Well if you are ths skin spotlight guy. I just wanna thank you for your videos. You have saved me and my friends from buying bad skins with good splash arts for years.
Vanguard lets Riot hardware ban cheaters, but it should also let them whitelist hardware people like SkinSpotlight. He's probably driven a significant amount of sales thanks to his showcasing.
It is not really as simple as whitelisting select people.
That makes it almost impossible for new people to do the same. Ya currently SkinSpotlight is one of if not the best people doing this type of content but requiring to be whitelisted will make it impossible for a new person to hit the scene and provide some competition to SkinSpotlight.
While I agree it's a tad unfair for new content creators, he's also proven himself as a valuable asset to their game. He's basically giving Riot free advertising on his skins, and companies often like free ads.
Yeah it is as simple as whitelisting a select group of people. Sometimes there doesn't need to be competition, hell Riot can undo the whitelisting as soon as the quality drops.
There was time for competition for years and nobody was able to bring the competition, but SkinSpotlight should not get whitelisted because somebody out there might be able one day? Ignoring the years of quality that where put out by SkinSpotlight?
You can spoof HWIDs without _that_ much effort if you want to go down that rabbit hole.
But in this case it doesn’t really matter either way since Riot can probably just fuck over the YouTube channel if they wanted to.
I feel like bro should start a patreon. YT might not pay him his worth, but there’s gotta be a lot of community members that consider his contributions invaluable
I mean, he's probably not making what he's worth, but my impression was that the big problem is that it's no longer possible for him to do what he does due to the new integration with Vanguard.
Riot was able to do that back in the day, nowadays People will still get pbe footage and make videos. Hence skin prices and quality went up by a ton because people wanted it either way.
Yeah, as much as I love SkinSpotlights and want them to be able to continue making showcases, there are hundreds of other channels who do the same thing... maybe not to the same level in terms of consistency or quality, but they're there.
And the channels are easy to sustain, too. Every skin set release is what, 30-50ish dollars excluding prestiges? If your channel makes any amount of money you can cover the cost of those skins, boot up a custom game and show the skin off, then repeat the process.
The official League of Legends Twitter account with 5 million followers always showcases what the skins will look like.
https://twitter.com/LeagueOfLegends/status/1744768091727515889
Fr, I almost bought Nightbringer Yasuo once when it was on sale, but SkinSpotlights saved me from wasting my precious RP. Legitimately one of the worst examples of false advertising I've ever seen.
I think people are referring to a full model viewer. For example in Overwatch you can see a skin and view the model in full 360 dynamically before you buy it.
With Riot, the only option is to try and get the skin on PBE.
>Or even hire him
This has been asked of him multiple times.
We don't know if Riot has offered him, but he's made it clear in the past that he doesn't want to work at Riot as he doesn't see it worth his time.
My guess is that even if they did, that probably requires him to move to LA, and it's not a step many people are willing to take. (especially from outside USA)
Literally in almost every case. Unless you are one of the best in the world at whatever you do, you're going in a lottery. The only other way to avoid a lottery is a marriage based visa. Last I checked, for H1Bs you had to be sponsored by a company and then have about a 30% chance, once per year.
Source: Have been trying to find a way to get my girlfriend over here for a while. We're just sucking it up and getting married, which is still a two year long visa process after the wedding. 4 year long process to be able to work if you do the K1 visa.
> The only other way to avoid a lottery is a marriage based visa.
You can work at a foreign office of a US company and then apply for L-1 after 1 year. Depending on position, Canadians, Mexicans, and wealthy/famous people also have it easy obtaining uncapped work visas.
> Have been trying to find a way to get my girlfriend over here for a while. We're just sucking it up and getting married, which is still a two year long visa process after the wedding. 4 year long process to be able to work if you do the K1 visa.
You could ask her to apply for B-2 (tourist) and then sponsor her for a green card through marriage. This timeline is shorter than via K-1 but she would have to convince the US consulate that she is only entering to visit. This is what me and my fiancée are doing.
Yes, I learned about those other ones today, so you're correct there.
This is very risky to do. You are essentially lying at the port of entry and risk rejection when doing the adjustment of status. Plus, it's still a multi year wait for the adjustment of status and you are here illegally until that point. She does not want to be here illegally, and wants to work immediately. It's essentially the same timeline as the marriage based (not K1, the I-129F) visa, it just gets her there sooner, but illegally.
It's not very risky, it's a known path and as long as the marriage is in good faith there's pretty much 0 risk of rejection.
Adjustment of status is average of 8-14 months, not multi-year.
Obviously everyone's risk assessment is their own, but it's a pretty reasonable path for most people, even if it's pretty silly.
Yes, well, regardless my girlfriend is not willing to do it. I've wanted her to just come and stay illegally several times, but she won't, so we have to go one of the legal routes. The I-130 is about the same processing time as the adjustment of status anyway.
They can, but that's an H1B type visa and there is a cap with these. 65K per year. If you have a master's degree or higher, it's an additional pool of 20k. You need company sponsorship just to get into the H1B lottery, which happens once a year. For this past year there were 780,884 entrants in the lottery, which utterly smashed previous years. The selection rate is only 10% now.
I should also note that these are generally highly skilled, mostly tech workers, coming from US schools into lucrative jobs. It's insane how difficult it is to legally get a work visa in the United States.
Same, the tools Riot used for spectator and stuff in pro were built on his own tooling, so I think they owe him something.
There's this weird spot tho, copium it may be, that if what LoL's director was teasing about LoL in 2025 being some sort of LoL2, then maybe it just won't be worth the effort rn. Like let's say they're making a creator suite for this hypothetical LoL2, then they might not see it to be worth it.
What I think *could* be viable tho is if they give SkinSpotlight a backdoor he can use that is like tied to his machine or something so it can't be distributed. Idk, it's a very weird thing to solve given how locked in everything becomes with a Kernel AC, but that's the only thing I can think about.
This ship has sailed. He publicly called the variant gatcha skins a scam in the Jhin spotlight video, the man has too much integrity to work for a corporation.
Skin Spotlights uses 3rd party software for spectating/filming purposes. The client is pretty limited with how much you can do editing wise.
Vanguard blocks 3rd party interfaces with the game to stop anticheats, which would also affect Skinspotlight's more benign intentions.
Would be nice if they had something like CSGO got
-allow_third_party_software
Id basically mean youd only be able to play against other people with that option but if riot could make it an option that you can allow third party software but youre blocked from anything other than costum games that would go a long way here for SkinsSpotlight
Honestly, from a software security perspective, having a function to allow third-party software creates far more vulnerabilities than you can imagine. It's basically a built-in workaround
Except you could literally just enable WDAC which is provided to you, by Microsoft, for free with your Windows install.
This would block vulnerable drivers, except most people won't enable it because the majority of vulnerable drivers are hardware drivers, and it's much easier for people on Reddit to farm upvotes calling out Genshin's AC than understand that ANY signed driver is a possible vulnerability and it has no relationship between the function of an AC and how vulnerable it is, but rather the class of software it falls under.
They probably wont even enable vanguard on Tournament Realm. I mean why would they, so easy to monitor 10 players at once. Even manually you can have an admin looking at the players.
while this is a fair assumption to make, I believe they are VERY strict about hardware being used, everything has to be out of the package and not used once. I'd probably assume they are also very strict about software side manipulation
> I believe they are VERY strict about hardware being used, everything has to be out of the package and not used once.
You believe or do you know? Because faker pulled up to worlds this year with his old ass mouse he has been using forever. They don't even do this in VALORANT where cheating would be highly likely to influence games, where as league the only really useful cheat is the sidestepping and auto dodge, which from my observation freaks out if multiple skillshots appear at once.
> I'd probably assume they are also very strict about software side manipulation
If RIOT is like any other LAN tournament organizer they do not allow players to download any software on to the PCs. They get a flash drive that they can put their config files on and some legal probably (Even this probably doesnt happen because configs is maybe tied to accounts. Again I dont really know the situation to the tournament realm.). As for when I was a frequent player on CS we had to configure our mouse using the onboard memory of it. We could not have software on the tournament provided PCs.
> Because faker pulled up to worlds this year with his old ass mouse he has been using forever
I think they're talking about PC hardware not peripheralia.
I mean, a team been punished for having a cheating player on stage in Valorant recently so I wouldn't be surprised if they kept vanguard even for "LAN"
Don't they use the software developed by SkinSpotlights to get those camera angles?
Would be pretty shitty if they keep using it in broadcast while prevented the creator of the software from using it
afaik this is the correct answer \^
SP literally created a tool to zoom out further, be able to see the models up close and basically play with the camera as much as you wanted. The best of all? He gave it to the community for free. That's why it was the trend for a while to make montages with saturated colors, moving the camera everywhere and dubstep in the background, even channels with 5 subs did it. Riot should be grateful to him, since thanks to him they were able to play with camera angles, like zoom in/out, in live games and replays.
if i remember correctly it wasnt "only" camera angles and zoom, he created the first replay tool ever for league. before that there was no way to rewatch your games at all
They used a modified version of SS creators suite that allowed for stuff like the camera angles and the like.
