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How did the pool party champions get chosen?

Linna Excel·6/27/2016, 8:18:54 PM·4 votes·10,761 views

Pool Party Taric - I get why he's getting the skin. Pool Party MissFortune - I get why she's getting the skin. Pool Party Fiora - Is a bit of a surprise to me when you could see others as better candidates.

How are champions chosen for the pool party theme?

87 Comments

RiotKindlejack6/27/2016, 10:29:34 PM15 votes

There's been a few threads lately asking how champions are chosen for skins, and this is a good question for me because I helped worked on this patch.

It's generally difficult to answer in a satisfying way without giving away information about future releases. For example; last year, for pretty much the entire year leading up to the event, we already had the skins for PROJECT locked in and were working hard on them. This meant for all that time when players asked 'Why no Pool Party Lucian!?' and 'Why are you ignoring Zed?' we had to stay quiet, when I would love to have said "Don't worry, they're coming and they are awesome!". I've talked in the past about why we choose not to talk about future plans or make promises when our work and goals changes so often - so keep in mind that at all times we are choosing champions in a very in-depth way and have a lot of information to drive our decisions we can't share at that time.

We ask questions like;

  • are they scheduled for rework or roster changes?
  • are we already working on a skin for that champion?
  • has that champion recently had a skin? (not counting World Champion skins)
  • does that champion have a skin that is similar? (I'd say it's unlikely we'll do PROJECT: Lissandra after Program)
  • does this theme play up the things we love most about this champion?
  • does this theme have global appeal? (I discovered Pool Noodles are not well known in China, so we did some follow up on Fiora before committing to it)
  • do we have the bandwidth to complete a skin for that champion before the event?
  • do their champion pillars have overlap with the theme? (eg. 'Pop Star Gnar' would be a hard sell, not impossible though!)
  • does this theme provide a strong alternate fantasy? (eg. 'Soulstealer Thresh' would just be his base)

Then we choose a short list and do some exploration sketches to see which ideas are working best in a visual medium, from there we choose the final champions and get to work!