This is something that got cut early in 2017 when we updated the client. Initially we were focusing on making sure everything was actually working—like when you give a gift to your friend, they actually got it. To make it faster to test the functionality, we removed a lot of the animations at first. Animations take time to load and can be problemsome for slower machines. Rather than have the team wait to put polish on gifting once functionality was complete, they moved on to getting other features in the client—like “Your Shop.”

When we came back to gifting, we started to notice some other issues with the feature that we wanted to address. We plan to go back in and add cool animations and sounds ::insert Whoosh, Whirl, Sparkle sounds here:: as well as make some changes to the feature to make it more robust in the future. Fun fact—did you know you currently can’t gift bundles? And sometimes when you try to gift your friend something, you’ll get an error message that doesn’t really tell you what’s wrong? These are just some of the things we’re hoping to tackle soon™.

It is definitely possible! It’s no secret that Ohmwrecker is unpopular, but there’s a kernel of excitement there to build upon. Some of us have looked in this design space before, but we haven’t landed on an idea that was both exciting enough and maintained a similar design to justify corralling up the resources for an update. (I’m making an assumption that the “pretty cool” thing we’re referring to is the item’s active: the tower disabling mechanic. Point Runner is a darn cool passive, but it’s not unique to Ohmwrecker and wouldn’t form the basis for an end-tier item on its own.)

Having a mechanic that impacts Summoner’s Rift—as opposed to champions—is awesome but almost guaranteed to be niche. It doesn’t have to be this niche, though. Right now Ohmwrecker is bought 10x less than Banner of Command, and both of those items are substantially less popular than Zz’Rot Portal. These items are similar in the sense that their main focus is progressing the game by impacting enemy turrets, but Ohmwrecker is dragging behind significantly in popularity. Clearly, there’s an opportunity space here.

We do take on projects that are largely opportunity based—meaning they’re not addressing a prevalent pain point—but they tend to be in the minority. There are a lot of areas we can constantly improve on in League, so we’re often trying to address significant pain points when we take on a project. This means that an inoffensive item is going to fall to the bottom of the priority list, especially if the item is unpopular but not really a “trap” to purchase (like Sword of the Divine was in most situations). When we look to tackle an opportunity-driven project, we also consider that players generally aren’t as attached to particular items as they are to champions. So when we have a champion who could use attention, it’s very often going to take priority over an unpopular item like Ohmwrecker.

Definitely! We held off from having one of these for a while as we prepared for Runes Reforged. Now that you’ve all gotten used to how the new runes work—this was me in the beginning =  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯—we’ll be bringing them back on a recurring basis. The next one we do will be with return of the Essence Emporium later this year.