Dear Riot: Why are you charging Essence for Mastery 6 and 7?

Listen, the mastery system is fun, and I am happy that these new masteries have been added, but I also think the fact they cost either essence or shards to combine is a poor choice. I have no issue with the idea of the shards, and if anything would be fine with you needing more shards to obtain mastery. But, having already earned mastery seven on one champion, I can't deny that the whole concept of needing to either have essence or champion shards to create them does NOTHING but rub me the wrong way.

Because honestly, the amount of essense one obtains and your skill at the game are pretty divorced from each other since there is a limit to how many boxes you can ever obtain at one time or even in one season. Even gaining keys to unlock them is more or less unchanged since most people's winrates are near fifty percent. Since their goal with these new masteries seemed to be to emphasize skill, all adding essence or shards to it is make it feel more like a cash grab attempt than a fun new addition to the game.

Personally I feel that upping the number of shards necessary would be a much better alternative if there was some need to gate how many people can get the masteries over a certain period of time, since getting S- or higher grades is pretty difficult, and it would have the added bonus of not making your players want to throttle you for adding a resource that can be bought for real money to something that was previously gained purely through play.