Why is it that...

Runes are so expensive?

A boost reduces the games needed to acquire a complete rune page from ~87 (win/loss I picked roughly 100 ip) to ~44. That is around 5 and a half days at 8 games a day. Doesn't that sound insane? 7 day boost, which is $8.00 and then 26 hours (35 minutes per game, although it's likely higher).. For one rune page. Without a boost, it's 51 hours of game-play for a full page (Cheapest).

To me that sounds like an incredible amount of work to get something that is pretty necessary for the game if you plan on playing any ranked.

One full rune-page of the cheapest tier 3 runes is 8,610 ip. Definitely more than any champion The most expensive, hopefully my math is right here, is 28,290 ip. O_O