Some ideas regarding gems, essence, and the rune system

Hey Riot,

I really like the implementation of things like "Your Shop", reward chests, level capsules, and honor capsules. They're a great way to add incentive to spend real money, (some of the discounts I'm seeing in the "Post Your Shop" thread are amazing!) as well as incentive to play well, play often, and be a good sport in general. For players like me, who've been playing League for a long time (not as long as some people but it will be seven years this October), these features that keep players playing don't add any real incentive to the game other than to just play ranked, the rotating game mode, or Blitz (which is AMAZING btw, great job to the dev team on that!). However there are a few things I would like to address, the first being my situation and possible solutions for issues related to this.

My situation is definitely a first-world problem. I own all purchased content currently available in League of Legends, save for some wards, icons, and chromas. To give you an idea of how crazy this is, I literally just rerolled three skin shards to get Hextech Poppy on the day of release. Same for Mecha Aurelion Sol. Gems don't have a purpose. Orange Essence is used to activate the random ward or icon that I don't have yet. Blue Essence is saved for the Emporium when it rolls around. Here's some screenshots:

https://i.redd.it/difasq671xg11.png

I already buy skins for the random players I encounter that exhibit traits such as patience, honesty, cooperation, coordination, and overall sportsmanship. I've bought people various skins throughout the years, the most recent being Cyberpop Zoe for a player who stuck through a game with a toxic bot and top lane. I offered to buy them a skin of their choice after the game wrapped up, friended them, and 24 hours later, they had Cyberpop Zoe gifted to them. It's my way of rewarding players who don't give in to the toxic environment we all have experienced in game.

I want to take this a step further but I'm not asking to be rewarded for spending time and money on something I enjoy. Instead, I would rather be able to use these in-game resources to benefit others.

First, let us be able to gift gems. I would absolutely LOVE to be able to give away the gems that I get. Some players don't see a gem for months at a time, which makes reading threads here and on Reddit about this really hard to stomach for me as gems no longer serve any purpose, even to open for chests. If I could help someone get one gem closer to finishing a Mythic skin, that would be amazing. Of course, this could possibly cause issues with real-world cash transactions, but a possible solution is that the decision to gift a Gem has to be made when the Gem is opened from a chest and can only be given to people on their friends list for some amount of time. Not the most elegant solution, but it can work.

Second, more blue essence dumps. The old system gave us a way to dump our IP but with that no longer in place, we're sitting on BE until the Emporium rolls around. I think implementing something similar to the old system that exists concurrent to the rune system would be ideal. Something like this:

https://i.redd.it/1jvz7adxexg11.png

Bring back marks, runes, and glyphs, but definitely not as granular. Give us back scaling and flat stats to customize builds deeper than we can currently. Keep the perks, (+20AP/+12AD adaptive in this case) though. I wouldn't want new players to want to save BE for runes though, so make these free with the benefit is that this also may make players purchase more rune pages with BE to build multiple pages for the same champ depending on the match up, just like the previous system. I do understand that something like this would be a major update and it would require re-tuning stats across the board for all champs, as all champions had starting base stats and growth changed to compensate for the removal of the old system. I do think though that with the current state of the game regarding the sheer amount of damage output, the system should primarily focus on utility and defensive runes.

Even quints can come back possibly, in tandem with or as an alternative to the marks/runes/glyphs system above. In the screenshot, maybe the symbol in the center of the Domination Rune can be a slot that unlocks a small set of Quintessences specific to the combination that adds choices related to both trees. So Domination/Precision will have a different set of Quintessences than Domination/Inspiration. These could possibly replace the flat stat bonus with utility options or give alternative options for the bonus. Say Sorcery/Resolve, which normally gives +15 to +135 flat health based on level and +10AP/+6AD adaptive, would also have the option to take scaling health regen with the damage bonus, or bonus Armor/MR and the damage bonus. You can even name these Quintessences after the in-game client names that we see on the premade rune pages.

Finally, for excess Orange Essence, let us buy optional content like ward skins, icons, or chromas with OE. Even keys would be useful to purchase with orange essence as I'm sure there are players out there with chests but no keys to open them with.

Thoughts, feedback, ideas, and constructive criticism is appreciated.