Riot Hopes to Make League of Legends Gifting "More Robust"

Logging into the League of Legends client to find that you've been gifted a skin or another item for your collection is always a welcome sight, but one that's lost some of its flair in the new client.

In the old gifting system, a gift was received with fanfare and animations with a chest presenting itself in the middle of the client for players to open. It was a production that added a bit of excitement to an otherwise simple action of passing a gift onto an online friend, but the new client sticks the gift notification in a corner where players may not even notice it.

When asked about the current state of gifting in an Ask Riot post, Riot responded and said that the lack of extra gifting effects in the new client was a conscious decision made to make sure everything worked properly.

"This is something that got cut early in 2017 when we updated the client," Riot said. "Initially we were focusing on making sure everything was actually working—like when you give a gift to your friend, they actually got it."

Animations were also a concern for slower computers that couldn't handle the effects quite as well. Instead of focusing on these gifting effects, the team working on the feature instead turned attention towards porting other features like "Your Shop" to the client, something that's appeared more than once since the new client released.

But that doesn't mean that Riot hasn't heard players' concerns with the gifting system's lack of razzle dazzle.

"When we came back to gifting, we started to notice some other issues with the feature that we wanted to address. We plan to go back in and add cool animations and sounds ::insert Whoosh, Whirl, Sparkle sounds here:: as well as make some changes to the feature to make it more robust in the future."

Gifting bundles – something that's currently impossible – is one aspect that's being looked into as well as the error messages players receive when a gifting fails. Instead of a generic error message, players will receive a more detailed response about what went wrong so they know what happened and how to fix it.

The full response from Riot about the gifting feature can be read in the Ask Riot post.