Poll Results: Healthy player interest in "Vanilla LoL" (aka "Classic Mode")
TL;DR I made a poll to gauge player interest in Vanilla LoL -- almost half of all responses said they'd be interested and that they'd be willing to pay an average of ~$30 for it.
"Vanilla LoL" or "Classic Mode" is the idea of being able to play on an older patch of LoL (most likely from sometime around Season 3). Riot has addressed this topic before, basically saying "it's not worth it since most people would rather play on the live patch." However, Blizzard has recently done something similar with Warcraft, and although they initially had the same attitude as Riot (i.e. that players think they want to play on previous patches but they really don't), player support for vanilla WoW has been extremely positive.
With how often people in the League community are talking about the "good old days," back before damage creep was a thing, or towers were more powerful, before so many new champions had dashes and complex kits, and maybe before their favorite champion was reworked, I believe vanilla LoL would be a feasible game mode. The main barrier, of course, will be the lack of funding for Riot to make it happen.
Yesterday I posted a poll in the leagueoflegends subreddit as well as the Boards, asking 2 questions:
- Whether you'd be interested in playing on a "Vanilla LoL" server, and
- The amount of money you'd be willing to pay to play on this server.
I wanted to share the results of my poll with you guys.
Total number of responses: 47
Number of responses that are interested in Vanilla LoL: 22 (47% of total)
Number of responses that are only interested in playing if it's free: 5
Average amount of money responses are willing to pay: $29 more detailed results graph
To be honest, this level of response is actually quite impressive to me, especially considering that neither of my posts were upvoted past 1 point. So with such low visibility I got quite a few responses, almost half of which said they'd be interested in playing Vanilla LoL, and over 1/3 of which said they'd be willing to pay for the privilege of doing so.
If people are really willing to pay an average of $30 to play on Vanilla LoL, we'd only need 33k players (that's just .06% of the LoL player base or 1 in every 1500, assuming 50 million active players) to raise 1 million dollars to make this happen. If this really gets going, Riot could start a Kickstarter and raise a ton of money that way!
