Our takeaway is that Spirit Bonds' backloaded grind was a better event experience, even though players completed the main portion of the event at radically different times. Normal engagers in particular can end up feeling like they have no shot at completing the story. Even when tuned well from an event-long perspective, slow progress in the first few weeks can feel demoralizing. On the other hand, backloaded progression was a risky choice from the start. On the one hand, this was because we flat-out missed on event tuning: Not even the hardcore engagers were progressing at the rates we designed for. Ultimately, we ended up patching the event partway through to greatly increase progression per game played, which removed the impact of deciding which regions to visit first, as well as basing progression around the Sentinels to begin with. We thought this'd also be a cool thematic representation of the Sentinels' momentum rising as they bolstered their ranks. We designed Rise of the Sentinels so progress increased every week, meaning hardcore engagers would still complete the early content faster, but normal engagers would be mostly caught up by the time we reached the finale. For Rise of the Sentinels, we wanted to narrow that story progression gap between hardcore engagers and normal engagers. With Spirit Blossom in 2020, super high engagers completed all of Spirit Bonds in the first two or three days and then spent the rest of the event grinding Spirit Petals. We also wanted to push further on the success of Spirit Blossom's in-client visual novel and character interactions, using them as a way to let players interact with the Sentinels during the fight against Viego and add immersion to the standard event progression experience. We tied together multiple new champion launches (Viego, Gwen, Akshan originally Vex before her delay) and released skins depicting champions as they appeared during the events of the story. This overall arc was our biggest expression of core Runeterra lore in League in ages. Sentinels of Light was the culmination of League's first multi-month narrative event, beginning with Ruination at Season Start. Use them to add color and detail to our biggest lore beats or provide specific windows into those stories, but not to deliver massive stories in their entirety.In-client visual novels have scope limitations we need to respect.Only incorporate faceless player stand-in characters when it makes sense, rather than by default.Keep simultaneous forms of storytelling consistent.Narrative and character tone need to match player expectations.Ensure canon lore in particular is accessible without over-the-top gameplay grinding, and provide ways to access the lore outside of the metagame.Streamline metagame design so players understand how to access everything.Pace big events so regular engagers feel like they'll be able to get through the main portion, with big grinds saved as optional challenges for hardcore folks.Event metagames need to be accessible to regular players, not just super engagers.This is a long one, so here's a summary of our takeaways: One EXTREMELY important note to keep in mind: We're focusing on LEAGUE PC's involvement, not Riot overall. We want to own up to the fact that Sentinels missed the mark, and share how we'll use our learnings to help future big events. As the year winds down and we reflect back on 2021, we wanted to talk about what we learned from the Sentinels of Light event this past summer. The Arcane x Riot event was also huge and went off without a hitch, so it’s clear that Riot is able to pull off insane events without many problems.Hey all. Now that Sentinels of Light has passed the developers have learned a lot and hopefully, the next larger event will be better. So, if you love lore and events, you can look forward to more large-scale events. In the post by Reav3 and 84Slashes, they explicitly state that even though this event didn’t go 100% according to plan, the immense amounts of feedback they got showed them that the community cares for these characters and would want more events based around lore in Runeterra. Arcane managed to stay consistent to Lore while tweaking a few things. Oh, and if you’re still confused about the core story of the event, make sure to check it out on the official Riot Games channel. So, in the future Riot will likely work on communicating and keeping the stories consistent. Our takeaway is that simultaneous forms of storytelling that support the same lore moments need to be consistent, rather than optimized for individual products.
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