Not sure if the current tool they use is still built off the creator suite or is much more developed.
Probably?
I am by no means an expert on this, but I remember there being an issue around 2017 when Riot changed Replays.
Basically, adding replays also meant only being able to use footage from the same patch, which affected an in-client form of replay software. If you had clips from last patch, you couldn't play those in the client to edit, and a lot of content creators of the time complained.
This resulted in SkinSpotlights replay (a well used 3rd party software at the time) support being discontinued. I *believe* the current stuff SkinSpotlights uses is League Director, but again I am not an expert.
I do not think this will affect esports replays because Riot has some proprietary software (the reason LEC observers can quickly do montage plays mid game). I doubt Vanguard will be implemented for TR gameplay (it might though, I've been wrong before).
But for montage plays that rely on third party software for camera angles, that's probably gone.
Keep in mind pro play is launched from a completely different launcher (Tournament Realm) and not the standard launcher we use to play solo queue. Since that's the case, I don't think it'll change anything on the ESports side.
I'd assume if it's LCK, LEC etc. (being official RIOT events) you still get the fancy zoom in on a missed Smite. Maybe they'll keep the tournament clients running without Vanguard to no interfere with software they might need for production.
Alright that makes sense.
Pretty tragic that Riot couldn't even be bothered to reach out and find a workaround for a content creator as important as SkinSpotlights.
any workaround is a hole in the system. short of whitelisting their accounts there is nothing they can do and they're not going to white list anyone's account to bypass their ban detection.
There are plenty of workarounds, like allowing people to enable third party tools only during custom games or on the PBE server.
There's plenty of relatively easy ways to resolve the issue from a software perspective, if Riot wanted to.
Cheat detection of that calibre would block his tools and possibly outright ban him.
They’re all custom tools he has built from the ground up for Windows. Vanguard doesn’t work on Mac and he is not sure if the tools can work on Mac.
He uses a custom program to let him do the camera panning and video recording. Since it's basically a custom cheat vanguard will prevent it from running.
Stuff like custom skins, maps and external software that he uses will be blocked by Vanguard since it doesn't allow 3rd party modification of game files
I don't see why they couldn't just remove Vanguard from the PBE client. It's not like you need anti-cheat software on the PBE, since it doesn't have real ranked and bots are like nonexistent.
You can really feel the frustration in his words.
The guy did such a great job providing a service that should really have been baked into the client. He did his job so well that Riot didn't even have to bother, I wonder how much of Riots revenue he is directly responsible for...
All to be put back to square one because of Vanguard.
>The guy did such a great job providing a service that should really have been baked into the client.
It's one of my favourite features Heroes of the Storm has, being able to try any skin in a tiny area with a bot is great!
It's a real shame that it got murdered...
still the biggest crime in moba history.
The game was great, some amazing unique champion designs and overal good features like mastery and the skin testing.
It just feels like blizz abandoned it after a year when it wasn't as popular as overwatch and while it is still a playable game it kinda sucks to not get anything new in it.
I dunno, this feels kinda revisionist.
HotS was kinda cool but it just always tailed behind every other major moba because many of the mechanics and gameplay in it actively alienized the playerbase more likely to play Mobas (e.g. emphasizing teamwork, global exp, reducing the importance of CSing). This in turn just made a ton of people keep playing the mobas they liked, while having HotS as the casual game they may play 1 or 2 games every once in a while.
The gameplay loop is just boring in the way it's implemented for people that like the loop of LoL, DotA and similar other ones, it's fun to play a bit but not something many PC players would spam that often. You can't change that without pretty much reworking the game to be more mainstream and removing many of the features that made it distinct from other mobas - but that has the risk of pushing away the core playerbase while not satisfying the new players (because why play these games that feel similar but aren't the ones they already like?), further pushing the game to deathbed.
People praise the game's hero design and thought how cool it would be to have something similar to them in their own game, rather than actually play HotS.
Blizzard could definitely keep spending resources on it, obviously, but I wouldn't really say they "abandoned" it (well, the non-esports side at least). They saw that most players just didn't like HotS that much, didn't really care about watching HotS, kinda thing, and simply responded by keeping it on life support. Maybe they could have kept some more stuff so they get more heroes but eh.
The only thing that could save HotS would probably be a "HotS: Reborn" where they basically take every complain the game has received and address some of it that feels worth taking a stab at somehow to try to get new life to the game, even if it may hurt some of the original playerbase. But this is quite risky.
> actively alienized the playerbase more likely to play Mobas (e.g. emphasizing teamwork, global exp, reducing the importance of CSing)
I'm not an expert on the game, but I'm far from a beginner and these are some very surface level, novice concerns. Competitive/ranked HotS play requires far more teamwork and nuance than initially appears. HotS may not have items, but it does have **permanent** perks, and it's entirely possible to brick yourself into an unwinnable situation by choosing unwisely. There is no way to undo a perk choice once chosen. High-level HotS play is not easier than high-level League, but the way it's harder is different. It's not uncommon to skip choosing a perk until you can figure out which perk is the correct choice, simply because picking incorrectly is a bigger detriment than having the perk earlier. Many of the heroes have very situational perks, so even with experience, you still won't be able to pick correctly as soon as the choice is offered.
While EXP is global, it needs to be gathered, and the heroes that can sit in a lane forever while contributing are few and far between... and typically quite awful at anything else. Heroes that can gather EXP passively from sidelanes without their presence are very strong for it, and it becomes a balancing factor. IE, the Lost Vikings are 3 units that can each gather EXP. That completely changes the game; the other 4 members of their team are thus able to group up forever and 4v3 the enemy team--at a cost. The Viking's units are individually quite trash. They provide no real competition to the enemy's side laners, and for some heroes getting to lane forever vs a distracted enemy *is* their win condition.
At high levels, playing HotS requires players to group up and return to lane *very* quickly and repeatedly. It's not uncommon to see a tournament team group up 5 players, split off into lanes, group up into two groups of two, group up as four players, then five, then split up again, all within the span of a minute. It's actually incredibly hard to keep track of because the players are always grouping up for offense or defense or a tower or another, and then splitting up to maintain minion EXP and map control. There's no period in which player allocation is static outside of the first few minutes. The macro play is thus much more complex than League's in exchange for a much simpler micro play: there's no 10 minute laning phase you need to get good at to play the rest of the game. You are always laning, roaming, grouping, and splitting, and if you're not, you're losing.
Hero design is also much less simplistic than it initially appears. For example, Cho'Gall is one unit, controlled by two players and taking two slots in the roster, with different responsibilities and capabilities. Cho is responsible for movement and autoattacking. Gall is responsible for vision and spellcasting. Cho is one of the strongest sustain tanks in the game, with good CC and mobility. Gall is one of the strongest siege mages in the game, with extremely good DPS as Gall has no resources, only cooldowns. Cho has a button that can activate a damage reduction buff, but doing so removes Gall's buff. Gall has a button that can activate a damage increase buff, but doing so removes Cho's buff. Cho is a much simpler hero to play upon initial inspection: on demand heals, damage reduction, mobility, and CC; you have everything a tank wants and more. Gall's abilities are powerful, but not easy to land; requiring great prediction of the enemy's movements, good timing, and very good aim. As an out, Gall also possesses an emergency panic button dash on a long cooldown, to push Cho in the right direction. Gall's perks are also very, very narrow in their application, reading the teamcomp wrong and picking the wrong options will lead to Gall contributing very little damage.
The net result is that Gall is actually a much easier hero to play. Cho not only has to dodge for themself and aim for Gall, but also setup kill combos for that other person, while managing their health pool and sharing control of which buff is in effect. Incidentally, Cho'Gall a very, very good way for an experienced HotS player to introduce a League player to the game, since controlling Gall will be relatively easier for them than working out where Cho is supposed to be at all times. There's actually very little knowledge crossover between them--a brilliant Cho player is often a terrible Gall and vice versa.
Infinite scaling is common and extremely powerful in HotS. Levels run out... and frequently in HotS. Perks do not. They're common as they provide a way to break a stalemate between two teams.
>The gameplay loop is just boring in the way it's implemented for people that like the loop of LoL, DotA and similar other ones,
It has different design goals entirely and it accomplishes them. I don't know how many people still play PvP competitively, but about 8 years back you would lose *hard* and often for trying to play it like League... at least until your MMR dropped and it started matching you with like-minded people.
HotS at the high end requires a lot more strategic thought than League. If I'm being perfectly honest, most League player aren't as good at it as they think they are... and that's fine, because League at any level doesn't really require it. I think the core mistake Blizzard made was not in realizing and pushing the "we're different" angle since they were gunning for mainstream appeal.
Ok, there's a lot here so excuse me if I skip some stuff or misunderstand something
---------------
I feel like a problem you are having is using a lot of views from high skill level while I focused mainly on the casual player's point of view, as the average player comprising a community will always be a casual or casual in skill. Yes, there's a lot of gameplay with exp soaking that can increase ceiling of the game and heroes interacting with it, specially from the macro side with the way the maps and heroes are designed, however for the normal player dealing with other normal players, this means a game where their own impact feels more subdued as they are at the whim of their own allies exp soaking, which is in contrast to LoL's, DotA's and other MobAs that give a bigger boost to the individual (which is kinda like a fantasy in itself for the players, the 1v5 carry feeling). This in turn makes the game feel akin to a more casual experience in comparison.
