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"All Runes are not Created Equal" - My suggestion for improving players' relationships with runes

Zovc··9 votes·1,180 views

summoner 13 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.Soraka

11 Comments

Sir ArmaMalum3 votes

I feel this is relevant: ricklessabandon on runes.

Runes are being looked at, but the changes were intended to be done by pre-season so either priorities shifted or they ran into problems. I'm sure there will be a change soon. Maybe not exactly like the ones you've suggested, but balance changes are incoming as well as more intuitive decisions for purchasing. There has also been some agreed upon dis-pleasure with the current rune combiner feature.

Zovc1 votes

Yeah, I remember reading Ricklessabandon's thoughts on Runes now that I've read through it again. Thanks for the refresher, though.
I still feel like, even after toning down the 'best in class' runes (like armor yellows), 'forcing' players to start getting specific core runes is a good idea. Armor will still always be good (maybe not always the best) for jungling and (at the very least) the bottom lane as an example.

Sir ArmaMalum1 votes

I completely agree, and your idea to have the tier system limiting people to a choice of stats is a cool idea.

Zovc2 votes

Better than limiting people to weaker runes for no good reason, I think.
What's even the purpose? People can't spend money on IP, so it's not like Riot gets money out of people wasting IP. Sure, they can buy IP boosts, but I feel like that's already incentivize enough with how egregiously pricey (in my opinon, it's kind of arbitray, after all) runes are to begin with.

Sir ArmaMalum3 votes

My best guess is since this rune system (not the numbers the system as a whole) was designed since the beginning the idea of having different tiers of runes sounded like a good idea at the time, they probably expect the climb to 30 be this comparatively short and wanted to give people that are almost there an option to improve their early game.

Hermaestus2 votes

They probably do indirectly generate revenue from people wasting IP. If people spend all their IP on runes they don't have any left for champs. So some people will purchase RP to get the champs they really want instead of waiting for their IP to accumulate.

Beowwulf1 votes

Yea I'd say anything that get's riot more money. They really deserve to have made us such a great game that you can play without purchasing anything at all.

willuwontu2 votes

Not a bad idea. I like the idea of them being limited in what they can buy. Another idea that I've seen that would probably go well with this one is training pages. Like how in COD you get premade layouts, and then can make your own.

There should be a set of standardized rune pages for people to use at a lower level when they can't afford that many. It will also give them an idea of how runes work, and let them see some of the variety they have.

Zovc1 votes

I really like your premade runepage idea, I'll edit that into the main post with your permission. In case your comment gets smothered by others.

Ceridran1 votes

[deleted]

Sir ArmaMalum1 votes

Oh but once you get them....they have saved my butt so many times.

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