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League of Legends developer Riot Games recently announced that a hotly coveted character skin is coming to the MOBA. Sahn-Uzal Mordekaiser will convert the game’s necromantic top-laner from his default lich appearance back to his human form. It’s a cosmetic with a lot of significance to League’s canonical story, and Riot clearly knows it, putting together a dramatic trailer to accompany the announcement, viewable above.
In short, it’s a big moment for the League of Legends community. But any player wanting to play as human Mordekaiser will likely have to pay through the nose to do so. That’s because Sahn-Uzal Mordekaiser will be added to League’s recently created ‘Exalted’ tier of skins, and these can only be acquired by engaging with League’s gacha-style Sanctum. Nabbing an Exalted skin from the Sanctum can be eye-wateringly costly, with League fans recently calculating that two-thirds of players won’t receive an exalted skin before spending 32000RP, which converts to $246.15. Or as I like to think of it, four Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2s.
Naturally, the community feels pretty sour about the whole thing. ” One of my all time most wanted skins ever was Sahn-Uzal/pre-resurrection Mordekaiser” wrote YouTuber NickyBoi on X, “but all that hype is obliterated knowing it’s stuck in a $200 fomo gacha store”. The responses to League’s official reveal of the skin on X are similarly unimpressed, with many replies claiming that the skin looks cheap, as well as being expensive to acquire. Meanwhile, the r/MordekaiserMains channel is in complete meltdown, currently an endless scroll of posts with titles like “LMFAO @ Sahn Uzal 250$ skin” and “Can we all agree and come together to not spend a single cent on this scam skin?”
This isn’t the first time Riot has landed in hot water with its community over perceived skin scalping since the launch of the Exalted tier. In June last year, fans pushed back against the introduction of a skin for vulpine mage Ahri that could cost up to $500. In response, game director Pu Liu said the pricing was “justified” because “the vast majority of players spend $0 on a free play game the vast majority of players spend $0 on a free play game. As a consequence of that, the majority of our revenue comes from a small, single-digit percentage of players.”
These players are commonly referred to in the industry as “Whales”, and whale chasing is an established, if controversial, industry practice, especially when combined with the gambling element of gacha mechanics. The Sahn-Uzal skin is a good example of why. Whereas the Ahri skin was designed to celebrate renowned League player Faker, this one, as already mentioned, is quite closely tied to League lore, and therefore subtly pushes on a larger number of buttons that might tempt players into rolling the dice. On the face of it, everything here is optional and it’s up to players whether they engage, but beneath this is a whole element of psychological manipulation, tempting players both to engage with the gacha mechanics in the first place, and then keep rolling until they get a reward in classic sunk-cost fallacy fashion.
The Sahn-Uzal Mordekaiser skin arrives into League on March 5. Riot has made a run of questionable decisions lately, and not just regarding its business practices. In January, League received an update designed to get rid of “unnecessary complexity”, which ended up making it next to impossible for new players to earn anything outside of the battle pass. After investigating, Riot admitted it had “screwed up” the calculations for the new reward system, stating that “the numbers we shipped were pretty far off from what they should be for many of you.”
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Kurt Indovina
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