Rune Costs (Dear Riot Games)

Dear Riot Why do runes cost so much? a simple tier 3 rune page (I calculated using only flat AP runes cuz yolo) and found that would cost 12,606 IP. thats a lot of fucking IP. That is approximately the same price as 2 top cost champions (6300). which translates to approximately $15 worth of RP. The rune page i could make with all of this IP would yield 36.18 AP. This page would give me 786.915 Gold's worth of IP per game (using amp tome as the standard of gold:ap ratio). This is absurd! Runes are a Pay to Win like feature in a free to play game. Only you CANT ACTUALLY BUY THEM! You have to play the game to get them. Which sounds like its simply rewarding players for playing, but its not. By making it cost IP, you are taking away a players ability to unlock "free" content (champions). Now from a business standpoint, this must sound like a wonderful idea because altogether, this encourages people to pull out the credit card and pay for their champions with money. But, thats not how people work. The People who are likely to spend cash on champions are just about as likely to buy the champions with cash regardless of whether or not they are saving IP for runes. Yeah, that number is negligible and there are certainly people who buy some champions with rp and most with IP. but that isnt the point. The real point here is there are people who are dedicated to the idea that they will not pay for things they could get for free. These people are guaranteed to not buy champions with RP, but might buy skins with RP. These people will have to choose with low amount of content (saving for runes, not buying champions) or more content at a low quality (getting champions, but not having the runes to make them any good) And these people are not going to enjoy the game nearly as much as the people who have the runes and the champions. And do you know what people who don't enjoy a game do? They Stop Playing

And when people that stop playing, riot doesn't make any money from them. When runes cost 12,606 IP a page, riot loses new players. Buy getting rid of tier 1 & 2 runes, and just having Tier 3 runes, and also making those Runes extremely accessible, riot games could very well see new player growth once again. Sincerely,
A long term player who understands business is the only way to get your attention