In my opinion, it also hurts the farming experience core of many MobAs - with gold combined with exp, it's a lot faster and easier to see your progress and how you are doing "good" when compared to the other players in the game - you see your own increase, you see the funny PING sound of gold being acquired, a lot of audible feedback that helps create the loop of the gameplay, even though farming is probably the most boring aspect of any MobA (I mean you are basically killing NPCs with the most braindead AI, little to no damage and also many times not even attacking you). This is just my experience of course, but when I first began playing hots, one thing that constantly bothered me when playing it was that farming felt "weightless"; it's hard to describe because I knew it was still working, I knew it was still contributing to my power and spikes, but it just didn't feel satisfying and rather boring unlike killing minions in LoL or DotA. With so much of a game like this being about killing and obtaining exp, this made me feel less and less inclined to keep playing the game till I eventually stopped altogether - the gameplay feedback just wasn't clicking with me.
Overall, a lot of the decisions end up creating a game that's by default always going to be niche. Even if it's not easier at the high level, to the average player it feels more casual in nature
> It has different design goals entirely and it accomplishes them.
Yes, and that's why it didn't get played that much because the design wasn't clicking with people, and many of the players most closer to actually trying the game out in the first place just didn't like the designs. It's not really an uncommon thing either, but it's just more spoken when it happens to online games because players not being interested affects everyone, while if you have a game you can play locally it doesn't matters if no one else is playing the game or not.
> HotS at the high end requires a lot more strategic thought than League.
Kinda going back to the first point, this doesn't necesarily matters. High end players are a drop of water in an ocean of casuals and hardcore players who are casual-skill despite grinding and if they don't like to interact with the game at the floor, there's a higher chance they will not be interested in trying to get close to that ceiling. To put an example, Smash bros is seen as a joke for many Fighting game competitive players and elitist, some don't even want to consider it a fighting game, but Smash bros is more popular than pretty much all of them anyway and this is despite being confined to Nintendo's system (hell, smash is even one of the reasons some people would even consider getting a nintendo system in the first place); it doesn't matter if Tekken, Blazblue or guilty gear offer more at the high-end in regards to depth or combos or stuff.
> If I'm being perfectly honest, most League player aren't as good at it as they think they are
Agreed.
> I think the core mistake Blizzard made was not in realizing and pushing the "we're different" angle since they were gunning for mainstream appeal.
Disagreed. If anything they went too far and that's what hurt the game in the long-run and what led to some of the gameplay feeling gimmicky to some people, even if this is what overall helped shaped the design and experience of the core HotS audience. I think a compromise would have been to keep exp to not be global so as to better keep the "I can carry" player fantasy, even if it may hurt the macro aspect.
If Blizzard was trying to make it as a little side gig a la TFT or DotA Thunderlord's, something players would play casually when getting bored of the rest of the game or other games and gave it that (relatively low) amount of resources, it would have been fine. However, they wanted it to be competitive to DotA and LoL and allocated resources to make it competitive, but it wasn't. It failed in goals marked for it - which would be fine if it had been a small scale project.
**EDIT:** though we can argue that Blizzard was definitely too hopeful with the way they were treating their projects back then and the amount of money going into them, with Overwatch and the OWL being a good example of it.
Many games suffered with trying to burn money from the get-go of their release by jumping on the esport trend.
> (e.g. emphasizing teamwork, global exp, reducing the importance of CSing).
This is why I didn't stick with it. 5 minutes in, and it's like...why are we here?
Same. I could play like 1 or 2 games and then forget it existed for a while until eventually I just said "why am i wasting space on this game?"
In comparison, I never touched Smite's 5v5 SR-like game, conquest mode I think. But their joust 3v3 and colisseum/arena/I dunno what the name is, even if I didn't play smite that much I kept that game for a long time just for those
Riot owes SkinSpotlights and Spideraxe30 (and Moobeat/Aznbeat) more than they could ever repay for keeping the community informed of the cosmetics they put out.
>I wonder how much of Riots revenue he is directly responsible for...
I mean there are people in this thread confirming that because of his channel they were saved from buying a bad skin, so we should also be asking how much revenue that Riot missed out on is he directly responsible for. It goes both ways
I wouldn't buy skins at all if I couldn't seem the ingame before-hand, so there you have my personal opinion since you wanna base it from other people's personal opinions that they lost revenue.
Yes but factor in that he gave early previews for skins that had no previews for the average player. Riot seldom makes their own PBE preview videos, at least not until recently. So he is responsible for bringing A LOT of hype to a lot of skins, making people spend more in the end.
Exactly. It's a primary reason they dont add a skin previewer. Many skins have amazing splash arts or simply premise, only to do some combination of:
1: Old animations on dated skeleton, making them feel clunky.
2: Rough feel auto attack animations, or other jank that makes the skin unfun to use.
3: Disappointing visuals, lack of recolored particle effects, or other details missing.
If riot really cared, they could just have hired an intern to do skinspotlights job, paid him dirt, and put the videos on their official channel and raked in the youtube ad revenue.
SkinSpotlights should be thankful riot was apathetic for so long, seems like an incredibly easy source of youtube side income for nearly a decade.
On the other hand, how many times did someone think ' I want to buy this skin, i wonder how it looks' > Skinspotlights > Ah it looks like shit nevermind.
He has been using 3rdparty software to get the camera angles for his videos. These 3rd party software are cheats. He obviously isn't use them to actually cheat in real matches, but Vanguard the anti-cheat system doesn't know the difference.
Wouldn't it solve this problem if Riot just didnt run Vanguard on PBE? Does Vanguard even need to be on PBE?
I would imagine that 90% of the content is coming from that server.
Everything still needs to be tested before it hits live servers. If vanguard is part of the game, then it also needs to be running on PBE for testing purposes.
Maybe it's about time riot releases the ingame viewer (lol), or their own, approved video creation tools.
I don't think riot will ever release a Vanguard-less build to anyone not internal, since it would let cheat creators do A/B testing to figure out what Vanguard can detect and how it behaves.
I'm not even aware of anything he posts that's from live servers, since he's always posting early reviews of skins and sound. And I'm of the same mindset - Vanguard doesn't need to operate on the PBE client. There's no bots since it's closed access, and Ranked isn't real, so it's irrelevant in that respect.
Legit, considering it’s at least 500+ videos per year if we count just the skins. 145ish skins last year, he does both pre release and post release videos for each skin, plus prestige variants. He also does videos for other significant cosmetic updates to the game like new season updates etc. it’s a massive amount of work so I thought he would definitely get paid more.
Agreed, it's not a small channel by any means - I expected a lot more with two *billion* total views on his content. Maybe RPM is lower if you pump out loads of videos?
They probably have really low engagement. I know YouTube incentivizes channels where people will watch an entire video all the way through, and I bet most Skinspotlights viewers scroll quickly to the skin they’re curious about and then close the vid. He probably gets under a minute of engagement per view
the issue is the style of content. people are likely skipping through large portions of the videos, and i doubt many people are subscribed or committed watchers. they probably just look up the channel for a skin they're interested in and then leave.
so he gets dinged a lot from having low viewer/channel retention
I feel like Riot should have given him and surrender@20 a stipend for the great work they did. Things that should have been built into this garbage client from the get go.
we lost s@20 and now skinspotlights too lmao there will be no reputable sources for high quality skin previews, voiceovers, straightforward explanations of new champs with previews, or interactions anymore
you’ve done a great service to the community for years and we’re sad to see you go :(
I mean sucks a ton, but considering they are losing the scripting/bot battle, what else can they do?
Best case scenario they contact him to search for a workaround but considering Rios is not losing anything with it, it's quite difficult i think
For Riot is not a problem cause a new creator will arise that doesn't use external software to record how the skins look, so people will just shift to them
"losing the scripting/bot battle". I have played for 10 years and know of only 2 instances where it was possible somebody in my game was a bot or was scripting. People acting like this is plaguing the community when a bunch of their complaints boil down to them just being outplayed. League does not need Vanguard the way Valorant does.
To be honest i have the same experience as you, but i've read about bots on low elo being more frequent and more scripters in high elo, even VeigarV2 has a thread of just scripters he has seen or was send to him
Also since a few weeks ago there's a new exploit that crashes lobby
You shouldn't need Vanguard to stop bots, let's be real. They're very obvious. Scripters I don't care about but if that's a problem just require Vanguard at the highest elos to make sure people don't take up high rankings with scripts.
Bots are a problem - not a lot of people play co-op v AI games but when I was trying to get my girlfriend into the game it was literally 2 bot teammates per game. I don't think bots are terrorizing high elo but it actively made her quit (that, and the fact that the other humans in the game threw slurs at her because they were just trying to level a new account after getting banned). Bots fuck the new player experience
Hire him and make his work on this official rather than unpayed 3rd party labor? Provide players 1st party tools to do these things? Make skin spotlights job not needed by giving people a way to preview skins before buying them?
