Last night I got to sit down and chat with Riot’s Steve Mescon (RiotPendragon) for a couple of hours.

Among other things, we talked about the 10k referral reward, and he informed me that the nature of the reward is less “Go design a champion with Riot” and more “Go work on a champion they’ve already designed”. They have their champion concepts laid out pretty far in advance… the next 4-5 months worth of champions are already in some stage of the design process, and they’d have me working on one of the champions way down the road. Apparently the one other guy who reached 10k, Grez, still hasn’t been out to the studio to work on a champion.

While it’s not a bad prize by any stretch, it’s fundamentally different from the reason I started this campaign. I wanted it to be less a me reward, and more an us reward. As I’d said, I hoped that if we reached 10k referrals I could collect Champion ideas from the community, Spider Shark included, and we’d vote on which ones to pitch to Riot.

As usual, you guys absolutely blew me away with your support of Spider Shark. As of this morning we had over 7000 referrals, and over 1000 people interfacing and playing LoL together through the Spider Shark Facebook page (huge thanks to Geofram for running with that!). The support for Spider Shark has been tremendous, and I really appreciate it. It would have been incredibly cool to get a champion into the game this way, but I hope that at least a lot of you found a new game you enjoy.

I still wholeheartedly support League of Legends, and will continue to play and talk about it, and I think you guys should check it out since, hey, it’s free so why not? But as I can’t promise you a champion we all had a part in seeing to reality, I’ll no longer be pushing for referrals.

I still intend to give away the 2 cameo appearances in the comic strip, as a thank you to the people who got their summoner to level 5 towards the effort. The cutoff will be tomorrow night at midnight (Wednesday 11:59pm EST) to give those people who already started leveling to 5 a chance to finish and a chance at the prizes.

And we’re still going to play League of Legends tomorrow night! Remember, from 5pm to 9pm EST I’ll be creating a chat room for everyone to gather in. From there you can easily find people to play with, including people just starting the game and are still learning. I’ve also spoken to a couple of Riot staffers that are intending to drop by and get a couple of games in as well.

Since we did get well past the 1k reward mark (have an in-game content element named after your summoner), I’m going to ask them to name it after Zeke, whatever it is.

I also do have an open invitation to visit Riot’s studios, so I may try and take them up on that later this summer. Perhaps they’ll change their mind about Spider Shark if I bring them cookies. Cookies always work, right?