Victorious Skins have lost sense of achievement.

Alright, I'm not gonna sit here and be an elitist about Victorious Skins or try to make it seem like I have something against particular skill levels of the game. But I do feel like having one skinline out of the hundreds of purchasable skinlines be based on a skill level requirement and offer something for your effort instead of your wallet felt more interesting.

Though, came a problem-- Evidently from region to region you'll find on the ladder only 30-40% of League's ranked playerbase (or people who have played a ranked game) actually make it to gold or even higher (At least, from what I see on OP.GG every season that I do rank, but I could be wrong. It did spike higher after removing promos). Ultimately, there are players who cannot climb from Iron, Bronze, Silver. Hence, the "average" rank of a League player can range from bronze-silver. (IMO if more people cared to improve I think the average rank would be Gold) An issue arose that a majority of the people who play ranked at all couldn't get the skin.

Naturally, Riot has reworked the Victorious Skin system to favor the quantity of ranked games you play over the results at the end of the season in attempt to help people who play for that skin. Roughly I found that if you didn't reach Gold immediately it'd take 80-110ish games of ranked to grind for it via a pseudo battle pass system.

Personally, I'm not a fan. It's not that I don't want to see people below Gold get absolutely nothing out of playing ranked while being stuck in a just barely slightly lower skill level, but I do think the main prize being something you can mindlessly grind out and not actually care about the results of your ranked games (aside from saving time) doesn't make people strive to play ranked to improve at all. Thus, the allure of getting Gold and getting a skin ceases to exist as a starting motivator for people to get better at the game and simply be complacent at their current level,

Of course, there's likely a majority of mid-high elo players who could give less of a damn about getting the skin because they get it no matter what and their only concern is to peak higher than their previous. But as we know A LOT of people do not want to play league competitively or are too intimdated to do so. I could see a reality where the skin basically being guaranteed as long as you have free time might help people ease into it more, but a participation award doesn't make people want to improve.

Again, I don't want Iron-Silver players to feel like they've wasted their time playing ranked at all, but is gating things to player skill level REALLY that awful of a concept in a nautrally competitive game? I think Victorious Skins are generally poorly designed recently and generally aren't worth the grind if you care about looks (that's another issue entirely) but the point of having one is having some visual indicator you are someone who wants to flex something that didn't require you to pull out your wallet. And it's not like we don't have hundreds of better looking skins that require way less of you to acquire them.

Yeah, gold isn't that impressive of a rank, I'm more than well aware, but statistically speaking you HAD to be better than a majority of players at the game in some ways to earn it.

Moving all the way down to simply "Win 15 Ranked Games" to get one now feels like it'll lessen the population of people who played for the skin even more because of how little time that will actually take.