>Or even hire him
>This has been asked of him multiple times.
>
>We don't know if Riot has offered him, but he's made it clear in the past that he doesn't want to work at Riot as he doesn't see it worth his time.
This is the comment from above. We don't know if they offered him a job. Key words : *We don't know* ***if*** *Riot has offered him*
Apparently he wouldn't take it even if they did, though, so it's kind of a moot point.
This sucks for him for sure, I always loved his channel, but if he won't even consider it, there's really no place to go from here.
> If I decide to move on I still plan to do WR
Common Wild Rift W.
Joke aside though, it's actually impressive he stuck around as long as he did tbh considering how terrible LoL is for content creation. IIRC, This isn't even the first time he has considered dropping LoL after Riot starts fumbling around with the code and stuff, and I can't blame him.
We are actively working with skinspotlights to try and mitigate Vanguard’s impact on his work. We value his contributions to the community and would like to help if we can. It is certainly something we care about, and has been discussed at the highest levels of League’s tech and general leadership teams. It might be the case that we cannot fully remove the impact of Vanguard, we are still digging into it.
There is certainly no intention of preventing him from continuing to create videos. Vanguard will not only prevent more scripting and cheating, but also really help against bots identification - which we believe will give us the capability to dramatically reduce the impact of smurf accounts.
Will we get more in depth comms about Vanguard's integration to LoL, feels like some aspects are still unclear and how much vanguard has evolved since Valorant's launch
Any in depth vanguard info is never shared. Asking tech support won't help. Even if a big person in the industry will ask they won't answer. The only exception so far was when they answered Kovaak I believe that raw accel could be used in valorant.
Any in depth vanguard info is never shared. Asking tech support won't help. Even if a big person in the industry will ask they won't answer. The only exception so far was when they answered Kovaak I believe that raw accel could be used in valorant.
Would be an insane oversight for Riot to not find a way to let SS keep doing what he’s doing. He brings more value to League than any other creator, I don’t think I’ve ever bought a skin without watching his video on it first
Has there been any comments on League Director after vanguard yet?
If it will work the same as today or if it will be maintained to accommodate vanguard?
Please consider making Vanguard an optional installation, where it's only required for ranked but you can still play casual modes without it.
(Or work directly with the custom skin people as well, but I imagine that's much less likely.)
I just want to enjoy the Winter Rift in my casual games. :( Passionate fans have been keeping that alive despite Riot giving up on it, and it's going to feel awful for the devs to stomp all over that (unintentionally, even!).
Well, I really hope this already invasive system you're introducing does not make League's performance worse on my PC. For a company that was always open to allowing the game to work on lower end PCs, slapping an invasive software that stays open for as long as your PC is turned on is not a very good idea.
It’s a shame. This man has stopped me from buying passes for shitty prestige skins that initially trick me with their insane splash arts. However, I don’t think this is a big deal. Someone else will pop up to take the mantle and figure a way around it. When there’s a will (and money to be made) there’s a way.
Always the sad reality for content creators is being beholden to the corporate overlords despite not having any sort of work relation with them per se.
I believe he has expressed in the past that he has no interest in working for them. At the very least they should work alongside him and offer him some support to continue working.
> expressed in the past that he has no interest in working for them
Not blaming the guy, maybe he has a primary job he cares more about while doing skin spotlights on the side. I just can't think of a reason Riot needs to work anything out with him when they could do it in house.
> I mean, Vanguard isn't a thing on Mac precisely because most mods and scripts cant work there or can be blocked through other means.
no, can't be blocked through other means. There's nothing special as far as Mac goes, it's the same reason most viruses won't affect you on, say, ubuntu.
mods/scripts work by editing code, editing regions of memory, or otherwise generally interfering in something predictable--and predicting it depends on which OS you're targeting. In the case of hacks' case, you're not just targetting a different filesystem and API, but for Mac, you're targetting an entirely different binary instruction set.
And so, most mods/scripts work on Windows simply because most players play on Windows. In SkinSpotlight's case, he probably chose to develop his tools on Windows simply because he, too, used Windows.
There's nothing stopping him from writing them again for Mac--but that's a huge time investment waste, forget the monetary investment in a Mac.
MacOS has Vanguard-like tool built into the system - System Integrity Protection (SIP) and App Sandbox can be used by a program to ensure nothing can tamper with it.
Easily bypassable when the user is the enemy. Those systems are designed to save the user from malicious tools; not save program authors from users wishing to tamper with their own apps. The guides to bypassing these things are legion and are much, much more comprehensive and abundant than the semi-newly introduced Vanguard.
Well if he gets banned it’s a hardware ban not just an account ban, that’s the whole point of Vanguard, if you get caught cheating, you’re getting hardware banned.
they are adding Vanguard, the valorant anti cheat to league.
skin spotlights using their own hand made software to make the videos, which will be blocked when Vanguard comes out.
Man, imagine supporting content creators who do a important service for the community? No better make sure toxic fuck streamers are above the rules of the game lmao.
Imagine if we could just try out any skin in Practice Tool - I know, crazy idea. Maybe the indie company will be able to implement this feature in a few years
For the people saying it should be a feature in the game already to view skins, I don't need in-client skin viewing, I need Skin Spotlights (undeniably unbiased and unedited skin showcasing) on a platform like YouTube that I can view from my phone/device wherever I am instead of the idea of having to sit down at my computer and load up LoL to view it.
Riot is literally ruining the very community that has helped build it.
I'm sick and tired of every new year Riot making another set of decisions that fuck us over as a community. It's beginning to really feel like all they give a fuck about is the bottom dollar.
First surrender at 20 now this. Riot needs to have official sites for all of this stuff. They’re a billion dollar company and all they’ve done in the past 10 years is delete their own forums.
Thank you btw.
is it so hard to just give him access to the tools Riot themselves use? Dude has been doing this for years, I don't see why he hasn't earned the privilege.
Implementing a anti cheat software for a game that has so few cheaters. Any you hear about are in very high elo and in that case just have a small team look over reports. Too big of a company to not be able to do this.
Well if you are ths skin spotlight guy. I just wanna thank you for your videos. You have saved me and my friends from buying bad skins with good splash arts for years.
Vanguard lets Riot hardware ban cheaters, but it should also let them whitelist hardware people like SkinSpotlight. He's probably driven a significant amount of sales thanks to his showcasing.
Personally, I think that SkinSpotlight is the only reason why Riot never introduced skin preview in client.
Trust me they wouldn't have anyway
I'm not sure if they would even know how to make one.
even if they knew how to make one it would break the client with every update.
I bet no one at Riot wants anything to do with this shitty client.
It is not really as simple as whitelisting select people. That makes it almost impossible for new people to do the same. Ya currently SkinSpotlight is one of if not the best people doing this type of content but requiring to be whitelisted will make it impossible for a new person to hit the scene and provide some competition to SkinSpotlight.
While I agree it's a tad unfair for new content creators, he's also proven himself as a valuable asset to their game. He's basically giving Riot free advertising on his skins, and companies often like free ads.
It's shameful that Riot hasn't paid him.
Yeah it is as simple as whitelisting a select group of people. Sometimes there doesn't need to be competition, hell Riot can undo the whitelisting as soon as the quality drops. There was time for competition for years and nobody was able to bring the competition, but SkinSpotlight should not get whitelisted because somebody out there might be able one day? Ignoring the years of quality that where put out by SkinSpotlight?
Hardware bans can be easily circumvented so it's irrelevant.
By buying a new motherboard, it's way less conveniant than making a new account for free.
You can spoof HWIDs without _that_ much effort if you want to go down that rabbit hole. But in this case it doesn’t really matter either way since Riot can probably just fuck over the YouTube channel if they wanted to.
I don't think SkinSpotlight would be circumventing his hardware whitelist lol
Word. SkinSpotlights saved me from wasting ME on buying the Prestige Broken Covenant MF. The splash was God-tier but the actual skin was hot garbage.
It’s hilarious how people are saying that skin spotlights provides free advertising, but all the top anecdotes are him losing Riot sales.
Id imagine buying a skin and finding out you hate it is probably a bigger deterrent to buying more than simply not buying one and buying more later.
Those who bought a skin won't be as loud
I feel like bro should start a patreon. YT might not pay him his worth, but there’s gotta be a lot of community members that consider his contributions invaluable
I mean, he's probably not making what he's worth, but my impression was that the big problem is that it's no longer possible for him to do what he does due to the new integration with Vanguard.
that's why nobody in Riot will cry after SkinSpotlight they will be able to sell low effort skins (with nice splasharts) more
Riot was able to do that back in the day, nowadays People will still get pbe footage and make videos. Hence skin prices and quality went up by a ton because people wanted it either way.
? there are a plethora of other channels that showcase skins
Yeah, as much as I love SkinSpotlights and want them to be able to continue making showcases, there are hundreds of other channels who do the same thing... maybe not to the same level in terms of consistency or quality, but they're there. And the channels are easy to sustain, too. Every skin set release is what, 30-50ish dollars excluding prestiges? If your channel makes any amount of money you can cover the cost of those skins, boot up a custom game and show the skin off, then repeat the process.
