League of Legends emotes allow you to add some flair to your game by communicating with other players. They’re a great way to encourage your friends and wind up your foes, as well as celebrate key moments in a match. It seems like they might be getting better soon, too, as Riot Games says it is “actively looking at the emote system” as it plans an overhaul to expand its implementation.
Jordan Checkman, League of Legends designer, answered a LoL Reddit question about expanding emotes. He says that emotes are currently “in discovery,” meaning that the team is actively determining what it likes about the system and what things it wants to change, along with what the team’s current capabilities are to make those adjustments.
“Expanding the emote wheel is kind of a given conceptually,” Checkman says, “but in the worst case expanding from the current five to the intended nine increases the number of unique emotes the game has to load by forty.” This number might increase even further, he continues, if additional event triggers are added to the current automatic ones of ‘start game,’ ‘first blood,’ ‘ace,’ and ‘win.’
This would mean that the game would use more memory. Checkman explains, “We manage the memory on League pretty tightly because we operate on a wide variety of machines around the world.” However, he adds that a recent internal audit of emotes has “found ways to reduce their size without reduction in quality,” which might free up some space for such considerations.
“In the meantime we’re also looking at better ways to manage your emotes, what we’d need to create multiple emote pages, and some other improvements we like for the system,” Checkman notes. He closes by saying, “We aren’t going to deliver it all right away, but we’re also not unaware that there are wayyyy more emotes than ways to use them. The designer working on this is awesome and I have every confidence emotes are going to slap even harder eventually.”
This post not only contains great news about LoL’s emotes but also shows how League of Legends has improved communication with their community following disappointments around the 2023 season begin cinematic.
Checkman says, “I always feel like the community in general isn’t super interested in what is standing between them and the stuff they want,” so he tries to strike a balance between educating players about the challenges of development and keeping fans in the loop, while making sure not to spoil surprises, overpromise on features, or make too many excuses. He also notes that he has to look after his own mental health, as “people have been pretty rude to me before.”
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