Riot, you're making a huge mistake with Rune pages.
Here is the quote. With a Link.
Warning: frank discussion incoming.
One of the things we haven't talked about a lot with you guys, but which should come as no surprise, is that Riot does make revenue on runes, which we ultimately invest back into League to make the game better.
This is indirect revenue, because it comes from players purchasing champions with RP since they don't have available IP to get those champions, since some of that IP goes towards runes. Freeing up rune IP (in the absence of any other changes) would let players buy a bunch of champions and spend less RP overall.
Now we are making some other changes to the system, but overall, Riot is losing money on this deal. Potentially a lot of money. This was something we had to talk about a lot internally, but everyone was ultimately behind the decision, all the way to Tryndamere and Ryze. I don't want to make too big of a deal out of this, but if we seem cautious with some of our decisions here, this is part of the reason why. (Another big one obviously is that we are taking a gamble by overhauling such a core part of the game for something that we believe will be better.)
We are making the new runes free because we believe 1) That it's the right thing to do for League and for League players, and 2) Our business model has always been to make a fun game that players want to keep coming back to year after year. Runes Reforged is a long-term bet on League of Legends (and Riot for that matter).
If we thought that Rune Pages made no sense with the new design and risked feeling like a cash grab, we would absolutely just kill them as a feature. But we have found they are useful with Runes Reforged, just less mandatory than they were before. Definitely open to discussion on this topic however.
I spent real life money on the ability to have multiple, static, only customizable systems outside of champion select. I paid for the convenience and the advantages these pages gave, not the ability to have multiple pages.
I have OCPD, a mental health disease that dislikes clutter and excess. With the way the new rune pages are, i will personally suffer from having 19 useless pages and a single mastery page that i edit every game. Currently, i edit my mastery page every game on every account of mine. (Usually i name them things like IAmBronze5, MetaIsOG, or something silly.) That's the only way that i really prefer it, and it's going to bug me clicking and seeing more pages.
Actually, scratch that, take them for free. Just let me keep playing the game without suffering from visual anxiety please.
