What’s up y’all. I’m Producer Alex “Tim Teemo” Kovalenko and I want to talk to you about a new-ish product: Emotes! We’re covering some new territory with this feature, and they’re going to be on PBE for an extended amount of time while we gather feedback, so we wanted to start talking now.

EMOTES SO FAR

Many of you have already seen emotes during events like Snowdown, Worlds, and Arcade. They’ve had a few limitations that we wanted to attack:

They could only be used during certain time windows or during certain events

They could only be used with an icon equipped

You could only use one at a time

We knew that we wanted to change all of those things, but there was a lot more to figure out along the way.

One of the bigger hurdles was figuring out what the emotes themselves were supposed to accomplish. We had a lot of debates over whether they should be a communication tool or an expression tool.

To us, a communication tool implies intent on an action; it communicates something related to the gameplay. Like “take baron” or “focus tower.” We define expression as separate from that; it’s the emotion you’re feeling in the moment. Ultimately we decided that pings are the channel that should be used for communication (looking at you, question mark ping), and that emotes should stick to expression. This sounds like a no-brainer, but it was a valuable distinction for us along the way.

The first version of emotes were emblems, like these: