Riot Games has altered one of the esports organization’s emotes that will be available to League of Legends players in late August.
On August 12, Riotrevealed the custom emotesdesigned by professional teams in its top League of Legends esports leagues. The designs are a mix of art promoting the esports team itself and some clever emotes from teams just having fun with the memes.
100 Thieves chose to create an emote displaying a gesture players would use after walking away from a massive outplay to talk trash to their opponents.
However, that design has not made it into the game as Riot has altered the emote in its PBE release to what some might say is a less offensive gesture. The change was caughtby SkinSpotlights, a social media account and YouTube channel devoted to covering cosmetics for League and Wild Rift.
100T Akali Emote was altered a bit, 1st is updated, 2nd was the old onepic.twitter.com/8y8ENz7gEO
Neither 100 Thieves nor the developer have said whether the design was actually changed from its initial announcement or if that was simply an earlier version of the design.
However, League players are upset, believing that Riot has sanitized what they considered a great emote, with some evencalling out the developeras “Cowards.”
This is not the only controversyassociated with this emote rollout. Riot is bringing backthe controversial bait ping as an emote thanks to Team BDSand its cosmetic design, which prominently featuresthe ping’s hook shape.
A similar emote of just the hook was previously removed from League of Legends after the developer foundplayers were using itin an “unacceptable” manner.
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Esports teams were incentivized to make their designs as interesting to players as possible, as Riot is giving 30% of the gross revenue from individual emote sales back to the team that created it. The emotes hit live servers on August 27 and will cost 350 RP, or a little over $3.
Declan McLaughlin was a Gaming & Esports Writer on Dexerto’s US team, specializing in Valorant and League of Legends. He has bylines at Upcomer and Inven Global.
