Honor Edition
This week we’re answering a bunch of your questions about League’s new Honor system.
It’s been a month (that was fast) since Honor launched, and in the first couple weeks alone more than 56 million honors were awarded. Now that we’ve all had a few games with it, let’s kick off an all-Honor edition of Ask Riot.
What if I already own the Warwick and Twitch skins? Will I not be rewarded at all?
You’ll still be getting key frags, loading-screen flairs, end-of-season rewards, and the rest of the goodies in Honor Capsules. We hear you that they’re not quite as exciting if you have those skins already, but the good news is that we’ll add new things to the capsules over time, so more stuff is coming.
Why can you only honor just one person in the new system?
The goal was to make Honor feel good on both the giving and receiving ends. Honoring one person per game prompts careful consideration of who you give your vote to; Honor should not feel like the equivalent of shaking everyone’s hand at the end of a game. Think of it more like an award you get each game to give to a teammate. It’s also why we have categories. When you get an honor, you know that someone chose to award you the only honor they had in that game for a specific category.
Early on we did look at concepts that involved multiple choices, but we ultimately went with a single choice to make it feel more valuable and also to keep the voting process quick, since now you do it every game.
Do you plan to replace Honorable Opponent? Enemies can be honorable too!
Enemies can definitely be honorable too, but generally when you play League, you chat with your team much more than with the enemy team. You have a better ability to judge how honorable players were on your team than the enemy team, so we wanted teammates to be the focal point of Honor. Also, we wanted to simplify the Honoring process and make the decision-making as straightforward as possible. Choosing among two to four options is less taxing than choosing among five to nine.
We are exploring some options that allow opponents to be recognized, but don’t have anything concretely in the works yet.
I had hundreds of Honors in the old system. Now they’re all gone. What gives?
We feel you. We’re planning a small gift for folks who were big into old-school Honor. In terms of design, we want to tip our hat to folks who really cared about and engaged in old-school Honor. We’re still ironing out the details and we’ll let you know as soon as they’re ready.
What’s the best way to level up? Why isn’t there a level up meter?
The best way to level up is straightforward: Get games in, steadily rack up honors, and don’t get penalties. The whole team gets a small bonus when all teammates give honor in a game, too! The meter question has a more complex answer:
It sucks to feel like you’re not making progress towards leveling up, and missing feedback about your forward progress is a clear pain point so far. It’s something we want to fix, but not with a progress bar. Since Honor levels are meant to stretch across a whole season, a slow-moving progress bar might feel like an awful grind.
The answer to the problem is most likely more clear and more frequent notifications about the honors you’re receiving as you move onward and upward. These notifications can give you cool info, like if a majority of your honors are around shotcalling. Tidbits like that can help you sharpen your strengths as a player, while signalling forward progress in the level system.
Have a question? Click on the button below, sign into your League account, and ask away.
We’ll do our best to read every question, but we can’t guarantee they’ll all get answers. Some questions may already be answered elsewhere, and some won’t be right for Ask Riot. This isn’t the best place to announce new features, for example, and we might skip conversations on issues we’ve talked about in depth before (though we can clarify individual points).
We are listening, though, so keep asking. We’ll make sure your questions are heard by the Rioters working on the stuff you’re curious about.