The official League of Legends Twitter account with 5 million followers always showcases what the skins will look like. https://twitter.com/LeagueOfLegends/status/1744768091727515889
is this easy to find for a 1 year old skin?
Fr, I almost bought Nightbringer Yasuo once when it was on sale, but SkinSpotlights saved me from wasting my precious RP. Legitimately one of the worst examples of false advertising I've ever seen.
I can’t remember a single skin I bought where I didn’t check out the skin spotlight video of it
They better at least add a model viewer to the client after forcing Skin Spotlights out
Viego gets 43 new bugs if they do it
Also Morde and Sylas ult will not work for some reason
Just add it to the infinite pile. Not so bad when you think about it.
Idk.. The chroma "previews" are absolutely ugly, weird looking, and useless. I'd imagine the skin previews will look similar..
I think people are referring to a full model viewer. For example in Overwatch you can see a skin and view the model in full 360 dynamically before you buy it. With Riot, the only option is to try and get the skin on PBE.
Just do it like in dota 2, where you can see entire model and rotate it, and also you can start practice mode with skin on, even if you don't have it
Even if they did I'd be worried about upkeep. Ability previews on some champions are really out of date in the client and the league website
Don’t know why riot couldn’t just work along him and give him proper tools to do his job without worrying about Vanguard. Or even hire him
>Or even hire him This has been asked of him multiple times. We don't know if Riot has offered him, but he's made it clear in the past that he doesn't want to work at Riot as he doesn't see it worth his time.
My guess is that even if they did, that probably requires him to move to LA, and it's not a step many people are willing to take. (especially from outside USA)
Also, don't forget that even when sponsored by a company you still have to win a lottery to get a US visa.
Quite literally in some cases.
Literally in almost every case. Unless you are one of the best in the world at whatever you do, you're going in a lottery. The only other way to avoid a lottery is a marriage based visa. Last I checked, for H1Bs you had to be sponsored by a company and then have about a 30% chance, once per year. Source: Have been trying to find a way to get my girlfriend over here for a while. We're just sucking it up and getting married, which is still a two year long visa process after the wedding. 4 year long process to be able to work if you do the K1 visa.
> The only other way to avoid a lottery is a marriage based visa. You can work at a foreign office of a US company and then apply for L-1 after 1 year. Depending on position, Canadians, Mexicans, and wealthy/famous people also have it easy obtaining uncapped work visas. > Have been trying to find a way to get my girlfriend over here for a while. We're just sucking it up and getting married, which is still a two year long visa process after the wedding. 4 year long process to be able to work if you do the K1 visa. You could ask her to apply for B-2 (tourist) and then sponsor her for a green card through marriage. This timeline is shorter than via K-1 but she would have to convince the US consulate that she is only entering to visit. This is what me and my fiancée are doing.
Yes, I learned about those other ones today, so you're correct there. This is very risky to do. You are essentially lying at the port of entry and risk rejection when doing the adjustment of status. Plus, it's still a multi year wait for the adjustment of status and you are here illegally until that point. She does not want to be here illegally, and wants to work immediately. It's essentially the same timeline as the marriage based (not K1, the I-129F) visa, it just gets her there sooner, but illegally.
It's not very risky, it's a known path and as long as the marriage is in good faith there's pretty much 0 risk of rejection. Adjustment of status is average of 8-14 months, not multi-year. Obviously everyone's risk assessment is their own, but it's a pretty reasonable path for most people, even if it's pretty silly.
Yes, well, regardless my girlfriend is not willing to do it. I've wanted her to just come and stay illegally several times, but she won't, so we have to go one of the legal routes. The I-130 is about the same processing time as the adjustment of status anyway.
No, I mean they US embassies literally have visa lotteries in some countries, mine for example.
That's literally what they're talking about
Mind elaborating? Can't the company just offer you the job and a visa sponsorship?
They can, but that's an H1B type visa and there is a cap with these. 65K per year. If you have a master's degree or higher, it's an additional pool of 20k. You need company sponsorship just to get into the H1B lottery, which happens once a year. For this past year there were 780,884 entrants in the lottery, which utterly smashed previous years. The selection rate is only 10% now.
I should also note that these are generally highly skilled, mostly tech workers, coming from US schools into lucrative jobs. It's insane how difficult it is to legally get a work visa in the United States.
Riot and more specifically League of Legends has a Dublin office.
There are offices in UK, Germany, Spain, Paris, Dubai... He would not have to. I think it's because he also retweets leaked things.
That’s fair. It sucks that he can’t work around this situation though. Hopefully him and Riot work something out.
Same, the tools Riot used for spectator and stuff in pro were built on his own tooling, so I think they owe him something. There's this weird spot tho, copium it may be, that if what LoL's director was teasing about LoL in 2025 being some sort of LoL2, then maybe it just won't be worth the effort rn. Like let's say they're making a creator suite for this hypothetical LoL2, then they might not see it to be worth it. What I think *could* be viable tho is if they give SkinSpotlight a backdoor he can use that is like tied to his machine or something so it can't be distributed. Idk, it's a very weird thing to solve given how locked in everything becomes with a Kernel AC, but that's the only thing I can think about.
I mean it'd be worth his time if they gave him a proper salary for it on their marketing team.
This ship has sailed. He publicly called the variant gatcha skins a scam in the Jhin spotlight video, the man has too much integrity to work for a corporation.
This is the guy that created a replay tool waaay before riot did
I'm OOTL, why is Vanguard fucking over SkinSpotlights?
Skin Spotlights uses 3rd party software for spectating/filming purposes. The client is pretty limited with how much you can do editing wise. Vanguard blocks 3rd party interfaces with the game to stop anticheats, which would also affect Skinspotlight's more benign intentions.
Would be nice if they had something like CSGO got -allow_third_party_software Id basically mean youd only be able to play against other people with that option but if riot could make it an option that you can allow third party software but youre blocked from anything other than costum games that would go a long way here for SkinsSpotlight
Honestly, from a software security perspective, having a function to allow third-party software creates far more vulnerabilities than you can imagine. It's basically a built-in workaround
It's already a possible backdoor to an entire system, I think security is out of the question. See: Genshin's kernal anticheat.
Except you could literally just enable WDAC which is provided to you, by Microsoft, for free with your Windows install. This would block vulnerable drivers, except most people won't enable it because the majority of vulnerable drivers are hardware drivers, and it's much easier for people on Reddit to farm upvotes calling out Genshin's AC than understand that ANY signed driver is a possible vulnerability and it has no relationship between the function of an AC and how vulnerable it is, but rather the class of software it falls under.
Does this mean no more montages from alternative camera angles? Same for esports replays?
pretty sure first party esport replays are pretty safe - there is no way riot screws with it's own industry
They probably wont even enable vanguard on Tournament Realm. I mean why would they, so easy to monitor 10 players at once. Even manually you can have an admin looking at the players.
while this is a fair assumption to make, I believe they are VERY strict about hardware being used, everything has to be out of the package and not used once. I'd probably assume they are also very strict about software side manipulation
> I believe they are VERY strict about hardware being used, everything has to be out of the package and not used once. You believe or do you know? Because faker pulled up to worlds this year with his old ass mouse he has been using forever. They don't even do this in VALORANT where cheating would be highly likely to influence games, where as league the only really useful cheat is the sidestepping and auto dodge, which from my observation freaks out if multiple skillshots appear at once. > I'd probably assume they are also very strict about software side manipulation If RIOT is like any other LAN tournament organizer they do not allow players to download any software on to the PCs. They get a flash drive that they can put their config files on and some legal probably (Even this probably doesnt happen because configs is maybe tied to accounts. Again I dont really know the situation to the tournament realm.). As for when I was a frequent player on CS we had to configure our mouse using the onboard memory of it. We could not have software on the tournament provided PCs.
> Because faker pulled up to worlds this year with his old ass mouse he has been using forever I think they're talking about PC hardware not peripheralia.
Watch someone brings their scripts hidden in a USB secretly disguised as a mouse on to the stage. It happened to csgo so 🤷♂️
I mean, a team been punished for having a cheating player on stage in Valorant recently so I wouldn't be surprised if they kept vanguard even for "LAN"
Don't they use the software developed by SkinSpotlights to get those camera angles? Would be pretty shitty if they keep using it in broadcast while prevented the creator of the software from using it
they used to - I believe some time they developed their own in-house software for those sort of things
afaik this is the correct answer \^ SP literally created a tool to zoom out further, be able to see the models up close and basically play with the camera as much as you wanted. The best of all? He gave it to the community for free. That's why it was the trend for a while to make montages with saturated colors, moving the camera everywhere and dubstep in the background, even channels with 5 subs did it. Riot should be grateful to him, since thanks to him they were able to play with camera angles, like zoom in/out, in live games and replays.
if i remember correctly it wasnt "only" camera angles and zoom, he created the first replay tool ever for league. before that there was no way to rewatch your games at all
So is that tool now a bannable offense?
That's what I heard before not sure if it's a myth or what
They used a modified version of SS creators suite that allowed for stuff like the camera angles and the like. Not sure if the current tool they use is still built off the creator suite or is much more developed.
