Good day to you, TB Skyen. There has been a little bit of controversy around Samira's new ultimate skin, concerning a disappointing lack of features/anything *really* innovative about it. Some even went as far as calling it an overpriced legendary due to the skin's lack of custom forms, new animations etc. Could you please share your opinion on the matter, if you don't mind of course.
Ah, Ultimate Skins, aka Riot’s Folly. It’s a big feature creep problem that Riot has never really been able to deal with.
It used to be that Ultimate skins were the pinnacle of what Riot could do with their skin and graphics tech, but then they started porting tech and features from the Ultimate skins into legendary skins and even into base champion designs. Kayle’s model changing as she levels up, for example, is something that used to be sold on Pulsefire Ezreal as an Ultimate skin feature.
The net result is that the baseline for quality has shot up so drastically that there simply isn’t a meaningful gulf between Ultimate skins and legendaries anymore, and because Riot are so determined to keep League of Legends viable to run on extremely underpowered hardware (where a lot of their players are), there isn’t a lot of headroom to expand above it. At some point, you would run into memory issues if five (or god forbid ten) players all tried to load into a match using Ultimate skins.
It’s not really an issue with any kind of easy solution, unfortunately, and I have a lot of sympathy for the skins teams trying to operate under all these compounding limitations. They get told to deliver an Ultimate skin, but then also get hard limits put on how many features they’re allowed to ship it with.
Riot Games the company gets no sympathy, though, because this is ENTIRELY a problem of their own making, the consequences of which they are trying to pass on to the players. They want to keep selling ultimate skins at full price, but they’re unwilling to actually add the kinds of features needed for a skin to deserve the category. It’s scumbag capitalist shit, it’s having your cake and eating it too.
What would be honest and “player first” (that slogan they claim is their foremost company value) of them to do would be to drop the Ultimate category entirely, recategorize them all as Legendaries, and drop the price accordingly, in recognition that Riot itself moved the goalposts of what those categories mean.
The result is a worse quality product at higher relative prices, which Riot will obstinately and necessarily insist is actually a better product with more features. It’s the Live Service Game version of Cory Doctorow’s concept of enshittification.
So I think the best strat here is for the users who did get the new layout to just stop using the desktop version of the site for a while, like a week or a month or however long their ‘experiment’ is supposed to last, while the users who didn’t get the new layout should keep using the desktop version like normal or, perhaps, use it even more than usual.
My guess is that they’re doing basic A/B testing on the new layout to see if it would boost engagement: the userbase is split roughly 50/50 between the 2 versions and they are going to be comparing the engagement data between the 2 groups of users to see if it’s worth it switching everyone to the new layout or not.
Basically,if you got the new layout and don’t like it - don’t use it. If engagement metrics of group B (new layout) are lower than those of group A (no change), the experiment will be considered a failure and they will have to reverse the change.
If your tumblr suddenly looks like twitter - it’s a sign to log off and go touch some grass! (or just use the mobile app since that engagement data isn’t relevant to this particular experiment)
using tumblr mobile and seeing people talk about a desktop layout change is like hearing a timer suddenly start ticking down. I am safe for now but I hear the danger
This blog is a mess - They/She Late 20s - TERFs are not welcome
