Graves’ cigar first appeared in a splash art update in October 2014, and helped show The Outlaw as the gun-toting, rule-breaking, line-ending badass that we all know and love. As explained by RiotSilver here, though, it was quickly removed the next month due to concerns about ratings changes in some countries (things like tobacco use, blood, skulls, etc. can impact a game’s rating depending on the region).

After a long (probably too long) time, we’re finally bringing back his carcinogen-laden accessory to many regions, which poses an interesting technological challenge.

Currently, we have one mechanism for displaying different content in different countries. Specifically, we can check whether the game is being run in China, by looking for a specific file in the LoL install (a .dll file that is used by our publisher in China). If that .dll exists, then we swap out specific particle FX for other versions. This allows bloody things like Vladimir’s trollpool to look red in most of the world, and black in China. We don’t have similar marker files in other countries, so we can’t use this technique anywhere else in the world.

We used to have one other mechanism, where other countries could create custom versions of splash art. Then, we automatically copied those splashes over top of the Riot versions and built the entire game (a very time-consuming process) again, thus making sure that the new splash winds up everywhere we need it to. This is how all the “Chinese version” vs. “NA version” splashes that you see on wiki sites were published.

Recently, some Rioters wanted to speed up our iteration process. If a designer or artist wanted to get their changes into testers’ hands for the evening, they would need to submit their changes very early in the day (typically by 12:30 or 1pm) in order to brave the hours-long gauntlet of being built into all the different versions of the game, and then published to our internal servers. This slowed iteration drastically, which in turn made it much harder to make LoL as awesome as we want it to be.

Thus, (along with other build improvements) we undertook the global splash parity project that JxE talked about here, allowing us to simplify and speed up our build process substantially. But it left us without a good way to swap art for different countries. We don’t want to reintroduce a lengthy build pipeline to handle things, but we need some clean and reliable way to toggle the presence of the cigar.

Therefore we’re packing both versions of Graves’ splash in patch 7.9, and the game will, by default, stick to the version with less nicotine. We’re adding some new data that says which types of content, like “Tobacco” or “Blood”, are allowed in each country. Then we’re adding some new data to each game server that says which region you’re playing in. If your region is tagged as safe for tobacco use, we’ll swap Graves out to use the edgier splash. Outside of the game, we’ll be adding similar technology as appropriate, always careful not to accidentally show restricted content in areas where that may endanger our rating (and thus prevent many players from being able to get on the Rift).

Thanks for fighting for the vision of Graves that resonates with you.