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What is one experience with creating or reworking a champion that led to a drastic change in how all champions were handled?

I don't know about a specific champion that led to a drastic change in how we handle ALL champs, but there was a VGU that changed how we handled all VGUs, and that was Aatrox.

Prior to Aatrox, new champions and VGUs had the same primary goal, which was to drive engagement. In other words, both VGUs and new champions were designed to get lots of players to play them, that way League consistently has fresh new gameplay, whether you're playing with, as, or against the champion. This doesn’t mean every champion has to be super popular—we sometimes create champs who we know will be niche but who we hope will have a dedicated player base.

New champions and VGUs had very different secondary goals though. For new champions, our secondary goal was (and still is) to expand League’s IP. For VGUs, our secondary goal was to build player trust in our dev team and keep League feeling up to date and modern.

Because our primary goal for VGUs was getting people to play the champions, we’d sometimes make choices that we felt would make the champs more engaging and exciting to the broader playerbase, even if it sometimes meant we had to make drastic changes to the champion’s play pattern or style. It’s easy to see fault in this approach now, but those were the goals that we thought made sense at the time. In any case, this is how we approached Aatrox’s update.

As such, we ended up with a champion with a much higher playrate amongst a dedicated playerbase, and if we were judging success solely based on our primary goal, then Aatrox was a success. However, the new engagement came at the cost of alienating a lot of old Aatrox players. It also made many players afraid for their favorite champions to get a VGU, in fear that we’d change them so far from what they love, they wouldn’t love them anymore.

After Aatrox’s update, we swapped the primary and secondary goals for VGUs. Player trust became (and remains) our primary goal—even if that means the champ ends up being a little less engaging or exciting for the broader playerbase.

In some ways, when we update a champion, we’re really updating something that’s no longer ours. It’s a character that sometimes millions of players have grown to love globally, and we want to make sure we do good by you all first and foremost.

This is part of the reason we’ve begun doing VGU polls. It’s also why we release multiple dev blogs throughout development so we can get earlier feedback from more players on the direction we’re headed, and make adjustments based on that feedback. We hope this new approach is something that can be felt in our most recent updates, and we hope that we can continue building trust between you all and the Champions Team.

This makes me substantially more satisfied that we'll be done justice with a VGU.