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Riot missed the boat on runes...

M4nTiCoR3·11/30/2014, 5:30:44 PM·2 votes·379 views

As a free to play bussiness model I think by and large Riot has one of the best. All the competitive content is free to farm up after a semi obnoxious number of games if you choose not to pay them their well deserved money for a product they constantly add content to and refine.

Runes however have always baffled me. In any business model of this nature you require a currency sink of sorts for people to spend their points on. I have often wondered why they developed contradictory models for the runes and masteries.

Masteries are forgiving...they allow you to rearange them and buy multiple pages so you can customize them for different roles and champions. Good system. Want more options buy more pages. Good currency sink.

Runes, not so much. The tiers are a constant point of contention, the combiner is wonky, and the fact that you can reuse runes is crazy. I was suprised to find if I put my runes into one page I could use them in another simultaneously when I first started. I just assumed you would have to buy more to fill another page. Also the disconnect from each tier was wierd. Why aren't all tiers above level 1 just upgraded in some way. So you buy level 1s at a cheap cost. Spend more ip or use some combiner and craft the T2 equivalent. In other words...all tiers are connected and all runes have a predictable life span. You only buy T1 runes, all other higher Tier versions are just upgrades of the original in some from or fashion. Never understood why they made them completely seperate.

A system where runes are way cheaper but not reusable forcing you to constantly invest IP into new pages and runes which scaled over time with investment would be a much better model than what it is today. You would always be playing as a seasoned player to get more and more customized pages for your champions and builds...while newer players would be able to start with some generic T1 pages that eventually tansition into generic T3 pages...which slowly grow frI'm 1 good page into multiple T1 pages for specific champions and upgrade into said T3 pages for those same champions.

Most people will down vote this idea because they already feel IP is too hard to farm. They are wrong. A huge amount of content is available at very reasonable IP prices. There are options to invest in IP boosters or RP to speed up your aquasition of more expensive content for a fair price as these types of games go. The real problem is dealing with this...

New players don't know what to buy...make poor choices, and can't recover the value of them. A better system like the one above would allow them to always keep the value of their spent resources in the long term.

Old players have stockpiles if IP but nothing to really spend them on until new champions that look cool come out. More emphasis on runes and the customization of unique pages that are crafted and upgraded over time through IP would help keep them more engaged.

Too little too late. They have the system they have and I doubt we will see major changes of any scope to it in the near future. I'll stop Rambling now. Theorycrafting innovation for a bussiness model that is making millions is moot I supoose.

7 Comments

yellowbricks11/30/2014, 6:59:36 PM3 votes

Ubisoft employee detected.

Lord Dusteon11/30/2014, 6:19:53 PM2 votes

How about we not make it take even more IP to get anything done? Just using a basic AD rune page (AD quints, AD marks, HP seals, MR glyphs), that costs (3075)(1845)(7380)(1845), or 14145 IP. As in, you could get 2 of the most expensive champions in the game and still have leftover IP before you finished a BASIC runepage. If you want to ever play some champions (tryndamere, jungle), you need even more runepages and specialized runes. If you can't reuse runes, think of spending 20000+ IP (runes + rune page itself) everytime you want to not have really shitty runes for your champion. And remember, runes can only be bought with IP, meaning unless you've literally spent RP on everything except runes you'd still need huge amounts of grinding to get anything.

Making it cost even more obnoxiously large amounts of IP to be competitive is not the solution to runes.

Matthevv11/30/2014, 7:02:20 PM2 votes

The game needed a currency sink back when there were only 40 champions to buy. Now with well over 100 champions in the game, having runes cost any ip at all is just stupid design that is meant to make Riot more money.

M4nTiCoR311/30/2014, 8:00:58 PM1 votes

I wish I had a job in the video game industry. Sadly I'm a lowly QC chemist. And to be fair...the ultimate point of developing a game is to make money. Riot adds more content on a monthly basis to this game than most games I buy do in year...or even a lifetime. And its largely freento the public! It's not unfair to say that making it so it is advantageous for players to spend money occasionally on content that while free...is limited...is ok with me.

Maybe im still one of the fee people in the world that doesn't expect a free hand out...seems that's the norm these days.

Quepha11/30/2014, 8:10:16 PM1 votes

runes are terrible but making them expendable only makes sense from an IP sink perspective, from an actual game perspective it's even worse than the current system.

M4nTiCoR311/30/2014, 9:04:23 PM1 votes

Expendable? I'm not sure we share the same definition of that word. Nothing in my post makes them expendable. ExpAndable...Maybe.

They woukd be just as important as they are today, the only difference being cheaper so players can get started sooner, upgradeable so they are still relevant later, and less flexible requiring you to in the long term buy more runes at cheaper prices/upgrade costs in order to have unique pages for every champion you play.

From a bussiness perspective it makes a lot more sense than what we have now. Every player has like the same 3-5 ideal Rune pages post 30 and the lack of anything meaning full to spend ip on is a wasted opportunity that riot missed the boat on. What's best for bussiness is rarely ideal for consumers. That being said I think it would still be a fair system that gave players something to work for. As it stands we all have huge banks of IP that have been playing for very long...and few champions left we care to buy expect in a whim, or on a new release that looks interesting.

I remember when I use to count how many games it would take to save up to buy something I wanted...now I barely notice how much IP I have, nor do I care. It's become irrelevant which is my point.