After sitting in the League of Legends client for a few years, Riot Games has made the decision to remove Clubs from the game “in the near future.”
In a recent blog post, Riot explained various reasons why it’s removing Clubs from League, including the rise and evolution of community tools. League‘s Clubs feature will never be able to become a community tool that can beat out Discord, for example.
Another key factor that influenced Riot’s decision was that the technology that Clubs was built on isn’t being supported as well anymore. As a result, it’s seen many bugs and issues pop up. Riot would have to rebuild the Clubs feature, which might not be the best place to put its efforts at the moment.
“The technology that Clubs was built on was a mix of internally developed systems and third-party software that was really exciting at the time,” Riot said. “Unfortunately, the external components of it are no longer fully supported by its original developer and as a result, it has begun to do what all technology does over time—degrade.”
Riot also explained that the teams want to focus on things that can “provide a truly great experience” for the League and TFT player bases. This is why the developers have shifted their focus on more important tasks, like a new item system on Summoner’s Rift and improving the game’s client.
Although this might be a sad day for anyone who’s used Clubs to connect and play with people, not everything will be lost. Riot announced that it will be partnering with Discord to ease the transition away from Clubs by making it “super easy for you to create a Discord server, share it with your Clubmates and continue playing League together.”
Riot has recently released updates on upcoming skins as well.
At the start of 2020 Riot said that they made a commitment to increase the number of skins they make per year. In 2019 they shipped just under 100 skins, and their hope this year was to ship around 120.
This all being said, they’re delighted to let folks know that they’re still on track to hit their target of 120 skins. In fact, it’s looking like they’re going to be able to exceed their goal and hit close to 140 skins by the end of 2020.
Now outside of our commitment to just increasing the raw number of skins, they also called out along list of lower play rate champions that haven’t gotten new skins in years. They’ve hit most of our targets on that list, and are likely on track to hit the remaining three.