League Of Legends Is Adding A Controversial Emotes Feature

League of Legends is adding permanent emotes to the game, a decision announced by Riot Games that’s proven to be a controversial addition so far.

While this isn’t the first time that emotes have been included in League by any means, they’ve been temporary in the past, tied to special events such as Snowdown or as ways to express loyalty to a professional team. Now, the emotes will be chosen through an emote wheel, much like the ping wheel operates now. The emotes from your wheel can be swapped out between games under your “Collection” tab. These new emotes are here to stay, but their cartoonish qualities have apparently been off-putting to some players who are hesitant to see the feature added.

Several versions of the emotes were explored before the revealed version was decided on, but after listening to players’ feedback, Riot remains open to changes to the following emotes.

The Progression Of The New Emotes

As the emotes were designed, they first looked quite different than they do now. The first appeared to be much more faction-based, emotes that were tied to the ruling powerhouses of League. In a post about the emotes, Riot’s Tim Teemo said that these didn’t really offer the same amount of expression that others did.

From there, they moved onto smaller, circular emotes that featured some easily recognizable champions and other features in the game. At that point, Tim Teemo said that it felt like real changes were being made, but they wanted to look for something that allowed for even more expression.

“This was the first iteration that really felt like it changed the way we played LoL,” Tim Teemo said, referencing the middle set of emotes found below. “But fitting all of our champions into a little circle didn’t always yield good results, and we kept looking for something better.”

The three different versions of the emotes in order of progression can be found below:

Goals For The New Emotes

When creating the emotes, Tim Teemo said that there were several ideas they wanted to keep in mind when it comes to how the emotes should and shouldn’t be used. From mistakes to great triumphs, the goals for the emotes were to provide a range of options for expressing feelings in League.

“Our number one goal is to give you a way to instantly express a wide range of emotions; if you’re playing Blitz, you should be able to show how you feel after a great hook, or a terrible hook, or when your ult passive steals farm from your AD,” Tim Teemo explained.

Baron steals, impressive Pentas, and other moments are what the emotes are for. Of course, with mastery emotes being flashed after every remotely impressive play or kill, League players have seen how tilting emotes can be, but that’s one aspect they hope to avoid.

“We don’t want these to be too tilting,” Tim Teemo assured. “Since the emotes are meant for broad expression, it’s easy to imagine the system fueling rampant BM. Our hope is that emotes encourage more of the fun kind of smack talk, and less of the actually-upsetting chat that can show up sometimes.”

Players’ Responses Have Been Pretty Negative So Far

Adding emotes as a new level of expression is a pretty big change for League, one on par with including the mastery emotes that were inevitably used as a prime fuel for teasing enemies and teammates. Like any big change, the emotes aren’t being received extremely well.

 From the comments made on the initial emotes reveal as well as those that came from other discussions on the boards and on Reddit, calls for a “mute ping” option have been made several times along with the request that they not be added at all. One of the higher-voted responses from the reveal post can be seen below:

Please DO NOT implement this!!!

I understand you are trying to make game life more lighthearted but these will NOT help. if you make one mistake people will just all ping “you idiot” emotes (aka the ‘disgusted faces’ emotes), while the enemy team all pings “LOL” emotes. its just gonna make the person who made the mistake feel even worse.

There are still quite a few players who have said that they’re okay with the change as long as they can opt out of the emotes, but even though the emotes will be mutable, some players also aren’t happy with the way that muting is done.

Emotes Will Be Mutable, Staying On PBE For More Testing

In a response to some of the negative feedback, Tim Teemo posted another discussion thread on the League boards about the emotes and how they plan on countering some of players’ concerns related to spamming and muting pings.

“We also know that this product won’t be for everybody, so we can see why frictionless opting-out has been a major thread so far,” Tim Teemo said. “This is why we tied emotes to chat mutes. This type of muting is intended to punish people who are misusing the system, rather than blocking everybody right off the bat. In our tests, emotes have led to some really memorable moments when used in earnest, and we want to give those a chance.”

Instead of blocking everyone’s emotes from being seen, the emotes have been tied to the “block chat” function in order to only block those who are spamming them. A cooldown will also be applied to them like the current pings to prevent constant spam, but with the mastery emotes and these new ping-related emotes operating independently, it seems like you could almost have constant emote uptime.

Regardless, Tim Teemo said that these emotes will be staying on the PBE for quite a while so they can evaluate players’ responses and tune them to something that works for everyone.

How Do You Feel About The New Emotes?