Of the last ten champions arrived on League of Legends, eight correspond to female characters. Riot Games hasn’t completely abandoned male champions, nor will it in the future. However, the trend of the last two years is more than striking for most gamers. So much so that a member of the community wanted to have explanations directly from the studio.
A difference that divides the League of Legends community
Reav3recently promoted to director of gameplay for League of Legends, explained on Reddit that several reasons had pushed the developers to make this decision. The most important is that currently “there are fewer female characters” and they think that “in the long run, it’s better if the character pool is more split between men and women”. An idea that also goes in the direction of the increased effort of representation and representativeness that Riot Games has undertaken in recent years.
However, the most striking information for the community was the following: “Our data shows that female players are using mostly female characters. In fact, some 97% of female players only use female champions. Players, on the other hand, are split 50/50 between champions and champions.”. That’s not to say that Riot Games will only release male characters from now on, but it does explain why the company has changed its releases quite a bit over the past few seasons.
In fact, sometimes the decision is made by accident. For example, Renata Glasc should not be a woman. During the initial stages of her development before her arrival in League of Legends, she had to be a male character. Nevertheless, as the design progressed they decided to modify it to keep it from looking too much like Silco and does not cause misunderstandings. An accidental decision which, given the current rate of outings, greatly modifies the percentages.
On top of that, Reav3 also wanted to disprove the classic theory that the majority of female players are in the support position: “In reality, the female audience of League of Legends is evenly split between ADC, support and mid laner positions. Jungle and top are the roles where there are the fewest female players. This correlates very strongly with the data we have, which shows that the majority of female players prefer to play ranged rather than melee characters.”
Analyzing the causes of all these circumstances is too complicated without being simplistic, and even League of Legends officials say they “don’t believe there is a single reason”. However, the statistical reality is indisputable and gives us a view of reality that most likely few in the community expected.
Riot Games is definitely having a hard time containing the leaks. The skills but also the appearance of the future ADC have already been revealed on the web, enough to spoil the surprise for the players once again.