VS. was the first foray into missions for Riot and we’ve looked at it as a learning opportunity that will help us refine missions in the future. Since then we’ve started using missions more, with the small Omega Squad event and the Kayn launch, missions are treading new ground and fueling better understanding. Our number one priority is to do no harm (because League doesn’t need missions to be fun). That said, we want to make the most fun missions we can. You’ll continue to occasionally see missions testing new boundaries that we’re pretty confident in, but we’ll always be ready to cut something off if it’s hurting players.

So how did we come to that conclusion? During VS., we looked at the effects of the various missions to ensure that we didn’t see significant negative effects on gameplay – longer game times, abnormal increases in kills – which would indicate that missions were causing problems. We didn’t find any indications we were changing the game in either our data or in player feedback, and we did see lots of players having fun with missions. The biggest change we saw was an increase in bot games and normal games as players sought to more easily complete their missions.

That doesn’t mean, though, that every mission we tried was a hit or a success. Looking at the VS. missions (and the Kayn missions which followed) we identified a few definite trends:

Fails:

Missions that require you to play a particular queue you don’t normally play (the daily mission to play a game of ARAM was easily the most disliked in VS.)

Missions requiring you to play specific champs (Kayn) feel bad when players aren’t particularly interested in playing that champ

Missions that are particularly hard to complete if you play a certain role

Successes:

Missions to win games

Missions to get kills and assists

Playing with (not necessarily as) a specific champion in your game

In general, missions that celebrate the achievements in-game that you already care about are the most successful, while in-your-face missions that require you to play a way you don’t want to are disliked.