS. WHY CAN'T HE FARM? #LETNASUSFARM2016

HellioningFeb 15, 20161 votes

Yes, but considering the new sale rules, I wouldn't buy it. I like Zyra, but I don't want to spend more than 975 on a skin.

ElewdFeb 15, 20161 votes

You must not like her as much as i do, i've played her since release and shes by far the first champion that "clicked" with me. with how Kindlejack has explained it, all of zyra's skins will be of the highest quality possible because of how much work would go into it.

HellioningFeb 15, 20161 votes

Just because a skin has more stuff doesn't mean it's higher quality.

ElewdFeb 15, 20161 votes

it may just be me being biased because zyra is my favorite champion, but i love all of her current skins and i expect only the best of skins from the champion Morello himself made.

HellioningFeb 15, 20161 votes

I'm really not sure why Zyra getting made by Morello means that she gets better skins?

ElewdFeb 15, 20161 votes

i said i expect the best, in other words i have really high standards. but i'd probably like anything as long as it isn't a bland dark and spooky skin again.

SaixosFeb 15, 20161 votes

I kinda agree, but I'd still like a contest where one of the requirements is "no preexisting skin themes". For example the violinist Fiora skin really caught my eye, and so did the gravekeeper leona one. The sakura Zyra was also very pretty. Limiting it to internal votes wouldn't be as interesting, but you could add clauses that each submitted skin is looked at by a Rioter to make sure it is appropriate and possible (so no shower garen).

Even with all the problems, you have to admit that a community run skin contest is something extremely exciting and a vast majority of players would participate. And the winning skin would definitely sell well as well. It's just one of those things that may have a bunch of issues that could cause problems, but the thing itself is still awesome enough that it should be attempted anyway. Maybe the ocean week statue would be a good comparison? idk. Imo a community skin concept would be many times more awesome than that kind of statue anyway.

RiotKindlejackFeb 15, 20161 votes

I love contests, I think they are a fun and interesting way of engaging with players. I entered into two of the art contests run in previous years before being hired by Riot. It's an awesome excuse to go all out on a piece of art and a way to feel like you're a part of something cool. I did see in those past contests an overwhelming amount of art produced to the point where it took a big chunk of Riot's time to go through thousands of entries. I also saw a lot of anger, frustration and negative comments when the winners were announced. There were a lot of professional artists in the competition because of the popularity of LoL and the huge prizes and I can understand why a lot of players were disenfranchised by the results. So I understand why they began moving away from those kind of contests.

I disagree about the assumptions that the majority of players would participate or that a winning skin concept would then sell well, there is no evidence to support that. It would be amazing if they did, but it's really not something to bank on. Ultimately our decisions are driven by one question; "Is this the best thing we can do for players with the time we have?" because, even if it's not a bad idea, if there is a better use of our time then it's hard to justify. The resources for a competition like that would really need to be justified, and that's why I think the All-Stars event was a good testing of the waters. So I want to see how 'Fire Diana' is received before I go pitching a community skin contest to my POs.

But all this thoughtful discussion is really helping balance the pros and cons and I still think it would be pretty fun >:)

HellioningFeb 15, 20162 votes

Honestly, I don't think you can compare the Fire Diana skin to a skin contest. A) The choice of champions were limited and kinda skewed; Teemo already has many skins, and a lot of people would pick Diana over Nautilus because Diana's more humanoid (and also female, which matters for some people.) B) I know I would significantly preferred Diana to receive an ice skin over a fire skin; there are already too many skins that are fire themed, and I would have preferred ice particles, especially for her shield.

The all-star thing was interesting, but it's not deep enough for some people, including me.

RendarkanFeb 19, 20161 votes

I voted for Diana based on the time between skin releases.

Teemo had Omega Squad previously and Nautilus got a Warden Skin not too long ago. Diana for me was the best candidate for a skin.

I think to make it more fair and even is pick three champions that haven't recieved a skin within a certain time frame, excluding new champion releases that happened within the past say year or so and put them up for community vote.

Legendary/Ultimates can get excluded as those usually get big promotional pre releases like PROJECT: Master Yi and Dragon Trainer Tris.

As far as the Diana skin goes I really hope it will either be something like Lunar Eclipse or Lunar Betrayer Diana where she embraced the sun instead. I also kinda hope Leona gets a polar opposite like Solar Betrayer or Solar Eclipse to go alongside it.

GouferPlaysFeb 20, 20161 votes

Why not a contest with very specific guide lines that would make it more logical to work within? Why not a contest for something Specifically like "The next pool party skins" Have the players vote down to the top 10 and then riot can pick 1-5 of them and create them for the next wave ?

SilatFeb 15, 20161 votes

Wouldn't the easiest way to solve THAT issue would be how you did for the all-star voting, choose a handful of champions(let's say Draven Karthus Rumble Volibear Corki ) for people to submit the skin ideas for? Or maybe just make a theme (like Fire or Ice ;p) for the contest.

Either of these would bring out the more unique skins than just the popular ones on cool champs! And then you're still able to hand pick the ones people could vote for beforehand to make sure that any of them would be something you'd be able to properly deliver on and not deal with copyright issues for others. :3

AtaxiChaosFeb 15, 20162 votes

I'd recommend taking a route similar to what WotC does for Magic's You Make the Card. Say...

