Was this year’s Star Guardian event a complete failure? Summary of player feedback
Why do many League of Legends fans think the Star Guardian event was a flop?
As you probably know, for the holiday of 2022, Riot prepared an extensive story event with its own visual novel, a system of relationships, cinematics, a separate story for Wild Rift, and a pass in Legends of Runeterra – all of this was to develop the Star Guardian universe, one of the favorite series of LoL players.
In theory, everything was really good – the community was going to get a lot of new skins (both Star Guardian and the evil characters from this universe), new Prestige skins were created (for Ekko and Syndra), and the music video for the song “Everything Goes On” was liked by hundreds of thousands of players and in a romantic way introduced the history of both Kai’Sa and Akali’s friendship and Xayah’s team who tried to save Rakan.
Unfortunately, serious problems began shortly after the start of the event.
Star Guardian problems in LoL
At the beginning, it is worth noting that the allegations against the event apply only to the League of Legends version. Most of the described problems and bugs do not apply to other games, and the event was introduced to the rest of the titles, such as Wild Rift or Legends of Runeterra.
Visual novel lagging computers
The first problems were related to the optimization of the event. In short – the LoL community began to complain about monstrous lag and hardware lags. It turned out that the game client, which caused the aforementioned computer problems, is to blame.
The work put into preparing the visual novel was undoubtedly huge because it cannot be considered that the extensive backgrounds or graphics were ugly. The creators prepared a lot of animations, music, numerous decorations, and colorful tabs with skins or relationships of the heroines. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of it all turned out to be one of the biggest drawbacks of the event, as it simply killed players’ computers.
Huge problems with missions and rewards
Another problem was the client missions that simply stopped working. For a while, players didn’t receive event tokens, level rewards, champion bond points, and so on. Everything seemed stuck and buggy, which made a lot of people panic because they thought the content they had acquired would simply be lost.
Support tried to reassure fans. It was saying that the content will definitely appear on the account of each player and that no one will lose anything.
Ultimately, the event was extended and all free content that could be obtained by playing will be credited to all players’ accounts – whether they were grinding during the event or not.
No PvE mode
Another objection is not related to the client’s error or the poor performance of what was added this holiday. This time it’s about the PvE mode, specifically the one related to the Star Guardian universe.
Some players believe that since this type of mode has already been created in the past, it would be worth bringing it back and simply modernizing it.
As you probably know, Riot has repeatedly said that adding PvE modes is not profitable because relatively few have played them and they were quickly losing the community’s interest. It’s really hard to tell if it would have been otherwise this time – perhaps many people miss the mode because they remember it better than it really was.
However, the truth is that the current event, which was a huge holiday event, did not bring anything new to the new game modes – some argued that it would be better to introduce a modified ARAM with a new map stylized in the Star Guardian universe.
Dedicated Star Guardian fans are truly sad that the event they’ve been waiting for turned out to be so problematic. Of course, it cannot be said that it was literally all wrong – the story itself, while simple, was cute and engaging in its own way. The creators efficiently combined the threads of the previous skins, such as the Ahri team or the Zoe theme.
All the videos related to the event also received good reviews. Both the music video for “Everything Goes On” and cinematic from Akali.
It remains to hope that Riot will learn from the mistakes that occurred this holiday. Unfortunately, the client was responsible for most of the faults, and if it were not for it, the opinions about the event could have been completely different.
