During champion development, we host several playtests or “player labs” where we bring in external players (non-Riot employees) to play the in-progress kit and give feedback on the visual and narrative concepts. These players can be anyone who lives within the Southern California area, since that’s where our main headquarters are located. Travel makes it cost-prohibitive to open this up to any player, but we try to be aware of and deliberate with our sampling given this restriction.

To be eligible, you need to be an active League player, generally be sportsmanlike without any banned accounts (we had to… relax this requirement when bringing in Draven mains to playtest Kai’Sa), and again we typically only grab players in the greater LA area.

We also occasionally invite and fly out more well-known champion enthusiasts/one-tricks with large communities to give in-depth feedback on their champion if it’s receiving a VGU. In the past we’ve had IreliaCarriesU (Irelia), Professor Akali (Akali), and Malicious Metal (Mordekaiser) give feedback on their champions. We try to stay in touch afterwards too as sometimes there are uh, lingering issues to be resolved post launch (*cough Irelia and Akali cough*).

I’ve personally shown new champions to thousands of players before launch, and while I’m transitioning away from running player labs for new champions, the Champions team is dedicated to running these for each new and reworked champion at multiple stages of development. Make sure your email is up-to-date because that’s how we’ll reach out if you’re invited to a playtest!