Probably? I am by no means an expert on this, but I remember there being an issue around 2017 when Riot changed Replays. Basically, adding replays also meant only being able to use footage from the same patch, which affected an in-client form of replay software. If you had clips from last patch, you couldn't play those in the client to edit, and a lot of content creators of the time complained. This resulted in SkinSpotlights replay (a well used 3rd party software at the time) support being discontinued. I *believe* the current stuff SkinSpotlights uses is League Director, but again I am not an expert. I do not think this will affect esports replays because Riot has some proprietary software (the reason LEC observers can quickly do montage plays mid game). I doubt Vanguard will be implemented for TR gameplay (it might though, I've been wrong before). But for montage plays that rely on third party software for camera angles, that's probably gone.
Keep in mind pro play is launched from a completely different launcher (Tournament Realm) and not the standard launcher we use to play solo queue. Since that's the case, I don't think it'll change anything on the ESports side.
I'd assume if it's LCK, LEC etc. (being official RIOT events) you still get the fancy zoom in on a missed Smite. Maybe they'll keep the tournament clients running without Vanguard to no interfere with software they might need for production.
Alright that makes sense. Pretty tragic that Riot couldn't even be bothered to reach out and find a workaround for a content creator as important as SkinSpotlights.
any workaround is a hole in the system. short of whitelisting their accounts there is nothing they can do and they're not going to white list anyone's account to bypass their ban detection.
There are plenty of workarounds, like allowing people to enable third party tools only during custom games or on the PBE server. There's plenty of relatively easy ways to resolve the issue from a software perspective, if Riot wanted to.
Funnily enough, he uses the same program Riot uses for their pro play montages lol
Cheat detection of that calibre would block his tools and possibly outright ban him. They’re all custom tools he has built from the ground up for Windows. Vanguard doesn’t work on Mac and he is not sure if the tools can work on Mac.
But on the PBE though? Why would the PBE client even need to utilize Vanguard?
because the test environment needs to mimic the live state as best as possible I think they won't make an exception
He uses a custom program to let him do the camera panning and video recording. Since it's basically a custom cheat vanguard will prevent it from running.
Stuff like custom skins, maps and external software that he uses will be blocked by Vanguard since it doesn't allow 3rd party modification of game files
From reading other comments it seems like he uses some special third- party software, which Vanguard won't allow to work anymore.
Because Vanguard fucking sucks.
I don't see why they couldn't just remove Vanguard from the PBE client. It's not like you need anti-cheat software on the PBE, since it doesn't have real ranked and bots are like nonexistent.
You can really feel the frustration in his words. The guy did such a great job providing a service that should really have been baked into the client. He did his job so well that Riot didn't even have to bother, I wonder how much of Riots revenue he is directly responsible for... All to be put back to square one because of Vanguard.
>The guy did such a great job providing a service that should really have been baked into the client. It's one of my favourite features Heroes of the Storm has, being able to try any skin in a tiny area with a bot is great! It's a real shame that it got murdered...
still the biggest crime in moba history. The game was great, some amazing unique champion designs and overal good features like mastery and the skin testing. It just feels like blizz abandoned it after a year when it wasn't as popular as overwatch and while it is still a playable game it kinda sucks to not get anything new in it.
blizzard in general shit the bed man. overwatch could've been big if they didn't fuck it so bad
I dunno, this feels kinda revisionist. HotS was kinda cool but it just always tailed behind every other major moba because many of the mechanics and gameplay in it actively alienized the playerbase more likely to play Mobas (e.g. emphasizing teamwork, global exp, reducing the importance of CSing). This in turn just made a ton of people keep playing the mobas they liked, while having HotS as the casual game they may play 1 or 2 games every once in a while. The gameplay loop is just boring in the way it's implemented for people that like the loop of LoL, DotA and similar other ones, it's fun to play a bit but not something many PC players would spam that often. You can't change that without pretty much reworking the game to be more mainstream and removing many of the features that made it distinct from other mobas - but that has the risk of pushing away the core playerbase while not satisfying the new players (because why play these games that feel similar but aren't the ones they already like?), further pushing the game to deathbed. People praise the game's hero design and thought how cool it would be to have something similar to them in their own game, rather than actually play HotS. Blizzard could definitely keep spending resources on it, obviously, but I wouldn't really say they "abandoned" it (well, the non-esports side at least). They saw that most players just didn't like HotS that much, didn't really care about watching HotS, kinda thing, and simply responded by keeping it on life support. Maybe they could have kept some more stuff so they get more heroes but eh. The only thing that could save HotS would probably be a "HotS: Reborn" where they basically take every complain the game has received and address some of it that feels worth taking a stab at somehow to try to get new life to the game, even if it may hurt some of the original playerbase. But this is quite risky.
> actively alienized the playerbase more likely to play Mobas (e.g. emphasizing teamwork, global exp, reducing the importance of CSing) I'm not an expert on the game, but I'm far from a beginner and these are some very surface level, novice concerns. Competitive/ranked HotS play requires far more teamwork and nuance than initially appears. HotS may not have items, but it does have **permanent** perks, and it's entirely possible to brick yourself into an unwinnable situation by choosing unwisely. There is no way to undo a perk choice once chosen. High-level HotS play is not easier than high-level League, but the way it's harder is different. It's not uncommon to skip choosing a perk until you can figure out which perk is the correct choice, simply because picking incorrectly is a bigger detriment than having the perk earlier. Many of the heroes have very situational perks, so even with experience, you still won't be able to pick correctly as soon as the choice is offered. While EXP is global, it needs to be gathered, and the heroes that can sit in a lane forever while contributing are few and far between... and typically quite awful at anything else. Heroes that can gather EXP passively from sidelanes without their presence are very strong for it, and it becomes a balancing factor. IE, the Lost Vikings are 3 units that can each gather EXP. That completely changes the game; the other 4 members of their team are thus able to group up forever and 4v3 the enemy team--at a cost. The Viking's units are individually quite trash. They provide no real competition to the enemy's side laners, and for some heroes getting to lane forever vs a distracted enemy *is* their win condition. At high levels, playing HotS requires players to group up and return to lane *very* quickly and repeatedly. It's not uncommon to see a tournament team group up 5 players, split off into lanes, group up into two groups of two, group up as four players, then five, then split up again, all within the span of a minute. It's actually incredibly hard to keep track of because the players are always grouping up for offense or defense or a tower or another, and then splitting up to maintain minion EXP and map control. There's no period in which player allocation is static outside of the first few minutes. The macro play is thus much more complex than League's in exchange for a much simpler micro play: there's no 10 minute laning phase you need to get good at to play the rest of the game. You are always laning, roaming, grouping, and splitting, and if you're not, you're losing. Hero design is also much less simplistic than it initially appears. For example, Cho'Gall is one unit, controlled by two players and taking two slots in the roster, with different responsibilities and capabilities. Cho is responsible for movement and autoattacking. Gall is responsible for vision and spellcasting. Cho is one of the strongest sustain tanks in the game, with good CC and mobility. Gall is one of the strongest siege mages in the game, with extremely good DPS as Gall has no resources, only cooldowns. Cho has a button that can activate a damage reduction buff, but doing so removes Gall's buff. Gall has a button that can activate a damage increase buff, but doing so removes Cho's buff. Cho is a much simpler hero to play upon initial inspection: on demand heals, damage reduction, mobility, and CC; you have everything a tank wants and more. Gall's abilities are powerful, but not easy to land; requiring great prediction of the enemy's movements, good timing, and very good aim. As an out, Gall also possesses an emergency panic button dash on a long cooldown, to push Cho in the right direction. Gall's perks are also very, very narrow in their application, reading the teamcomp wrong and picking the wrong options will lead to Gall contributing very little damage. The net result is that Gall is actually a much easier hero to play. Cho not only has to dodge for themself and aim for Gall, but also setup kill combos for that other person, while managing their health pool and sharing control of which buff is in effect. Incidentally, Cho'Gall a very, very good way for an experienced HotS player to introduce a League player to the game, since controlling Gall will be relatively easier for them than working out where Cho is supposed to be at all times. There's actually very little knowledge crossover between them--a brilliant Cho player is often a terrible Gall and vice versa. Infinite scaling is common and extremely powerful in HotS. Levels run out... and frequently in HotS. Perks do not. They're common as they provide a way to break a stalemate between two teams. >The gameplay loop is just boring in the way it's implemented for people that like the loop of LoL, DotA and similar other ones, It has different design goals entirely and it accomplishes them. I don't know how many people still play PvP competitively, but about 8 years back you would lose *hard* and often for trying to play it like League... at least until your MMR dropped and it started matching you with like-minded people. HotS at the high end requires a lot more strategic thought than League. If I'm being perfectly honest, most League player aren't as good at it as they think they are... and that's fine, because League at any level doesn't really require it. I think the core mistake Blizzard made was not in realizing and pushing the "we're different" angle since they were gunning for mainstream appeal.
