Since not all of my six readers are League of Legends players, much less gamers at all, I’ll try to kind of start with an analogy that those who have gamed at all within the better part of the last decade might understand.
Achievements, have become a pretty normal thing in today’s gaming landscape, with players getting little pop-up notifications in-game from their systems themselves, when they accomplish particular tasks in the games they are playing. Ultimately, they’re utterly useless in the grand spectrum of most games, but their existence has created somewhat of a collecting hobby for those who game.
Some achievements are justly achieved by accomplishing monumental feats, like beating Mass Effect 2 on the hardest difficulty without dying once. Others are as systematically simple as proceeding through the story, and getting an achievement for each notable storyline break point. There are achievements of insanity, such as completing an entire Left 4 Dead 2 campaign only using a melee weapon. There are achievements of futility, such as deliberately getting every single question wrong in a round of 1 vs. 100, and then there are achievements of everyone gets a trophy, such as simply starting a game.
The point is, achievements have become somewhat of a point of bragging among gamers, and one of the greatest accomplishments is getting a 100% of achievements earned in games, because usually every game has a good variety of achievements from layups to Hail Marys. As in the case of XBOX Live, players’ stats have a running tally of how many games they get 100% success rate on, and for players like me, it’s something to be prideful of, to be able to prove just how little of a life I can sometimes have, when I obsess over trying to Boomer Bile over all four survivors in one hurl.
One of the most obnoxious things though, is when a game releases a patch, or an expansion, and then they proceed to add a few more achievements into the game. And then suddenly, your 100% marker on a game is stricken, and then you delve into the achievement tab to find out just what more bullshit you have to do in order to get back to that 100%.
Then, you discover that either the expansion is full of bugs and even completing the criteria for the achievements yields no achievements (Left 4 Dead: Crash Course), or the game makes an expansion that they actually want you to pay more money to unlock (Resident Evil 5, Mercenaries Mode), so you can try to get those bullshit achievements.
The bottom line is that it sucks when you play a game to death, thinking you’ve achieved everything that can be achieved in the game, but then the game raises the bar a little bit higher, and then suddenly you’re no longer on the peak of the mountain, and in some cases, you have to pay more money in order to even have the opportunity to get back there.
Well, League of Legends has gone ahead and joined the club.
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This shouldn’t be that big of a surprise, considering the game I actually do love, in spite of how often I criticize the shit out of them, employs a tremendous amount of methods in order to bilk more money from their players and fans. Because lord knows Sona needs more skins that accentuate her massive tits, and by golly is it awesome to have skins on the wards that nobody outside of the professional scene actually utilizes!
Anyway, one of the achievements a player can work towards is the champion mastery system, in which players can basically show off who their favorite champions, or the ones they’re most competent with. There were five ranks, and starting at the fourth rank, a little bit of in-game bling could be flashed with a command, so that everyone in game, teammate and opponents, could see that you play a lot of that particular champion. It’s inconsequential and basically pointless in the grand spectrum of the gameplay, but much like achievements, it’s something that players really love to earn, and it’s a little bit of pride for the champions they might actually be decent with.
The best part of the champion mastery system is that it’s basically free. Players can unlock champions with free IP, and once unlocked, they can ride those champions and start grinding out mastery points, and eventually get them to a rank 5.
Well, that is until recently, where Rito has decided to raise the bar, and create a rank 6 and rank 7; you know, nice round numbers, for players to strive for, to get those bragging rights that they’re really that good with those particular champions.
It’s bad enough that players like me collectively groan at the notion and the feeling of an uphill climb at the idea of trying to even further rank our preferred champions, it doesn’t help that the system in which gaining those ever-higher ranks completely differs from what it takes to work one’s way through ranks 1-5.
Basically, the game grades players in every single game, like school grades. However, unlike school grades, A+ is not the best a player can get, much to the chagrin of High Expectations Asian Dad; S+ is the top grade a player can get. It’s based on a convoluted formula that involves positioning, statistical output, and basically playing extremely well, compared to all other players who play that particular champion in that particular position.
Earning any sort of S rankings is not an easy task. If it weren’t as difficult as it is, I probably wouldn’t be brogging about how much it sucks trying to earn them. I’ve had matches with Miss Fortune where I’ve gone death-less with many kills, and still gotten “just” an A+ because some Korean actually in Korea had 52 kills, 0 deaths and 343 CS to raise that S bar to astronomical heights with Miss Fortune.
