League of Legends‘ newest Ultimate skin was just announced days ago, but some players have some reservations about the skin.
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For those who didn’t see the official reveal, the next Ultimate skin to be available in the in-game store is Gun Goddess Miss Fortune. The skin is an impressive cosmetic to be sure, and while players have pointed out their concerns with transformations that some are calling chromas while others pointed the lack of animations, the main issue that most seem to be taking with the skin is the “Ultimate” classification.
Players on Reddit as well as those commenting on the League of Legends boards post that was created specifically to collect feedback on Gun Goddess Miss Fortune shared their thoughts on the skin’s supposed shortcomings with many lamenting the idea that this is the Ultimate skin players will receive for this year with few avenues for their proposed changes to become realities. Riot Games also responded to the players’ concerns in a couple of different ways, but most replies so far have done little to suppress players’ frustrations.
Why Is the Skin Being “Ultimate” a Problem?
To understand why players are upset with the skin, it’s important to first understand what exactly makes an Ultimate skin so Ultimate.
Riot Games’ support site provides a guide to different skin tiers with every skin priced 975 RP and under not having a name for classification and everything above that being separated into Epic, Legendary, and Ultimate tiers. Ultimate skins, according to the support site, are priced at 3250 RP and contain the following:
- An ultimate skin is a complete reimagining of a champion that includes an evolved model and additional features and bonuses (e.g., summoner icons).
- Features: new model that evolves into different forms, new textures, new splash image, new animations, new visual, new voice over and sounds, additional/bonus content.
The new Miss Fortune skin has the first part of the Ultimate traits down, though the second part involving the animations and different forms is the one that players have problems with. When comparing this skin to other Ultimates like Spirit Guard Udyr, a skin that was released in 2013, it’s a bit more understandable why some might consider these transformations to be lacking.
But Miss Fortune’s Ultimate skin also isn’t priced the same as the others in that tier, another difference that was addressed by Riot Games.
Riot Games’ Comments on the Lower Pricing
One of the first issues that players first spoke up about was what some are calling and admission from Riot Games that the skin didn’t reach the quality of an Ultimate cosmetic. The skin was discussed days ago during the latest State of Skins dev diary where Riot Games product manager Anna “SuperCakes” Donlon talked about the skin.
“So, something interesting happened while creating this skin,” Donlon said about Gun Goddess Miss Fortune. “When we think about what makes a skin an Ultimate, we think about the entire experience. We consider both the depth of that experience, as well as what new feature or functionality we can bring to League through skins.”
The Rioter then used both DJ Sona and Elemantalist Lux as examples, the first having different transformations with accompanying music and the second having a whole selection of elemental transformations, each with different ability visuals.
“With GGMF, the depth of experience is what you’ve come to expect from an Ultimate, but because we were able to take advantage of tech we’d already built, she doesn’t bring that ‘something new’ that other Ultimates have,” Donlon continued. “So, we’ve chosen to release her at a lower price, and we’re introducing some flexibility into the pricing of the Ultimate tier.”
Here lies the issue that some players have: Why not just call it a Legendary skin if it doesn’t bring the “something new” that that tier is known for? The skin will cost 2775 RP instead of the usual 3250, but this left some dissatisfied that this skin still being called an Ultimate means that Miss Fortune won’t get a shot at having an Ultimate skin on par with the rest.
Riot Games Responds to Feedback
With the skin being usable on the PBE, players were quick to pour into the PBE boards post to share their overall negative feedback. Terms like “disappointing” showed up quite often, that particular word appearing at least 19 times from a quick look at the main comments without digging far into the replies.
Karl “Riot LoveStrut” Abad responded to players’ most frequent questions in one sizeable comment, all of those answers regarding animations, voice overs, and more found below.
“WTF is up with her face and neck in the splash art?!”
- You can expect to see an update to this in the next PBE deploy! Hopefully the changes feel better to ya’ll.
“Her VO doesn’t sound like Miss Fortune! And why all the sexual lines?”
- Unfortunately, we couldn’t get base MF’s voice actress for this skin, so that was unavoidable. As for all the sexualized lines, we actually got that same feedback during the process to tone down the seductive lines and add more of that fierce Captain Fortune vibe, so we ended up adding in more “vicious” and “cutthroat” lines for events that tend to play more often (e.g. Long Move, Attack). We honestly feel good about the current state of her VO in regards to capturing MF in this universe.
“These forms look like chromas, change the models!”
- Unfortunately, there are limitations that prevent us from changing the models at this stage. We can make minor tweaks to the textures however.
“Why does the jetpack VFX blink?”
- With the way the VFX is set up to play from the animation, this is an unavoidable side-effect. We managed to make this a little less noticeable at least!
“The animations are way too close to base!”
- Keeping the animations fairly close to base was a concession that we had to make early on in development. If a marksman is going to be able to transform an unlimited amount of times throughout the game with varying particles (as well as a very different silhouette with her shoulder-pieces, exo-suit, and guns), we have to make tough choices to keep consistency with Base MF in several areas to maintain the MF read.
“Change the in-game portraits to match with the splash!”
- There aren’t any plans to do this at the moment, but I can check with the team and see what they think. If we can leverage Elementalist Lux’s tech and iterate on the splash easily, then there’s a possibility, but the timeline is still super tight.
“Bring her back into production and re-release her at the typical Ultimate skin price.”
- Mr. Cactopus addressed that here.
“Change her VO lines to be different per form.”
- She actually does have unique VO lines per form! Currently, we don’t plan on expanding the current list of unique VO lines.
“There’s a super annoying bug where she appears at the edge of the Fog of War!”
- This should be fixed now!
Slide 4
Following all the feedback from players and the responses from Riot, one suggestion was circulating in players’ discussions: Pull the skin from it’s upcoming release and make changes to make it more like an Ultimate.
However, Riot’s Ryan “Riot Cactopus” Rigney responded on Reddit and made it clear that that solution would not be happening before explaining what Riot’s current plans are for the skin.
“We’ve been discussing all this feedback on GGMF as a team since yesterday. Before anything else, I want to be super transparent and honest with OP about their suggestion: We’re not going to do this.
“Like we explained in the State of Skins video, while we think the in-game transformations do set her apart and make her way higher-value, it’s not new tech and we know that full price ultimates usually bring something crazy and new to the table. That’s why we picked a lower price point (2775 RP) for her, and we think that’s still a pretty good deal.
“Our plan is to just listen for now (reading what players are saying all over the world—not just the Reddit echo chamber) instead of engaging in arguments in comment sections like these. Then we’ll likely sort out the feedback that seems to be resonating and address it in an Ask Riot post. If we have any tweaks to the skin to announce, we’ll do it then. But understand up front that we’re not going to completely rescope the skin.”
The Rioters comment was hit with a wave of downvotes that bring it down to a score of -1532 at the time of publishing. It’s likely that it was hit by a downvote brigade shortly after the comment began circulating, perhaps due to the fact that “No Participation” links like the one we’ve used above aren’t supported on the League of Legends subreddit. Still, the link does remind readers to refrain from vote manipulation, but that doesn’t seem to have happened with this comment.
For now, players will have to wait for more information to come from Riot regarding any changes that’ll be made to the pricey skin, info that’ll come in the previewed Ask Riot post if not sooner.
