Hey everyone! Eternals, our new champion-based achievement feature that lets you showcase personal accomplishments for your favorite champs, is heading to PBE for release on 9.17. You can read all about how to unlock and equip Eternals in the FAQ. In this post, we’ll be talking more in-depth about Eternals, including details on our goals, how we designed these new achievements, and what the future holds.

Why’d You Want to Make Eternals?

Every couple months, we send surveys to players all over the world asking what types of new personalization features they’d like to see in League. One of the top requests is always for champion-based achievements. We decided to explore what we could do in the space, knowing that we’d have to push through some challenges. Not only is it tricky to add meaningful achievements for 140+ champs, but we also wanted to push the envelope on what this kind of game system could deliver for League.

After a lot of exploration, we landed on a few core goals that we wanted to hit:

Provide players a way to show off their achievements in and out of game

Give players a new progression system beyond Mastery and Ranked

Reward players with unique perks for their success

With these in mind, we invited players to Riot to help lock down some of the details. For example, we worked with players to find the right balance between broadly-appealing accomplishments, like kills and takedowns, and unique, champion-specific moments, like Sylas’s “Stop Hitting Yourself,” an Eternal which tracks how many times Sylas kills an enemy with their own ultimate.

Will Eternals Encourage Bad Behavior?

We do a game design review for every Eternal we create to ensure that, on paper, it’s not incentivizing a suboptimal playstyle. Then we follow this up with playtests to validate “in the moment” feels. This process has been hugely helpful in refining our designs to hit the goal of Eternals—they should reward positive play patterns that are exciting and meaningful to achieve. Balancing positive intent with satisfying Eternal design has been a challenge, so be sure to give us feedback once you’ve played with them if you feel we’ve swung too hard in either direction.

Additionally, we’ve taken several steps to minimize objective-setting with Eternals in game. You can always check how close you are to the next Eternals milestone with the hover tooltip in game, but a tracker isn’t always front-and-center. (At one point, we actually tried removing all ways to track your milestone progress in-game, but that felt pretty bad, so we compromised with the tooltips.)

Much like the Missions and Mastery systems in the past, we expect we’ll refine Eternals over time and tune them based on your feedback. We’ll keep an eye on how things are going after launch, and if you see players acting in bad faith to min-max their Eternals, feel free to report them in game and let us know.

Why are Eternals Only Available for RP?

We took a look at how other games have tackled similar systems to see what felt good and what could use some improvement. Existing systems like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s loot boxes for StatTrak weapons and Dota 2’s subscription model for Hero Relics showed us that rarity was a core component for these types of systems. As a result of what we were seeing, we initially designed an early version of Eternals with a loot-based system, but it felt overly complicated and too punishing to be a satisfying approach for League. As a result, we went back to the basics: We’d package sets of three Eternals for players to get with RP.

Additionally—and for complete transparency—Eternals were a huge undertaking to build. The system has a significant amount of new tech powering it to ensure that it works consistently and reliably. We also want to support and expand upon this feature for years to come, and with so many champions to build and maintain Eternals for, the only way we could justify supporting the feature was to attach an RP price to it.

What’s Up With All the Statues?

We wanted to create different visual representations of the types of achievements you’ll be showing off on the Rift. To do that, we explored the idea of appeasing ancient Runeterran gods that responded to your accomplishments, which allowed us to create multiple types of Eternals, with each representing different gameplay pillars.

Here’s a breakdown of each Eternal and the accomplishments they represent: