My Thoughts on the Latest Runes Refund/Game Changes
OK so I'm a little late to jump on about the recent news of IP change and refunds and whatnot but I still feel like I should make a post discussing my feelings towards all of this nevertheless.
Level cap 30 removed, rewards when leveling up: This I feel is a good move Riot is doing as it doesn't feel like your limited to just grinding IP after hitting 30. It now allows freedom and purpose to continue playing and leveling up as it will lead to progress on getting rewards and even gemstones at milestones. However, when you get down to it, almost every popular game out there does this in some way: Heroes of the Storm does it, Overwatch does it, & Paragon has started doing it with champ leveling, or to better say made it better with no hard cap on them. While it's a good move on Riot to implement this, it just feels like they're doing what everyone else is doing (as most people/companies do) but are a bit late in doing so.
IP now being replaced with BE, disenchanting now yields less: So for this I'm not really crazy about but I'm also not upset. Changing IP to BE I think is fine. There wasn't a whole lot we could do with blue essence outside of leveling up our champ masteries when we finally got the right amount of tokens and redeeming champs with shards we could get of them (I think?). Having it as the new currency that you can earn in-game I feel is alright since it'll now have more use. Plus and BE you have now will get multiplied by 6.5 but only if you disenchant now to get the most value, since later the disenchanting will yield less which is understandable.
IP Transistion/Runes Refund: (Warning: Rant) Now this is were people are going nuts over and honestly they have a right to do so. Essentially, for those who somehow don't know what the fuss is about, Riot is only giving 100 BE back to people who spent on runes before the start of 2017, 300 for quints, and 1500 for and rune pages bought with IP (epic skins for every 4 pages bought with RP, rounding up though, which is nice). This caused various people to say that this is outrageous while others essentially called those people greedy. Really? You're going to call people who have spent the beginning of time of this game, grinding out hours for IP for however long to get the various top tier runes, basically investing in this system, for so many years and when the time arrives that it's getting revamped for a free system and you're refund for putting all that time, from season one for many, into this is a fraction of what spent on all of it?
Granted, some have argued that it's like buying a car, you don't get it because it'll be worth more later, you get it for the utility and not necessarily investment. OK you make a fair point and some may stand by that but for the rest of us we don't see it that way, probably because it's not a car in the first place. These were things that we had to grind for just to buy one of them or even a complete set of one, that more than likely took weeks, maybe months depending on how often you got to/could play. So when the time comes for refund and we only get a fraction of what we worked so hard to gather up, it just doesn't feel worth it. For my analogy, it's like working at a high end company for so many years, putting time and effort into what you do but at the end of the day when you get your paycheck it's not worth what you worked for.
Another thing I want to bring up is the prices on these things. T3 marks, glyphs and seals have prices of 205/410/820. Quints have prices of 515/1025/2050. Rune pages are 6300. Now taking into account each price range with the total we get back with the current refund amount (and hopefully getting my math done correctly), you get back 48/24/12% for regular runes, 58/29/7% for quints, and around 24% for rune pages. And before anyone says something about getting roughly 50-ish % back on the cheap runes is worth it, I'm not done yet. If we count every single mark, glyph and seal once for the prices they are at, not counting the seasonal runes and before the permanent price reduction of those few mandatory runes a while back, we have a total of 65 basic runes, 26% (17) of those are of the 205 price, 51% (33) are of the 410 price, and 23% (15) for the 820.
And if you were to buy one of each and get the refund back, the amount for 205 would be 3485 total with 1700 refund (loss of 1785), 410 would be 13530 with 3300 refund (loss of 10230) and 820 would be 12300 with 1500 refund (loss of 10800). This applies the same to quints if you only bought one of each rune. 515: 1545 total, 900 refund (loss of 645). 1025: 18450 total, 1800 refund (loss of 16650). 2050: 24600 total, 3600 refund (loss of 21000). Total spent: 73910. Total refund: 12800. Total amount you lose getting back from refund:61110 (83%, rounded of course) You do the rest of the math of how much you lose if you have every full set of runes bought. Oh and 1500 refund for 6300 IP rune page: 4800 loss (76% loss).
To sum this part up, the refund that players, especially veterans, are getting feels horrid. Some are ok with it, fine whatever, but to the rest of us who more than like had to grind out the IP to get full sets or even one high priced rune, most often without an IP boost, it just doesn't sit right. Yeah a 7% refund on the 6150 MS quints I had to grind months to get for 900 total! Fucking hell.
That's my rant about the latest news. Yes, it's another bitch post about how we're not getting a good refund back, but let's face it we're not. Everything else is perfectly fine: the lost streak prevention, more drops, BE now getting more use. But having to get so little a refund from a system that we had to grind out in before now it getting reworked and free feels like it wasn't worth investing in it at all. I really don't care if this gets downvoted or upvoted or whatever. I just need to voice with many others "Riot, you're fucking up by pissing off the long time players."