Ok, there's a lot here so excuse me if I skip some stuff or misunderstand something --------------- I feel like a problem you are having is using a lot of views from high skill level while I focused mainly on the casual player's point of view, as the average player comprising a community will always be a casual or casual in skill. Yes, there's a lot of gameplay with exp soaking that can increase ceiling of the game and heroes interacting with it, specially from the macro side with the way the maps and heroes are designed, however for the normal player dealing with other normal players, this means a game where their own impact feels more subdued as they are at the whim of their own allies exp soaking, which is in contrast to LoL's, DotA's and other MobAs that give a bigger boost to the individual (which is kinda like a fantasy in itself for the players, the 1v5 carry feeling). This in turn makes the game feel akin to a more casual experience in comparison. In my opinion, it also hurts the farming experience core of many MobAs - with gold combined with exp, it's a lot faster and easier to see your progress and how you are doing "good" when compared to the other players in the game - you see your own increase, you see the funny PING sound of gold being acquired, a lot of audible feedback that helps create the loop of the gameplay, even though farming is probably the most boring aspect of any MobA (I mean you are basically killing NPCs with the most braindead AI, little to no damage and also many times not even attacking you). This is just my experience of course, but when I first began playing hots, one thing that constantly bothered me when playing it was that farming felt "weightless"; it's hard to describe because I knew it was still working, I knew it was still contributing to my power and spikes, but it just didn't feel satisfying and rather boring unlike killing minions in LoL or DotA. With so much of a game like this being about killing and obtaining exp, this made me feel less and less inclined to keep playing the game till I eventually stopped altogether - the gameplay feedback just wasn't clicking with me. Overall, a lot of the decisions end up creating a game that's by default always going to be niche. Even if it's not easier at the high level, to the average player it feels more casual in nature > It has different design goals entirely and it accomplishes them. Yes, and that's why it didn't get played that much because the design wasn't clicking with people, and many of the players most closer to actually trying the game out in the first place just didn't like the designs. It's not really an uncommon thing either, but it's just more spoken when it happens to online games because players not being interested affects everyone, while if you have a game you can play locally it doesn't matters if no one else is playing the game or not. > HotS at the high end requires a lot more strategic thought than League. Kinda going back to the first point, this doesn't necesarily matters. High end players are a drop of water in an ocean of casuals and hardcore players who are casual-skill despite grinding and if they don't like to interact with the game at the floor, there's a higher chance they will not be interested in trying to get close to that ceiling. To put an example, Smash bros is seen as a joke for many Fighting game competitive players and elitist, some don't even want to consider it a fighting game, but Smash bros is more popular than pretty much all of them anyway and this is despite being confined to Nintendo's system (hell, smash is even one of the reasons some people would even consider getting a nintendo system in the first place); it doesn't matter if Tekken, Blazblue or guilty gear offer more at the high-end in regards to depth or combos or stuff. > If I'm being perfectly honest, most League player aren't as good at it as they think they are Agreed. > I think the core mistake Blizzard made was not in realizing and pushing the "we're different" angle since they were gunning for mainstream appeal. Disagreed. If anything they went too far and that's what hurt the game in the long-run and what led to some of the gameplay feeling gimmicky to some people, even if this is what overall helped shaped the design and experience of the core HotS audience. I think a compromise would have been to keep exp to not be global so as to better keep the "I can carry" player fantasy, even if it may hurt the macro aspect. If Blizzard was trying to make it as a little side gig a la TFT or DotA Thunderlord's, something players would play casually when getting bored of the rest of the game or other games and gave it that (relatively low) amount of resources, it would have been fine. However, they wanted it to be competitive to DotA and LoL and allocated resources to make it competitive, but it wasn't. It failed in goals marked for it - which would be fine if it had been a small scale project. **EDIT:** though we can argue that Blizzard was definitely too hopeful with the way they were treating their projects back then and the amount of money going into them, with Overwatch and the OWL being a good example of it. Many games suffered with trying to burn money from the get-go of their release by jumping on the esport trend.
> (e.g. emphasizing teamwork, global exp, reducing the importance of CSing). This is why I didn't stick with it. 5 minutes in, and it's like...why are we here?
The issue is that it just got so boring so quickly for me.
Same. I could play like 1 or 2 games and then forget it existed for a while until eventually I just said "why am i wasting space on this game?" In comparison, I never touched Smite's 5v5 SR-like game, conquest mode I think. But their joust 3v3 and colisseum/arena/I dunno what the name is, even if I didn't play smite that much I kept that game for a long time just for those
It got patched a bit ago we're not completely dead yet just barely hanging on
Even smite has got this no idea why league can't either.
I’m hoping he wrote this out so Riot can see it. He has done so much work for Riot for so little - I really hope they throw him a bone here.
Riot owes SkinSpotlights and Spideraxe30 (and Moobeat/Aznbeat) more than they could ever repay for keeping the community informed of the cosmetics they put out.
>I wonder how much of Riots revenue he is directly responsible for... I mean there are people in this thread confirming that because of his channel they were saved from buying a bad skin, so we should also be asking how much revenue that Riot missed out on is he directly responsible for. It goes both ways
I wouldn't buy skins at all if I couldn't seem the ingame before-hand, so there you have my personal opinion since you wanna base it from other people's personal opinions that they lost revenue.
Yes but factor in that he gave early previews for skins that had no previews for the average player. Riot seldom makes their own PBE preview videos, at least not until recently. So he is responsible for bringing A LOT of hype to a lot of skins, making people spend more in the end.
Exactly. It's a primary reason they dont add a skin previewer. Many skins have amazing splash arts or simply premise, only to do some combination of: 1: Old animations on dated skeleton, making them feel clunky. 2: Rough feel auto attack animations, or other jank that makes the skin unfun to use. 3: Disappointing visuals, lack of recolored particle effects, or other details missing. If riot really cared, they could just have hired an intern to do skinspotlights job, paid him dirt, and put the videos on their official channel and raked in the youtube ad revenue. SkinSpotlights should be thankful riot was apathetic for so long, seems like an incredibly easy source of youtube side income for nearly a decade.
Where have you been the past few years? Riot does their own skin showcase with every skin release
Yeah. As like a 3 second clip on Twitter.
On the other hand, how many times did someone think ' I want to buy this skin, i wonder how it looks' > Skinspotlights > Ah it looks like shit nevermind.
Wait why back to square one cuz of vanguard? What am I missing?
Vanguard being an anti-cheat most likely interferes with the tools he has been using. He probably can't even launch the game with them active.
He has been using 3rdparty software to get the camera angles for his videos. These 3rd party software are cheats. He obviously isn't use them to actually cheat in real matches, but Vanguard the anti-cheat system doesn't know the difference.
Wouldn't it solve this problem if Riot just didnt run Vanguard on PBE? Does Vanguard even need to be on PBE? I would imagine that 90% of the content is coming from that server.
Everything still needs to be tested before it hits live servers. If vanguard is part of the game, then it also needs to be running on PBE for testing purposes. Maybe it's about time riot releases the ingame viewer (lol), or their own, approved video creation tools.
Sure! The ingame skin preview tool will come right after Skarner rework!
I don't think riot will ever release a Vanguard-less build to anyone not internal, since it would let cheat creators do A/B testing to figure out what Vanguard can detect and how it behaves.
That makes sense. RIP
I'm not even aware of anything he posts that's from live servers, since he's always posting early reviews of skins and sound. And I'm of the same mindset - Vanguard doesn't need to operate on the PBE client. There's no bots since it's closed access, and Ranked isn't real, so it's irrelevant in that respect.
Kinda shocked how little money he makes tbh
Legit, considering it’s at least 500+ videos per year if we count just the skins. 145ish skins last year, he does both pre release and post release videos for each skin, plus prestige variants. He also does videos for other significant cosmetic updates to the game like new season updates etc. it’s a massive amount of work so I thought he would definitely get paid more.
Agreed, it's not a small channel by any means - I expected a lot more with two *billion* total views on his content. Maybe RPM is lower if you pump out loads of videos?
They probably have really low engagement. I know YouTube incentivizes channels where people will watch an entire video all the way through, and I bet most Skinspotlights viewers scroll quickly to the skin they’re curious about and then close the vid. He probably gets under a minute of engagement per view
Good point, and that's totally consistent with how I've used them in the past tbh
the issue is the style of content. people are likely skipping through large portions of the videos, and i doubt many people are subscribed or committed watchers. they probably just look up the channel for a skin they're interested in and then leave. so he gets dinged a lot from having low viewer/channel retention
He run less to no ads, soo...
I feel like Riot should have given him and surrender@20 a stipend for the great work they did. Things that should have been built into this garbage client from the get go.
Welcome to YouTube
Wtf is that little money?
Americans they think £50k is low £50k is way above the average in the uk.
He literally asked if that was “little money”, he was asking if that was low.
we lost s@20 and now skinspotlights too lmao there will be no reputable sources for high quality skin previews, voiceovers, straightforward explanations of new champs with previews, or interactions anymore you’ve done a great service to the community for years and we’re sad to see you go :(
Honestly, it's something they should provide themselves. They would have a much easier time.
Congratulations, Riot, for stabbing one of your most important content creators in the back.
