Eternals are coming to League of Legends to highlight accomplishments

Riot Games product manager Adriaan “Kenadamsnsa” Noordzij has published a dev post outlining a new way to progress your champion fan status. The concept of Eternals is best compared to the current Mastery system for all champions. However, the Eternals for each of the 140+ champions of League of Legends will track how frequently you complete a certain action, rather than your time spent on a certain champion.

The goal of Eternals

According to the dev blog, players wanted more ways to progress and show off their achievements in and out of the game. Eternals will introduce more ways to show off your mastery of certain champions through an in-game tracker and upgrades to your Mastery emote. An example that is given of something that will be tracked as Eternal is Sylas’ “Stop Hitting Yourself.” This Eternal will track how many times you have killed an enemy with their own ultimate in the game.

Eternals are connected thematically to various Runeterran gods. And besides the upgrades to the look and effects of the Mastery emote, you will also be able to show off your personal bests in-game for your Eternals goal.

The developers discussed at length that they were worried about the possibility of the Eternals causing players to play in a sub-optimal manner. However, they have tested each Eternal thoroughly to ensure this behavior will not be incentivized through their design philosophy.

They will cost RP to unlock

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to players who have followed Riot Games’ recent financial reports, but their profits have been declining with the competition of games such as Fortnite. Connecting an RP cost to an aspect of the game that took a lot of developer time to create and is not required to participate in the game seems like a fair way to go about it. Riot Games has given the players a lot of freebies over the recent years to stay competitive, but they still need to ensure they stay profitable so the game can last.

The Eternal system and everything connected to it will be headed to the PBE soon. If all goes well, the system will be in place for the 9.17 patch on Wednesday, Aug. 28. For more of League of Legends, check out the preview for tomorrow’s patch 9.16.