League of Legends players are making good on their attempt to forcibly boycott a $500 cosmetic by banning the champion it's available for.
Signature Ahri is a particularly fancy skin, designed to commemorate League of Legends' all-time esports great Faker. Trouble is, the fanciest version costs $500, and players aren't happy about the potentially slippery slope that could set Riot sliding down. The concern is that if it's willing to charge this much now, it'll be happy doing this again in future, milking the community for ever-larger amounts of money.
Even as the skin was announced players were expressing plans to stop those who purchased it from being able to use it by deliberately banning Ahri from every game. Now that the skin has released (and key developer Andrei Van Roon has further stoked controversy by making it clear there are no plans to back down from this kind of drop), they've come good on that threat: Ahri's ban rate has rocketed, doubling almost overnight in certain regions.
ahri ban rate since the hall of legends skin released pic.twitter.com/3LxXinWEgQJune 13, 2024
It's unlikely that that spike holds for long - when you've only got five bans to use across your team, using one of them to spite players who might not even be in your game is a bit of a waste, and eventually Ahri's ban rate will probably return to normal. Still, it's amusing to see that the parts of the community expressing their concern did come good on their threat, even if reports suggest that the vast majority of these bans are coming from Western regions, rather than the Chinese and Korean markets that seem more likely to purchase the skin in the first place.
Elsewhere in the League of Legends ecosystem, Arcane is ending with Season 2 - but fans are already theorizing where it's heading next.
