Riot Games apparently has been “actively looking at the emote system” in League of Legends, working on a major overhaul of this important feature. The plan for the moment is apparently to expand and improve the system, something which is widely seen as critical to the overall gameplay experience.
The news comes from Design Lead on League of Legends Jordan Checkman. The developer recently took to the social media platform Reddit, answering all sorts of questions and addressing a variety of different comments from the community. According to Checkman, the communication system in the game is currently “in discovery,” meaning that Riot Games has been looking into upgrades and improvements.
“Expanding the emote wheel is kind of a given conceptually,” Checkman explained. “But in the worst case, expanding from the current five to the intended nine increases the number of unique emotes the game has to load by forty.”
This of course means that League of Legends would require a larger amount of random access memory in order to run. “We manage the memory on League of Legends pretty tightly because we operate on a wide variety of machines around the world,” the developer described before going on to say that Riot Games recently “found ways to reduce their size without a reduction in quality.”
“In the meantime, we’re also looking at better ways to manage your emotes, what we’d need to create multiple emote pages and some other improvements we like for the system,” Checkman remarked about the upcoming changes. “We aren’t going to deliver it all right away, but we’re also not unaware that there are way more emotes than ways to use them. The designer working on this is awesome and I have every confidence emotes are going to slap even harder eventually.”