"All Runes are not Created Equal" - My suggestion for improving players' relationships with runes
All Runes are not Created Equal
My suggestion for improving player's relationships with runes
I'm certain that by now Riot has been familiarized with people's opinions of runes. From what I can tell, there are two schools of thought:
Save your IP, you'll need it for when you're level 21 and can buy tier 3 runes.
and
Tier 1 runes aren't that bad, you can buy those. But avoid Tier 2 like the plague.
Both of these are fairly unintuitive, considering there's a clear (or at least visible) progression from tier 1 to 2 to 3. Potency and cost both increase as you progress from one tier to the next (albeit at hardly the same rate).
While there's nothing wrong with progression, there is something wrong with encouraging players (simply by giving them the option) to spend a finite currency on something that stands only to become obsolete. New players don't have access to the knowledge or understanding of why they shouldn't spend IP on tier 2 runes without having someone explain to them that they are far more expensive than tier 1 without even a remotely close (literally comparative) gain in stats.
My suggestion to remedy this is fairly simple: Remove tiered runes. Of course, I have suggestions for what should be done after that, as well.
Now let's say we've agreed to remove tier 1 and 2 runes. "10/10, would do again!" Right? Okay, I probably haven't sold you yet...
With only tier 3 runes in the rune shop (and all reference to tiers we can find being removed from the game; all tier 1 and 2 runes being upgradable at something like 3:1 to the next tier), even level 1 summoners have full access to all of their rune pages.
"But Zovc! How will new players be able to make informed decisions with their IP with access to all these crazy runes?"
That's a problem we have right now, I bought 9 Scaling Mana/5 Seals when I hit level 21 (Whoops!). But I think there's a fairly intuitive and safe solution to this. Allow lower-level summoners to only purchase useful runes. Here are some examples:
Level 10 summoners are only able to purchase:
Mark: Attack Damage, Magic Penetration
Seal: Armor
Glyph: Magic Resist
Quintessence: Ability Power, Health, Lifesteal, Movement Speed
This is an elegant way of teaching players the 'roles of the runes.' Marks augment your offensive prowess, Seals augment your armor (what else do these do, again?), Glyphs augment your magic (resist), and Quintessences are your efficient and powerful wildcards.
Naturally, buying one rune of any given type gives you incentive to purchase more runes of that type. This sets new players on the right track towards being able to jungle, and just having useful runes in general.
At level 20, players gain the ability to also purchase:
Mark: Attack Speed, Hybrid Penetration
Seal: (lol armor...) Gold Generation?
Glyph: Scaling Magic Resist, Cooldown Reduction
Quintessence: Attack Speed, Armor Penetration, Gold Generation
By the time you hit level 30, you've got a vested interest in finishing your sets of generally useful runes before making the blunder of purchasing Critical Damage runes or something silly like that. And you've also made progress towards having sets of runes you're actually going to use for the rest of your League of Legends career.
Furthermore, like I said, this allows Riot to illustrate to players what the 'roles of runes' are, by type. Anyways, the idea that "All Runes are not Created Equal" means that League of Legends should automatically steer players towards purchasing useful runes rather than encouraging them to spend their precious IP (that could be spent on friggin' characters!) on something they'll never use once they start 'taking the game seriously.'
Thanks. Bananas.
