Its become pretty clear the game is slowly decesnting into "Pay to enjoy"

Note that before anyone flames me right off the bat, I am NOT implying that League in any way offers advantage to someone in terms of game balance IE "Pay to Win" and any comments accusing of such will simply loook silly.

something tho bugged me about that Worlds pass and now I see what it was: You guaranteed NEEd that pass to unlock everything about what should be the one League event that's about the game more than anything else. Worlds was never supposed to be this big sellout event, it was a simple one where the only things you needed to buy were your teams swag to support them both financially and in spirit. Now tho for anyone that wants that "prestige" skin or hell even wants more than one reward from Worlds loot at all, they are FORCED into that pass. there is basically zero way doing missions alone will net you a guaranteed 2500 tokens, and if it can be done its DEFNITELY set at such a level you'e meant to shrug and go "might as well spend 10 bucks" just to make it easier.

Stacked onto that, it brought gameplay INTO it. you only earn more tokens playing more games and this will lead to bloated numbers of people "playing" the game. Im not gonna get all tin hat and say Riot is doing this to promote the game because insert controversy of choice made a lot of players to uninstall, but at the very least this is just another thing they throw out to say "hand us money and grind through more games than you would normally play and we give ya stuff" and while I guess thats better than just asking for the money straight up, it feels just....dirty. It feels like the game is now just a tool you use to tempt people into cosmetics.

It feels like fortnite. "100% free to play, but you don't wanna LOOK bad do ya? Better get this SUPER exclusive limited event item FAST or else you'll look LAME!"

TL;DR - Riot has basically doubled down on "Make money first, make an enjoyable game second" and it's only ironic because what led to such success was their focus more on fun game stuff that also came with cool cosmetics you WANTED to spend money on, not were pressured into buying ASAP.