Riot Games revealed that the League of Legends in-game store in-game store is going to undergo a revamp. The news comes courtesy of a post at the game's Development Corner by Lead Gameplay Designer RiotScruffy.
Titled Item Shop Cleanup, the post reveals that the development team has been unable to come up with new items since the shop is currently overcrowded. This makes it "hard to quickly find the item you're looking for and makes the store overwhelming to both new players and players trying champs or roles that use items they aren't yet familiar with."
The team is planning to get rid of unnecessary clutter and remove what they consider "dead" items. Doing this not only "makes the shop faster to navigate and easier to understand" but allows for new items.
Just made a post about some item shop cleanup and future item work:https://t.co/cud1EIJoVO
— Mark Yetter (@MarkYetter) April 5, 2019
TLDR - We want to git rid of or rework "dead" items to make room for cooler additions in the future.
The development team is planning to remove:
Unhealthy items, meaning items that:
- Massively reduce or remove counterplay against a champion
- Incentivize not interacting with the enemy team
- Give access to an effect (usually reactive or defensive) that we don’t actually want all champions to have access to
Items too similar to another item:
- This leads to always picking whichever one is stronger rather than making decisions around the items' unique properties. Either we find better ways to differentiate them or we can just combine these items and retain both user bases
Very low usage rate items:
- This can sometimes be because we nerfed an unhealthy item. Removing the item would be better at this point since it's too weak to be a good item, but we aren't going to buff it since it causes gameplay issues when strong.
- It can also be because a too-similar alternative is currently better so everyone's using that alternative instead
- Some item niches aren't really something that any champion would want
Items reducing or not adding impactful decisions to the system:
- Overly similar versions of Zeal items or tank items with near identical stats have had this problem in the past
- Overpowered or "always good" items can squash a lot of other choices in the system - core items like IE can be great for power fantasy but if we have too many of these there is no room to make choices
- This can also be true of overly similar component items, like if we had a 500g health item that was used sometimes instead of Ruby Crystal; we’re not really gaining any new decision space
Once the cleanup is done, the team hopes to offer new items like ones that can help with tower pushing. They also want to offer more differentiated choices in order for players to build paths that so far lack diversity. One example cited is lethality items for AD assassin players.
The team does not want to simply remove items with the promise of offering a better one in the future. Instead, the approach for the cleanup is to remove certain items while also reworking the others.
