Riot Games has altered one of the esports organization’s emotes that will be available to League of Legends players in late August.
On August 12, Riot revealed the custom emotes designed by professional teams in its top League of Legends esports leagues. The designs are a mix of art promoting the esports team itself and some clever emotes from teams just having fun with the memes.
100 Thieves chose to create an emote displaying a gesture players would use after walking away from a massive outplay to talk trash to their opponents.
However, that design has not made it into the game as Riot has altered the emote in its PBE release to what some might say is a less offensive gesture. The change was caught by SkinSpotlights, a social media account and YouTube channel devoted to covering cosmetics for League and Wild Rift.
Neither 100 Thieves nor the developer have said whether the design was actually changed from its initial announcement or if that was simply an earlier version of the design.
However, League players are upset, believing that Riot has sanitized what they considered a great emote, with some even calling out the developer as “Cowards.”
This is not the only controversy associated with this emote rollout. Riot is bringing back the controversial bait ping as an emote thanks to Team BDS and its cosmetic design, which prominently features the ping’s hook shape.
A similar emote of just the hook was previously removed from League of Legends after the developer found players were using it in an “unacceptable” manner.
Esports teams were incentivized to make their designs as interesting to players as possible, as Riot is giving 30% of the gross revenue from individual emote sales back to the team that created it. The emotes hit live servers on August 27 and will cost 350 RP, or a little over $3.