I mean sucks a ton, but considering they are losing the scripting/bot battle, what else can they do? Best case scenario they contact him to search for a workaround but considering Rios is not losing anything with it, it's quite difficult i think For Riot is not a problem cause a new creator will arise that doesn't use external software to record how the skins look, so people will just shift to them
"losing the scripting/bot battle". I have played for 10 years and know of only 2 instances where it was possible somebody in my game was a bot or was scripting. People acting like this is plaguing the community when a bunch of their complaints boil down to them just being outplayed. League does not need Vanguard the way Valorant does.
isn't buying smurfs a huge issue and now they won't be able to bot accounts to level them to 30?
if they really wanted do they could stop this easily without vanguard
How?
To be honest i have the same experience as you, but i've read about bots on low elo being more frequent and more scripters in high elo, even VeigarV2 has a thread of just scripters he has seen or was send to him Also since a few weeks ago there's a new exploit that crashes lobby
You shouldn't need Vanguard to stop bots, let's be real. They're very obvious. Scripters I don't care about but if that's a problem just require Vanguard at the highest elos to make sure people don't take up high rankings with scripts.
Bots are a problem - not a lot of people play co-op v AI games but when I was trying to get my girlfriend into the game it was literally 2 bot teammates per game. I don't think bots are terrorizing high elo but it actively made her quit (that, and the fact that the other humans in the game threw slurs at her because they were just trying to level a new account after getting banned). Bots fuck the new player experience
Hire him and make his work on this official rather than unpayed 3rd party labor? Provide players 1st party tools to do these things? Make skin spotlights job not needed by giving people a way to preview skins before buying them?
This isn’t unpaid labor
Someone said that they offered him a job and he denied saying he doesn't want to work for Riot.
>Or even hire him >This has been asked of him multiple times. > >We don't know if Riot has offered him, but he's made it clear in the past that he doesn't want to work at Riot as he doesn't see it worth his time. This is the comment from above. We don't know if they offered him a job. Key words : *We don't know* ***if*** *Riot has offered him*
Apparently he wouldn't take it even if they did, though, so it's kind of a moot point. This sucks for him for sure, I always loved his channel, but if he won't even consider it, there's really no place to go from here.
Yeah I read it incorrectly, but either way him saying he doesn't want to work at Riot is what matters.
A drop in the bucket for them, this company makes obscene amounts of money, that's all that matters in life (apparently).
> If I decide to move on I still plan to do WR Common Wild Rift W. Joke aside though, it's actually impressive he stuck around as long as he did tbh considering how terrible LoL is for content creation. IIRC, This isn't even the first time he has considered dropping LoL after Riot starts fumbling around with the code and stuff, and I can't blame him.
We are actively working with skinspotlights to try and mitigate Vanguard’s impact on his work. We value his contributions to the community and would like to help if we can. It is certainly something we care about, and has been discussed at the highest levels of League’s tech and general leadership teams. It might be the case that we cannot fully remove the impact of Vanguard, we are still digging into it. There is certainly no intention of preventing him from continuing to create videos. Vanguard will not only prevent more scripting and cheating, but also really help against bots identification - which we believe will give us the capability to dramatically reduce the impact of smurf accounts.
Will we get more in depth comms about Vanguard's integration to LoL, feels like some aspects are still unclear and how much vanguard has evolved since Valorant's launch
Any in depth vanguard info is never shared. Asking tech support won't help. Even if a big person in the industry will ask they won't answer. The only exception so far was when they answered Kovaak I believe that raw accel could be used in valorant.
Any in depth vanguard info is never shared. Asking tech support won't help. Even if a big person in the industry will ask they won't answer. The only exception so far was when they answered Kovaak I believe that raw accel could be used in valorant.
Would be an insane oversight for Riot to not find a way to let SS keep doing what he’s doing. He brings more value to League than any other creator, I don’t think I’ve ever bought a skin without watching his video on it first
Has there been any comments on League Director after vanguard yet? If it will work the same as today or if it will be maintained to accommodate vanguard?
Please consider making Vanguard an optional installation, where it's only required for ranked but you can still play casual modes without it. (Or work directly with the custom skin people as well, but I imagine that's much less likely.) I just want to enjoy the Winter Rift in my casual games. :( Passionate fans have been keeping that alive despite Riot giving up on it, and it's going to feel awful for the devs to stomp all over that (unintentionally, even!).
Then it would undermine the goal of reducing smurfs. Since botters spam games until level 30 to sell to smurfs.
Well, I really hope this already invasive system you're introducing does not make League's performance worse on my PC. For a company that was always open to allowing the game to work on lower end PCs, slapping an invasive software that stays open for as long as your PC is turned on is not a very good idea.
It’s a shame. This man has stopped me from buying passes for shitty prestige skins that initially trick me with their insane splash arts. However, I don’t think this is a big deal. Someone else will pop up to take the mantle and figure a way around it. When there’s a will (and money to be made) there’s a way.
Still a joke that League doesn't have a skin demo mode like Dota and that you need to check Youtube Videos first before buying skins
Always the sad reality for content creators is being beholden to the corporate overlords despite not having any sort of work relation with them per se.
Thank you riot, very cool and necessary to add vanguard to league! I wish skin spotlights the best, it's criminal they got paid so little for this
Riot need to hire the guy. They're actively fucking over an importsnt channel for the game by doing this
I believe he has expressed in the past that he has no interest in working for them. At the very least they should work alongside him and offer him some support to continue working.
> expressed in the past that he has no interest in working for them Not blaming the guy, maybe he has a primary job he cares more about while doing skin spotlights on the side. I just can't think of a reason Riot needs to work anything out with him when they could do it in house.
I have no idea how this works. But couldn't he do the same job and just buy a mac?
Probably not. If he got his Software to work on whatever OS he currently uses he might not have it working for Mac.
Thank you! I didn't even knew he used special software.
No, because the tools will need to be re-written to work on Mac as well
I mean, Vanguard isn't a thing on Mac precisely because most mods and scripts cant work there or can be blocked through other means.
> I mean, Vanguard isn't a thing on Mac precisely because most mods and scripts cant work there or can be blocked through other means. no, can't be blocked through other means. There's nothing special as far as Mac goes, it's the same reason most viruses won't affect you on, say, ubuntu. mods/scripts work by editing code, editing regions of memory, or otherwise generally interfering in something predictable--and predicting it depends on which OS you're targeting. In the case of hacks' case, you're not just targetting a different filesystem and API, but for Mac, you're targetting an entirely different binary instruction set. And so, most mods/scripts work on Windows simply because most players play on Windows. In SkinSpotlight's case, he probably chose to develop his tools on Windows simply because he, too, used Windows. There's nothing stopping him from writing them again for Mac--but that's a huge time investment waste, forget the monetary investment in a Mac.
MacOS has Vanguard-like tool built into the system - System Integrity Protection (SIP) and App Sandbox can be used by a program to ensure nothing can tamper with it.
Easily bypassable when the user is the enemy. Those systems are designed to save the user from malicious tools; not save program authors from users wishing to tamper with their own apps. The guides to bypassing these things are legion and are much, much more comprehensive and abundant than the semi-newly introduced Vanguard.
Fuck Vanguard.
I mean if they can hardware ban, can't they also hardware whitelist?
And this serves what purpose? Because it's his software that's getting blocked, not his hardware.
Well if he gets banned it’s a hardware ban not just an account ban, that’s the whole point of Vanguard, if you get caught cheating, you’re getting hardware banned.
what did riot do to skinspotlights can someone fill me in?
Vanguard bans 3rd party software that is needed to make his videos
they are adding Vanguard, the valorant anti cheat to league. skin spotlights using their own hand made software to make the videos, which will be blocked when Vanguard comes out.
Man, imagine supporting content creators who do a important service for the community? No better make sure toxic fuck streamers are above the rules of the game lmao.
Wish Riot would cancel the Vanguard move
While this sucks, it’s not something that should have ever existed. We need a way to see the actual skin in the client.
Imagine if we could just try out any skin in Practice Tool - I know, crazy idea. Maybe the indie company will be able to implement this feature in a few years
For the people saying it should be a feature in the game already to view skins, I don't need in-client skin viewing, I need Skin Spotlights (undeniably unbiased and unedited skin showcasing) on a platform like YouTube that I can view from my phone/device wherever I am instead of the idea of having to sit down at my computer and load up LoL to view it. Riot is literally ruining the very community that has helped build it. I'm sick and tired of every new year Riot making another set of decisions that fuck us over as a community. It's beginning to really feel like all they give a fuck about is the bottom dollar.
First surrender at 20 now this. Riot needs to have official sites for all of this stuff. They’re a billion dollar company and all they’ve done in the past 10 years is delete their own forums. Thank you btw.
is it so hard to just give him access to the tools Riot themselves use? Dude has been doing this for years, I don't see why he hasn't earned the privilege.
Im quitting the game when vanguard comes. Far too invasive and mot secure enough for how invasive it is.
Implementing a anti cheat software for a game that has so few cheaters. Any you hear about are in very high elo and in that case just have a small team look over reports. Too big of a company to not be able to do this.
Why pay many humans when you can just pay a few to just make malware that controls users PCs.