Honestly, a pretty surprising number of players play Ranked. For example, in 2018 around 70% of level 30+ players placed in at least one queue. Not only that, but on a monthly basis around 65% of active players play one or more Ranked games. That’s pretty high participation—we think one reason for this might be because one of the core reasons players try League is for the intense, competitive aspects of the game, meaning they’re more likely to opt into ladder systems.

Since the vast majority of players engage in Ranked, we have to make sure the system works well for you no matter who you are. For example, elite players in Master and Challenger have substantially different needs and motivations from players who are lower on the ladder since many of them actually know each other and they tend to specialize more often than lower ranked players. We have to take those kinds of differences into account when making changes.

Currently, we’re prioritizing other features like Ranked and Clash over further improvements to Honor. Having said that, we do think there are a number of things we can do to make Honor better. For example, a common request is for us to bring back honoring opponents, which is something you can’t do in the current system. We’d also like to do a couple other things like provide clearer directions to help Honor level 0 and 1 players climb back to an honorable state and frame the system more around sportsmanship rather than who carried who.

One thing we are planning to do is integrate Honor level as a multiplier for split points in the new Ranked system, but we’re still a ways away from exploring more foundational changes.

Yes, we’ve definitely thought about this. We think giving you more ways to see what your friends are interested in for gifting would be great, and we’ve even done some initial discovery work on it. Unfortunately, we learned that it’d be very difficult to implement on our current tech stack due the way we built the store backend and frontend in the past.

Right now we’re doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work updating all aspects of the store to make features like wish lists and other cool stuff much easier to implement. In the meantime, we’re going to continue on small quality of life feature improvements. For example, we recently added the ability to gift people directly from your friend’s list. In short—we’d like to add a wish list feature, but we’ll need to finish refactoring pieces of the store before we’re able to.

While I doubt every champion, or even a vast majority of them, will need full gameplay reworks at some point, it’s always possible they could. It’s hard to say which champions will stand the test of time and which won’t. The game is constantly changing, and because of this, some champions will fall out of favor, or maybe some kits that work really well in the current state of the game might become obsolete down the road. Only time will tell.