Hextech Crafting

Hextech Crafting is a new gameplay reward system implemented by Riot Games Inc. for League of Legends. The reward system is directly tied with Champion Mastery.

It was released on the PBE on January 13, 2016. The first live testings were done on the Turkish server from patch V6.3 on February 10, 2016.

Hextech Crafting was launched on:
 * NA on patch V6.5 (March 15, 2016)
 * EUW and EUNE on patch V6.6 (March 24, 2016)

Hextech Chests
Players earn a Mastery Chest whenever they or a member of their premade party earn an S-, S or S+, while they are playing a champion eligible to earn a chest and have an available chest slot.
 * Players can only earn chests while playing a champion they own.
 * Players can only earn one chest per champion per competitive season.
 * Champions eligible to earn chests are shown on the Champion Collection tab.
 * Note that a champion becomes ineligible after earning a chest, not after obtaining an S grade.
 * Players can earn 1 chest every 7 days, storing up to four available chests in reserve. The number of available chests is shown in the Summoner Profile.
 * Even though the Profile refers them as "Mastery Chests", Chests rewarded by Mastery Grades are identical to Hextech Chests purchased in the store.
 * Hextech Chests can be purchased in the store for.
 * Purchased Hextech Chests do not count toward the earned limit.

Chests must be unlocked with a Hextech key.

Keys

 * Keys can also be purchased in the store for.
 * Players are periodically awarded Key Fragments for earning Honor, so long as the player has an Honor of 2 or above. 3 Key Fragments can be combined into a Key.

Loot
Unlocking a Hextech Chest awards "Loot". You are guaranteed to receive one of the following:
 * Champion Shards – Uncommon (30% Frequency)
 * Cosmetic Shards
 * Champion Skins – Common (60% Frequency)
 * Ward Skins – Rare (6.6% Frequency)
 * Summoner Icons – Rare (3.3% Frequency)

There is also a chance to get an additional drop of one of the following:
 * Cosmetic Essence – Rare (1% Drop Rate)
 * Rare Gems – Rare (4% Drop Rate)

Only the odds for Rare Gems have been officially disclosed. The rest are estimated based on player studies. The first study referenced also determined that players have a 25% chance of receiving Legacy Vault cosmetics, which is disproportionately higher than one would expect if all skins had equal odds.

Loot Exclusive Content
There are a number of skins that can only be obtained via the Loot system:

can also be obtained with a Redeemable Code from Riot events.

Crafting Material
Crafting Materials are obtained when a Hextech Chest is unlocked. They include essences and shards.


 * Essences
 * Champion Essence
 * Used for upgrading Champion shards to permanent versions.
 * Used for achieving Tier 6 and Tier 7 champion mastery.
 * Obtained through disenchanting Champion shards and permanent champions.
 * Cosmetic Essence
 * Used for upgrading Champion skins shards and Ward skins shards to permanent versions.
 * Obtained through disenchanting cosmetic shards and permanent cosmetic items (i.e.: Champion skin shards).


 * Rare Gems
 * 1 Gemstone can be used to craft a Hextech Chest and Key.
 * 5 Gemstones can be used to craft the Loot Exclusive Ward skins.
 * 10 Gemstones can be used to craft Loot Exclusive Champion skins.

Crafting Costs

 * Champion Crafting

While not being directly available in the store, Hextech Annie's and Soulstealer Vayne's Store cost is.
 * Skin Crafting
 * Ward Skin Crafting

Hextech Annie
By Mirross



Hi all!

Everyone’s favorite combo of sugar, spice, nice, and plenty of burning is getting a new skin as part of hextech crafting and loot. In order to secure appropriate testing for Hextech Annie, we’re putting her and her hextechnically-augmented Tibbers on PBE early, but don’t expect her to debut with the launch of hextech crafting and loot.

Featuring an all-new model, textures, animations and particle effects as well as new sounds, Hextech Annie is intended to be available exclusively through hextech crafting and the loot system by acquiring 10 gemstones either in normal chests and promotional chests through rare drops or by picking up special promo chest bundles (which’ll guarantee a gemstone drop). Gemstones are rare loot drops that can be crafted into a chest and key bundle or saved to combine to craft Hextech Annie.

Promo chests will only be available at limited times and may have different content inside compared to normal chests. For testing on the PBE, we’ve unlocked Hextech Promo Chest bundles in the store so players can pick up Hextech Annie as soon as possible. During this test, buying one of the 10-chest bundles guarantees a gemstone in addition to the gemstones you can find in the chests themselves.

As we mentioned at the beginning, Hextech Annie won’t be available at the launch of hextech crafting and loot. We’ll test her on PBE before testing her release to live servers in Turkey (where we’ve been testing hextech crafting and loot for a little while now). When hextech crafting and loot debut on all live servers, Hextech Annie will follow shortly after.

Lastly, we’re pretty sure everyone’s used to this by now, but please keep in mind the promo chests have been heavily discounted for testing on PBE, and the drop rates of items in the chests may also change before we go live.

Leave your feedback on the skin or even the idea of a free, exclusive skin in hextech crafting below, and we’ll see you on the PBE battlefields!