Whereas the quest for rank 5, players earn mastery points whether they win or lose matches, the quests for rank 6 and rank 7 are solely based on individual grades.
To get to rank 6, a player must earn at least an S- grade in two matches.
To get to rank 7, a player must earn an S or an S+ in three matches.
Honestly, if the criteria were just getting all those S ranks in order to get to 6 and 7, it would be hard enough as it is.
But it’s not.
With each successful S- and then S rank earned, players earn a token for that particular character. Once two tokens are earned, the player can “craft” the tokens into the increased rank.
But crafting the tokens together has a price of its own, from an in-game currency known as Blue Essence, that I’m discovering is as difficult to accrue as getting S ranks.
And the worst part about Blue Essence, is that earning it, is completely random.
The way you earn Blue Essence is by earning chests by winning games, and hoping that the chests contain “champion shards” which can be turned into Blue Essence, which can then be accumulated to be able to craft together S tokens.
I haven’t figured out what the drop rate for chests is yet, aside from the description that it’s random. But seriously, I haven’t gotten a single chest drop in the last month, and I’ve played games in which someone on the team, or myself has gotten the requisite S ranking in order for them to become eligible.
Oh, by the way, chests are unlocked by keys that you also have to win games to randomly earn shards, which three shards = 1 key.
Confused yet? I’m not surprised. I’m kind of getting there too, and I’m the one writing all this. So basically, let’s try to break down what it takes to get a rank 6, on one character, much less get to a rank 7.
- Get character to rank 5 = 20-30 games
- Get two S- ranks or better = if you’re lucky, 2 games
- Get random shards to craft keys needed to open random chests, which have random contents that may or may not actually yield Blue Essence = 9,000 games
- Gain rank 6
- Repeat all at least 9,032 games in order to gain rank 7
By the way, the game has over 140 available champions, so hopefully you’re only hell-bent on getting to rank 7 with like, 2-3 characters.
Or, you can just pay actual money, and simply buy chests. No shards to craft keys? No problem, you can also pay actual money and buy the keys too. You still will have no clue what’s going to be inside the chests, and whether or not they’ll yield any Blue Essence, but at least that saves you at least 100 games worth of time trying to get shards, keys and chests to hope to convert your tokens into rank 6s and rank 7s.
So realistically, there are people out there who could boost their rank 5s into 6s and 7s, with little more than a few lucky games where they get their requisite S grades, but then simply shelling out money in order to grind out the requisite Blue Essence. Ultimately, this seems to be the Rito way, which absolutely loves the idea of getting richer and richer on microtransactions because there are some with the means to be lazier than others.
Currently on my account, I have Miss Fortune and Volibear sitting at rank 5s, with two rank 6 tokens earned for each of them. However, I have no Blue Essence, so despite the fact that I’ve grinded out the requisite rankings and tokens necessary to be rank 6s with these two characters, I can’t actually promote them. Because I never get any champion shards to turn into Blue Essence, because I never get any chests in spite of all the S rankings I’ve already gotten to get my tokens, and I simply refuse to pay actual money for them. I however have 5 keys, which means I’ve gotten at least 15 shards, which all means a whole lot of fucking games played and time burned on League of Legends.
As if it needed to be spelled out completely, I absolutely loathe the fact that Rito has introduced the rank 6 and rank 7 into the game. I absolutely want them, because I’m an overachieving completionist, but I really fucking hate the song and dance I have to go through in order to get there.
Because people are so hell-bent on trying to get S ranks, players are flooding servers with outside-the-box thinking, positioning and game play, with hopes of trying to fish out S grades in shallower pools, but then suck and die over and over again, or players are playing so risk-averse that they become detrimental to a team game. Often times, it’s just both, and it ruins the experience for those less interested in superficial rankings, and just want to get wins, so they can hope to acquire some randomly dropped chests.
Leave it to Rito to take an achievement that players can take some pride in attaining, only for them to take it away by virtue of adding additional tiers that have excruciatingly convoluted criteria to meet, along with the reliance of random events and random results in order to get to them.
Removing the random factor from the equation makes it truly skill-based, but by doing that, they’d eliminate the capability to possibly monetize the whole fucking equation entirely, and that, is not what is best for Rito.
Achievements are supposed to be things that earned by skill, perseverance, and hard work, and should have a sense of pride and accomplishment when attained. Instead, League of Legends joins an array of games that somehow manage to turn the whole chase into an agonizing grind that sucks the fun out of it, and relies way too much on stupid dumb luck and chance, or an open wallet, instead of realistic skill. gg Rito.
