When we originally sat down to build Hextech we played with a few loot systems in other games to get an idea of what was out there. We noticed a pattern of hard monetization gates — in a lot of cases, the game would give you a chest, but ultimately you had to pay to open it. As a player this felt pretty crappy, so early on we knew we wanted players to be able to earn Hextech content without having to pay.

On the flipside, giving away millions of skins each month can quickly limit our ability to keep investing in better servers, balancing the game, and developing other features that help the game for all players (regardless of spend). From that we came to key fragments as a way to balance giving out free content at a pace that made sense for all players and felt rewarding whether they played a little, or a lot.

Now that the system has been in players’ hands for the better part of a year, one issue we’ve seen is that no matter how many fragments and chests players get, they say “I’m not getting enough.” Some of that can probably be solved with a clearer feedback system, but some of it might be unavoidable. Who doesn’t want more free stuff?

The basic rules for key fragment drops are:

Key frags are only dropped from wins. Key fragment drop rates work off of a per player cyclical reset timer, similar to chests. Higher drop rates are slightly front-loaded and gradually slow based on the total number of key fragments you’ve received in a cycle until the reset. It’s possible to earn 4 keys (12 fragments) in a 4 week period. This matches the number of chests players can get. There is a bad-luck protection rule that puts a maximum number of wins between key frag drops. Players get a small drop chance bonus if they were in a premade.

While this ruleset is functional, there is definitely room for improvement. We are looking at some possibilities for where we can take this system next, but aren’t ready to share all the details yet.

As always we appreciate all the feedback you’ve given around this and hope you’ve all gotten a ton of great loot over the last year.