Missions
By Revenancer

Hey folks. I’m Game Designer Evan “Revenancer” Humphreys, and I’m here to talk about our upcoming feature, Missions. Most of us have played dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of hours of League. To stay fun over such a long time frame, the game can’t become monotonous or stagnant. When it comes to moment to moment gameplay on the Rift, a lot of what we do helps add that necessary variety—new champions, frequent patches, deep mastery curves, etc. Outside of the Rift, we address this with long-term goals reflecting your growth as a player—ranked and champion mastery specifically.

These long-term goals are fun to work towards, but progress usually takes months (or years), and important milestones are fairly scarce. On a week-to-week or day-to-day level, there aren’t many different goals to pursue to bring variety and character to your individual play sessions.

Historically, we’ve added these sorts of goals to the game periodically in the form of events, like Snowdown and Bilgewater: Burning Tides. But the difficulty of working with the old client made putting any parts of the events directly into the game impractical, and players were often stuck deciphering websites to determine what they could earn and how to get it. With each past event hard-coded and managed by hand, handing out event rewards required our Insights team to go through the database, check which players qualified, and then manually hand out each item (if you ever wondered why it takes a week for you to get that sweet summoner icon for Snowdown, that’s why).

The new client makes bringing these sort of features directly to the game much easier. This gave us the opportunity to build a way to deliver the same sort of goals players had seen in events, but faster and better (and more often). From there, it was a short step to opening up those goals to more than just traditional events—and thus League of Legends Missions was born.

Missions will offer players new challenges to solve on the Rift for rewards like unique skins, Summoner icons, and loot. Since this is uncharted territory for League, we don’t quite know where we’ll end up years from now, but we do have some guiding principles to separate a good mission from a bad one.
 * WHAT WILL MISSIONS BE LIKE?


 * 1) PRINCIPLE #1: MISSIONS DON’T TROLL YOUR GAMES.
 * 2) * This is a delicate area. It’s important to us that missions don’t negatively impact your games. This means missions can’t encourage players to play to lose or to play in sub-optimal ways. However, we’re making an exception for situations where all five players are signed up for the same challenge.
 * 3) * Good mission: Win three games with at least 10 kills/assists.
 * 4) * Bad mission: Win a game with 300 AD as Lux.
 * 5) PRINCIPLE #2: MISSIONS CHALLENGE YOUR SKILL, NOT YOUR PATIENCE.
 * 6) *Not every mission will be easy to complete in one afternoon, but no mission’s condition of success will simply be how much you’re willing to play.
 * 7) *Good mission: Win three games as Leona with an A grade or higher.
 * 8) *Bad mission: Play 100 games as Leona.

Ultimately, we want players to come away from a completed mission having had fun—or feeling satisfied with the challenge they’ve overcome.

Rest assured, League of Legends is first and foremost a PvP game that’s about battling it out on the Rift. It isn’t an RPG; we don’t want to make the game about questing or checking boxes off a list. We won’t be flooding the game with a deluge of missions just to keep shaking things up.
 * WILL LEAGUE BE ABOUT COMPLETING MISSIONS?

Our goal with Missions is to deepen all sorts of aspects of the game you already enjoy. Now regions and feature teams have the flexibility to add missions that enhance your experience with new goals and rewards. You might be able to do a chain of missions to demonstrate your loyalty to TSM (or CLG, if you’re a masochist like me) and earn a unique icon, or live a new champion’s story personally through a set of missions.

We’re just starting with Missions, and we’re going to start small. Ultimately, what you guys think of the feature will determine its place in League, so definitely leave us feedback about what you like—or don’t—as new missions roll out.

Update: Missions
By Revenancer

"In your missions dev blog Riot said that “kill X things”-type missions would be bad, but the VS. event had many events that changed the way people play (picking Riven, focusing on kills, etc.). Is Riot happy with the way these played out?"

- Player Question

VS. was the first foray into missions for Riot and we’ve looked at it as a learning opportunity that will help us refine missions in the future. Since then we’ve started using missions more, with the small Omega Squad event and the Kayn launch, missions are treading new ground and fueling better understanding. Our number one priority is to do no harm (because League doesn’t need missions to be fun). That said, we want to make the most fun missions we can. You’ll continue to occasionally see missions testing new boundaries that we’re pretty confident in, but we’ll always be ready to cut something off if it’s hurting players.

So how did we come to that conclusion? During VS., we looked at the effects of the various missions to ensure that we didn’t see significant negative effects on gameplay – longer game times, abnormal increases in kills – which would indicate that missions were causing problems. We didn’t find any indications we were changing the game in either our data or in player feedback, and we did see lots of players having fun with missions. The biggest change we saw was an increase in bot games and normal games as players sought to more easily complete their missions.

That doesn’t mean, though, that every mission we tried was a hit or a success. Looking at the VS. missions (and the Kayn missions which followed) we identified a few definite trends:


 * FAILS:
 * Missions that require you to play a particular queue you don’t normally play (the daily mission to play a game of ARAM was easily the most disliked in VS.)
 * Missions requiring you to play specific champs (Kayn) feel bad when players aren’t particularly interested in playing that champ
 * Missions that are particularly hard to complete if you play a certain role
 * SUCCESSES:
 * Missions to win games
 * Missions to get kills and assists
 * Playing with (not necessarily as) a specific champion in your game

In general, missions that celebrate the achievements in-game that you already care about are the most successful, while in-your-face missions that require you to play a way you don’t want to are disliked.

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