Update on Yesterday's Capsule Pricing Error

Hi folks,

Yesterday an error in League's in-game store briefly made some expensive content available for Blue Essence. We want to explain a little more about what happened and how we'll prevent similar errors in the future.

What happened?

At 10AM PT on January 10th, the new Blood Moon capsules and Prestige Points went on sale. Because of a configuration error that resulted in PBE content making it to Live, you could purchase individual Prestige Points as well as individual Blood Moon capsules for just 1 BE apiece.

The error was live on the store for 14 minutes. During that time, a few thousand players across all regions were able to take advantage of the situation and buy both Blood Moon capsules and Prestige Points using BE. In many regions, fewer than 100 players were able to take advantage of the error.

Yesterday I announced on Twitter that we'll be reverting and refunding all BE-purchased Prestige Points along with the Aatrox Prestige skin.

**But what about the capsules? **

For reasons I'll explain here, we won't be able to revert or remove the free Blood Moon capsules that players were able to purchase using BE. Lots of you have pointed out that this feels unfair, so we want to explain why we decided to do this.

It's not too complicated of a process for us to manually remove most items from your inventory if we need to. If it's a single skin or a champion, we have tools to remove those quickly and effectively.

However, it gets more complicated when we talk about capsules and other loot items, because it's a lot harder to track what players have done with the capsules after they open them. You can disenchant skin shards into orange essence, or reroll them using other skin shards you already owned (including ones you earned legitimately). Instead of reverting a single item, we'd have to revert potentially thousands of transactions made in the loot system. This would take us months to undo, as it’s a very manual and delicate process to ensure we don’t wipe out legitimate transactions accidentally. Additionally, it could revert perfectly normal actions, like LP gains, Mastery tokens, and more.

Since we don't keep easily reversible backups of an earlier version of your account's state, properly reverting the capsules purchased using BE yesterday would be nearly impossible and come at the expense of other features we’re working on for players. For this reason, we're choosing to only take away the Prestige Points and Blood Moon Aatrox Prestige Editions that were obtained with BE.

We're already taking steps to prevent this sort of mistake from ever happening again.

Our first action will be to make internal test prices reflect Live prices for store content. This way, if content that shouldn’t be on Live accidentally makes it way out, it won’t be exploitable or priced incorrectly.

In the long term, we're going to continue to explore the work needed to address issues like this in the future. In the off chance this happens again, we'll be able to respond quickly and appropriately.

Thank you so much for your patience.