Champion cost?

captinjoe2·Jul 30, 2019·2 votes·2,207 views

I just was wondering if anyone knows how Riot decides how much blue essence a champion costs? For example Ryze costs 450 blue essence, and Aatrox costs 6300. How do they decide these costs?

4 Comments

SEKAIJul 30, 20193 votes

A long time ago, it used to be that champion were released on different cost based on Riot's perceived difficulty of them; the harder the champ Riot thought they are to play, they were released with a higher cost. For instance, Poppy was released in the 1350 IP tier, Jarvaon IV was released in the 4800 IP tier, and Ezreal was released in the 6300 IP tier.

At some point in history, Riot simply made ALL champion to be released in 6300 IP tier.

Then at some point, it isn't enough anymore, so on the first week of release of a new champ they would be sitting at a seperate 7800 IP tier for 1 week before dropping to 6300 IP tier.

........

At some point Riot notices that there are way too many champs in the 6300 IP tier, and so they began their price reduction plan.

The price reduction plan was so that with each new champion release, 3 oldest champs of yet-to-be-cost-reduced would receive price drop.

But then at some point, Riot changed that to: with each new release the oldest 6300 IP champ is reduced to 4800 IP; with every 3rd new release an additional 4800 IP champion or below is reduced in price. This significantly cuts back the price drop scheme as initially proposed (initially 3 per new release, now 1 per new release and only 2 every 3rd new release), and this comes after the fact Riot doesn't release champ nearly as much as before too

........

And there's 1 extra kick: Since now your IP/BE gain is directly tied to the cost of champs since you only gain IP/BE by DISENCHANTING champion shards (unlike before you gain IP by simply playing the game, and get it after each match), this means that whenever Riot reduces a champion's price, they're also nerfing your IP/BE gain.

........

Just well played, Riot. Well played.