League of Legends Announces Sweeping Honor System Rework

If you’ve completely forgotten that League of Legends even has an honor system, you certainly wouldn’t be the first. The system is, as it stands, pretty easily ignored, as it relies on players hitting a tiny button in the post game to honor their teammates, and the game doesn’t do much to tell you that it’s there. Due to that, honor ribbons are pretty much exclusively seen in Co-op vs. AI games, where players, for whatever reason, tend to honor each other every game.

Well, it turns out that Riot saw that as something of a problem, and announced earlier today in a dev video that they would be giving the system a sweeping overhaul in the surprisingly near future. From the way it was described, Honor is about to go from being a nearly invisible system to instead a very obvious and core part of the post-game experience.

The new system will be familiar to anyone that’s played either of Blizzard’s most recent releases, as it echoes the system that both Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch use in an almost suspicious fashion. After each game ends, players will be presented with the option to honor one of their teammates in one of three ways. The first option, “Stayed Cool”, is meant to reward players that refused to let the pressure of the game get to them, regardless of how many times the enemy jungler camped them. The second, “Great Shotcalling”, rewards players that make decisive calls that turn the game around, such as a gutsy Baron call that earns their team a win out of nowhere. The final category, “GG <3” is something of a catch-all that’s designed to rewards players that just made the game a more fun experience, however that was done.

The biggest change to the honor system, however, isn’t in the titles, but in the rewards. While Riot hasn’t given any specifics, they did mention that there would be new content that would only be available for high honor players in addition to simply having more sweet honor insignias. Considering how hotly sought after the game’s other exclusive content such as Hextech Annie and Soulstealer Vayne are, it’s pretty likely that the rift will become a much more honorable place after the rework.

According to the development video, the new honor system is slated for almost immediate release. Patch 7.13 is when we’ll see the new system, supposing no massive delays push it back. That’s only three patches from the current live patch, wich means that we should see the revamped honor season somewhere in the early days of summer!