Open vote for the champion role to narrow down submissions.
Run off vote if there's a narrow margin of victory.
Have a period of open submission for skin concepts. (with all necessary legal things covered in that process)
Have people sift through and narrow down the designs to the best/most viable.
Pit submissions against each other. (For the most recent YMtC it was narrowed down to 8 and then single elimination)
Put together some splash art descriptions
Vote on those
Sketches based on art description
Vote on those
Open name submission (again, include legal stuff on the form)
Narrow down internally
Put up for vote
Make skin
Make players happy
Sell skin
???
Profit

Something along those lines, the latter parts could probably be condensed down if necessary/desired.

patmax17Feb 15, 20161 votes

I was going to write something very similar, You Make The Card was the first thing I thought about, too :D

The real advantage of doing this is that the artwork (splas, concepts, in-game model mockups) would be made by rioters, and this would solve a lot of copyright and quality problems :)

RiotKindlejackFeb 15, 20161 votes

I did initially think about YMtC, but making one card in a set that is sold as random packs of 15 (in a year where there are roughly 1000 cards printed) is quite different than making a stand-alone product that is one of only ~60. Another major difference is the size of the audience - it's almost impossible to run a competition with multiple stages simultaneously across all regions, handling translation and collation. And that's how we'd want to do it so all players can be involved. Another drawback is that these kind of competitions don't actually involve a lot of the community and thus don't provide that much value for players. The latest YMtC actually has "Designed by the Magic community" printed on it and I suspect it's because there was no way of knowing that the previous YMtCs were. Unless you were active on the website at that particular time, they are just another card. Even people who are active here on the boards often don't know about the All-Stars skin competition we just ran, and they're active on the site! An in-client event would work better, but that's not something we can easily implement until the LCU happens.

On the other hand, our boards already work as an informal voting system - where the most popular skin concepts make their way to the top and we see them. And while I'm sharing my thoughts about the challenges this idea faces I still think it would be fun to run this kind of competition in the future.

HellioningFeb 15, 20161 votes

Well, people didn't know about the all-star thing because it was almost exclusively on the esports site, and a lot of people, including me, don't give a shit about esports.

Also? If the boards counted as an informal voting site, we would have had Dragon Master Swain years ago.

ElewdFeb 15, 20161 votes

well they did say that dragon master swain was going to get made but they probably stopped production because hes getting a Visual and gameplay update sometime in the future.

HellioningFeb 15, 20161 votes

Yeah, but Dragon Master Swain was an idea that came out literally years ago. Unless his VGU has been an idea for longer than VGUs were things, they can't use that as an excuse.

ÇhåryzårdFeb 19, 20161 votes

(referring to my comment above)

What if Riot picked the skins? The reason I'm saying that is because the community would either vote for the most outrageous skin, the most inappropriate skin, or completely ignore the skin and just vote for whoever has the most artistic talent.

My main concern when having a community vote is having people who aren't digital artists or the best artists having 0 chances of winning because only the best digital artists who can paint well are voted for. Doesn't matter what the skin is, only their talent. I've seen this happen with other contests too for other things. The best artist wins, not the skin.

I feel like if Riot picked the winners (maybe a 1st, second, and third place with rp being part of the prize too?) you guys would be looking for the best concepts that fit the game and not who can paint on the computer the best.

MrRazzleDazzleFeb 15, 20163 votes

It's an absolute shame that one of the earliest fan creations hasn't been made yet. I am of course referring to Beekeeper Singed. http://i.imgur.com/V1bOi.jpg

cuddlykitten4Feb 19, 20162 votes

I...would....play...Singed....so much....more..... :) :) :) :)

Virgin RayFeb 14, 20161 votes

You have a great point. Riot hasn't made any contests since the last art contest which was about 2 years ago. I'm thinking it should go 1st place X RP and the skin you designed possibly a border around you every time you use the skin so other people know you made that skin concept. All other 2nd and 3rd will get the exact same rewards with less RP. Honorable mentions will get RP.

Heckin SupportFeb 14, 20161 votes

Riot should involve the community in more game related things. It would probably create a better culture in the game.

DucksAreMagicalFeb 14, 20161 votes

This would be great sort of like what Dota has going on, but riot style.

RendarkanFeb 19, 20161 votes

Hidden Boss Mordekaiser for the Arcade line.

You know like that one hidden boss that is insanely stronger than the actual final boss? There's always a hidden boss that could easily take over but prefers to remain chill and completely not giving a damn about the world around him.

Heimerdinger Can be made into Arcade Dinger and Referance tower defense games like Plants vs Zombies.

ÇhåryzårdFeb 19, 20161 votes

I feel like if the community got to vote, people would be more inclined to vote for the better artwork than the actual skin. I've seen this happen with other contests for other stuff where people got to draw or design. People who have great concepts but aren't the best at art don't have any chance because people voting think better artwork = a better concept, which isn't always true.

I feel like if Riot looked at each concept, it'd be better, because they'd be looking for what concept fits the champ or game the best and won't necessarily be looking for the best artist.