A New Approach: Create Your Own Skin Marketplace

Brave Sir Robinn·6/16/2015, 6:34:14 AM·2 votes·776 views

Hi, I've been thinking of this idea lately of a Do-It-Yourself type marketplace for skins that would be beneficial to the players AND increase profit for Riot Games.

A skin marketplace: A place where you can login into your League of Legends account, select a particular champion, and pay to customize and tweak the appearance of said champion. For example, you could change the color of the base garen's skin to red, orange, or other colors for 99 cents. You could change garens sword's appearance for a couple dollars or into a 2 handed axe for 5 dollars. I know what your thinking: this sounds alot like Dota's approach to skins. But, I believe Riot can do it better. What if there were components to one skin that players liked, like Darius dribbling a basketball, but what if you could change Darius' attire to a fashionable suit while dribbling a basketball? Every champion in every game could potentially have a custom appearance which is not only fun for you, but also for the other players by keeping the game fresh, showing off your own custom champion skins. Plus, I think people would be alot more willing to spending 99cents here and there upgrading their champion skin incrementally instead of outright buying one skin every blue moon for 5 dollars or so. I myself, would spend alot more money on skins if I could customize my champion the way I wanted instead of the way riot decides they want their next skin to look like.

Riot could start off launching the marketplace for 3 common champions, slowly adding customizable options to those 3 champions and each month adding 3 more champions to the marketplace with their own custom apparels/accessories. I dont think it would be that difficult or time consuming to design different colored apparel, weapons, and other accessories rather than spend an entire month working on one skin that many people wont even consider buying. If any rioter reads this, please feel free to respond, I'd love to talk about this idea more and see if it can go anywhere or atleast get noticed/considered. Thanks!

4 Comments

SLangedEdge6/16/2015, 4:30:02 PM1 votes

That's endearing that you think Riot could do a better job than what Dota has done. In all things client, design, UI, etc Valve is leagues ahead of Riot...

SLangedEdge6/16/2015, 9:02:33 PM1 votes

LoL definitely has better forums.

It's not being negative, it's just being real about it. I would love to see Riot up their game to at least catch up to the features valve has afford its user base. While we can all disagree till we're blue in the face about which game is better (balance, gameplay, philosophy, art, etc) we should all agree that valve made the better client. When LoL can't keep their servers running, login working, patches, updates, skill shots, replays, integrated voice, afk, dc, etc working, why would you think they could make a better skin system than valve?

also, (i could be wrong) the way everything is modeled in LoL, everything in the animation is done at once. Meaning the skin has to be animated as a whole, as opposed to teh semi 3d design dota has. Because the models are more complex in dota you could dress each portion separately. Also, they're about to move to source 2, so I'd expect a lot more features available.