Introducing Challenges: Tracking your LoL progress aside from rank

Riot has talked about adding this new feature for a while now, and now they’re finally available on the PBE server. Their design is centered around displaying the progress you achieve as a League player, not just in the Ranked Queues but in ARAM, Clash, and as a skin collector.

Challenges are different from Eternals because you can level them up from Iron to Master. Most of them even have Grandmaster and Challenger tiers and just like in Ranked, only a certain number of people from the region can be in those tiers. If you ever wanted to know the person with the most pentakills on the server, challenges are here to determine that.

League Challenges

Over 300 challenges will be released on live servers at the beginning of the 2022 season, so they have to be tested extensively on the PBE for a longer period. Challenges will be a tab in your profile like match history or highlights, and there you can see the progress you’ve made on them. You can also view the progress of other players unless they disable that option with the new feature that will hide match history, disable spectating, and other profile privacy measures.

Each milestone you pass will increase your overall score on which your rank will be based, and there are five different types of challenges for various aspects of the game.

• The “imagination” section consists of challenges that are innovative and hard to accomplish, like killing 20 minions in three seconds.
• The “expertise” challenges reward players that are focused on their performance, like winning a game without a single death or winning a game with a 100 or more CS than your opponent.
• The “teamwork” section consists of challenges like getting a dragon soul without losing a drake(4-0) and scoring an ace over the enemy team before 15 minutes.
• The “veterancy” challenges are aimed at long-time players by tracking their total number of kills, gold pentakills, and other stats.

And the last ones are the “collection” challenges that track stats like champions, skins, and icons among others. A search bar will also be implemented to find challenges by their name, or by the group in which they belong.

League client updates

The lobby in the client is also getting some major changes so your challenge progress can be displayed in other places apart from your profile. The Ranked armor you have around your Summoner icon is also getting updated and now you can choose your level borders, it won’t automatically be the most recent one.

Challenge cards are also being introduced and they serve a similar function to champion mastery tokens. Showing the progress you have made on a challenge, the name of the challenge, and the criteria to fulfill for the next rank. It also shows how many points the said challenge attributes to your overall challenge score and in what game modes can you complete it.

Hovering over a player’s Summoner Icon will display a dropdown displaying his past and current rank, details regarding challenges such as rank and progress, and also a new feature called “tittle”. Titles are earned and unlocked by leveling up certain kinds of challenges to a certain rank and they’re accompanied by Tokens that are hoverable and display challenge tier and info.

Those will be visible in the loading screen as well just like eternal progression. All of these changes that you can apply when setting up your profile identity will be saved in real-time and can be undone so you can experiment with your outlook more freely.

Loading screen and Post Game

The loading screen is also receiving changes to make space for all of the new features. It will now display your icon, ranked and prestige borders, Summoner name, title, runes, spells, Honor, mastery, Eternals, rank, challenge crystal, and tokens. The end of the game screen is also split into two parts, one for the personal progression(level, XP, mastery, LP) and one for the game’s scoreboard.

The scoreboard is changed in a way that adds more information regarding the game such as KDA, easier toggling of the stats (damage done, gold earned, etc), and shows Honor and Challenges progress from the game. Now while in the pre-game lobby you can hover over a player’s Challenge Tokens and if they’re above Master in that Challenge you will see a leaderboard and his ranking on it accordingly. You can also see how you stack up compared to their progress and how they stack up against the best on the server.

Because of the nature and the size of these changes, it will take a lot of time to test them out before they hit life servers. Most of them are already on the PBE server and they will go on live servers on patch 12.1 with the start of the new ranked season with the complete launch coming a few months later.