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Riot. please get rid of rune prices and make rune pages free. (WARNING LONG POST)

TheLadyOfPain498·9/9/2015, 6:01:45 PM·7 votes·561 views

The rune system in league of legends is one of the most broken and archaic parts of the game. At this point I would argue that practically no one thinks the rune system is logical or helpful for the game of league and it needs to be massively overhauled or just made free. Before I go into the reasons as to why runes specifically are a problem, I am going to bring up one of the points Riot brought up when talking about Sandbox Mode. In their argument Riot said that they wanted the game to not have an element of grinding being expected in order to play the game competitively. And even if you or I think that it's ludicrous to try to argue against sandbox mode or replays value to the competitive scene, let's accept "anti-grinding" as a legitimate argument because it is, as Far as I know, Riot's stance on League of Legends and their design philosophy. In order to even jungle in League you need to have a minimum number of runes. I remember playing the first 20 or so levels and not being able to clear the jungle no matter what pathing or champions I chose. I was always getting whooped on by the jungle monsters and dying or almost dying on my first clear. Also every single person who has legitimacy/experience/a voice in League will tell you that it is necessary to have Runes in order to jungle. Runes are a necessary component of the game even on the most casual/basic level in order to experience an entire potential role. The cost of having the runes necessary to jungle as every type of jungler adds up to 45,510 IP if you go off of the pricings listed under this post (https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/2s5snf/cheat_sheet_for_rune_pages_for_the_2015_season_as/) Now let's look at how much you have to play League in order to get enough to buy these runes. According to Bill Burr on (http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=1421124) you get x IP after playing a game for a certain time and winning or losing: 20 minute game: 64IP (win), 44IP (loss) 30 minute game: 88IP (win), 58IP (loss) 40 minute game: 111IP (win), 73IP (loss) 55 minute game (max): 145IP (win), 94IP (loss). So, after I did the math, you get the most IP possible by the game ending at 20 minutes. Now I am going to calculate the minimum amount of time you spend playing league to get runes using this information. This is because you get 32IP per ten minutes played as opposed to the 24 per ten increase you get for games that go over 20 minutes. Now we are going to assume that all you're trying to do is get your runes as quickly as possible, so naturally all you do is join blind pick games, surrender at 20 or have the other team surrender at 20 and then jump into blind pick. Then after assuming you lose the same number of times that you win you gain 108IP for every two games you play. The last assumption I am going to make before I calculate the amount of games you need to play in order to get all the runes the guide I linked to says you need or should have, is that there is a 5 minute downtime between games where you are in champ select loading into the game and looking for a lobby. The end result is that you need to play 843ish games (not including the first win of the day bonus). Which to be fair would drastically reduce this number, probably by close to half down to 420ish(lol #blazeit) in order to buy all the runes in order to just be able to jungle. This is not including buying new champions, or buying the rune pages you need in order to play the game competitively at your role or utilize the runes you are buying in this situation. Or even buying the runes you need to pay other roles. This is grinding. It's literally almost nessesary for you to grind in order to get the champions and runes you need or want to play the game. This is exactly contrary to Riot's statements about Sandbox Mode. This doesn't even address the fact that rune pages cost as much as a full priced recently released champion at 6300IP or 975RP. since a 25 dollar RP card that you can buy in any store gives you 3500 RP lets use that as a baseline for the cost of a rune page. Riot expects you to purchase rune pages at the staggeringly unnecessary price of 7 dollars a pop. This to me is ridiculous because it takes the already monstrous price of runes in terms of time needed to be spent and couples it with a cost of 126 dollars if there isnt a deal or special. That is ridiculous when you consider that in a competitive environment you want to be able to switch up your rune page based on what kind of match up you are going against. The most basic I can think of being an AP midlaner going against an AD mid wants straight armor yellows instead of scaling health yellows because that improves your odds of winning by functionally giving you more health. If you go up against someone who has more runes than you/ has more runepages so they can have multiple setups you are at an unnecessary disadvantage in competitive play or really any kind of play. The problems I see with making Rune pages and Runes free or cost less is that all the players who bought these things before will feel screwed because they were. It wasn't that the Rune prices were reasonable before, the problem is that they continue to be unreasonable. And I honestly don't think you can really not piss off a bunch of people unless you give them some RP or a skin for buying a certain amount of Runes before a certain date. Maybe you could make a skin for everyone who bought a rune page before a certain date as a weak apology to those people. Or you could just make them free and then have all the new players have a better experience than the people who were playing before. As a person who has bought rune pages and runes I would be fie with it because then I wouldn't feel inclined to buy anymore. Finally I have some unrelated points about the rune pages: why do tier one and tier two runes still exist and what is the rune combiner? Has anyone ever used the stupid Rune Combiner? Is there a point to using it or it continuing to be in the client? Answer: No there isn't.T ier one and tier two runes only exist to screw new player out of their IP because they don't know that they are wastes of IP so their continued existence are inherently stupid and it almost feel malicious on the part of Riot to still have tier one and tier two Runes because they clearly are just wastes of IP. That is all they are. New player traps.

2 Comments

SmokedAlmonds9/9/2015, 6:21:18 PM1 votes

I donno that we necessarily need anything terribly drastic changed, but I think there needs to be some boost at the start. Maybe some kind of pack you can buy only 1 time that comes with like 3 rune pages and either some preselected runes or just lets you pick a certain amount for a massive discount. Just to get people going.

I do think the rune tiers are kinda dumb, at least tier 2. Tier 1 are so cheap now that I think they are fine. The tiers probably shouldn't exist and they should just scale with your summoner level if they really need to be weaker for new players.

Candyxo9/9/2015, 8:53:42 PM1 votes

I like rune pages personally, I know there's a best way for each champion for runes to be used, but it's kind of fun to test diff runes out as well.

I do feel that the t1/t2 runes should just be taken out, they are rather pointless and a waste of IP as you had said, I liked the rune combiner, though I am not seeing it in my client currently and as far as I was aware it had been taken out, I did like using it though taking old runes and merging them to create other runes was kind of fun, I mean if you never plan on using the runes why not use it just for luls?

If they keep the tier 1 and 2 runes I think that the combiner should accept X amount of runes and allow you to convert the old tier runes into tier three runes, so that it doesn't feel like you definitely wasted IP on the lower tier runes.