So, come have a chat with us about refunds. What is your department's philosophy behind them, and what ideas do you guys have going forward? The topic has been broached before but we have never actually had a response from Riot about more refunds being added/refunded. Come on, I know you guys have had at least one meeting on this topic. What can you tell us?
I'd be happy to have a dialogue with you guys. I suppose my question for you is: what is your use case for refunds? What makes a player want to use one? I think locking down the reasons players refund items is really important for figuring out the best strategy for both players and Riot.
Thoughts?
I have two instances of where I refunded content with a refund token I'd like to share. The first was back in Season 2. I was interested in Jayce and thought he looked fun. After a few weeks I discovered not only was I just not getting his kit, but I found it not to be as fun as I had anticipated and found the Champion overall to be boring in terms of personality, he was not worth the few weeks of IP gathering I took to get him. I refunded Jayce so I could in turn get Syndra. I found her more interesting to play and I feel like I've gotten more out of her than I ever could get out of Jayce (not in terms of power, but gameplay satisfaction)
The second instance was also during Season 2. One point earlier I had gotten Frost Queen Janna. At the time Janna was one of my favorite supports and I wanted a high quality skin. Fastforward and out comes the Kha'zix release bundle. I was very much hyped for Kha's release and the Mecha skin. At the time I did not have enough RP to get it and wasn't in the position to get more. So I used my second refund in order to upgrade to a higher point skin, and to this day it was one of my best league decisions
What my examples illustrate is how refunds turned regretable or potentially regretable situations into net gains. I got a Champion I enjoy more and a release skin bundle which has given back to me multi-fold, Riot even get a few extra bucks by letting me trade up to a higher priced skin set.
As for how do we deal with players who want more refund tickets. There have been a few options suggested. One idea is to give a refund at the start of every season, so every season starts off fresh. Another idea is a refund ticket for good behavior. Riot may be hesitant to give out refunds for free since they stated refund tickets would be set at 3 and only 3. An idea I had that could satisfy both parties is you get a refund token for spending $20 or more on a single RP purchase (not $20 worth of content, but buying $20 worth of RP). Players would be able to get a refund, but only after investing a sizeable amount of money into future content
I can understand why Riot is wary of giving out a lot of refund tickets. Riot might be trying to combat situations where someone has a lot of tokens to where they can buy one piece of content, then keep refunding to try out multiple others. Someone spends $10 and gets $50 worth of content over several months from those $10. One thing I'd like to bring up is if normal stores (like Costco or Target) can refund many items from one person without a problem, why can't Riot? And don't forget, you can refund almost anything from Target. The only thing I can think of is Riot doesn't want to deal with managing refunds, or as I said earlier, someone "exploiting" the system.
I do think more refunds should be available. Everyone makes mistakes or misses out on a cool deal that comes a few weeks after their purchase. Riot has been open to skin ideas, game modes, balance suggestions, and complaints but when it comes to refunds Riot seems to buckle up. Riot has constructed a healthy and expansive Free-To-Play model and they don't want to mess it up. But I'm sure we can find some middle ground on this issue. Personally having refunds has prevented me from having such regretable mistakes.
i use mine when i'm not happy with the skins i got, i purchased a skin which looked great, played it in-game and i figured i'd much rather have another skin
I think the biggest thing is people want to refund a skin that they might not enjoy as much, for another skin that they'd enjoy a lot more. That's what it is with me anyways.
3 every year pls
I know that my idea might cause a bit of work to implement, but would it be possible to give people a "Trial Token" system? Where a "Trial Token" can be used to test out a champion or skin for a short window of time (2 or 3 games/2 or 3 hours,) or in certain situations (like in the next 3 bots games or something like that.) This would give people a chance to make a decision on a champion before buying it for themselves or a friend.
Honestly I used one of my refunds on Jayce because I couldn't understand his kit at the time, I used the other one on Lucian because I didn't really like him or played him much and something else came along that I preferred. And lastly I refunded Lulu early in my career if I recall correctly, but later I got her again and learned to play her better. At the time I had no idea how to support because I was a wee newblet, now with several more battled under my belt I got her again.
EDIT: Meant to post this from my NA account, accidentally posted on my EUW account that I made recently to play with my friends. xD
Hello WizardCrab. My opinion is you should probably refresh the number of refunds let's say... Monthly? 3 refunds/month sounds good imo. There have been a couple of times that I've bought a champ and then I started to play him and I really hated it afterwards so then I would go to the shop and immediately refund him. We really need some kind of testing thing (or probably a new option on custom games?) that allows us to test all skins and all champs in-game to really see if we really like that skin and/or champ.
I only ever refund skins I really didn't like. I believe my refunds were used on... Quinn Bundle, Really didn't like phoenix Quinn. Corporate mundo - The novelty wore off. I was also broke and some other skins I wanted went on sale, so I bought some of those with the refund. And honestly, if I had more refunds I'd want to refund skins that I bought before a much better skin came out, like, for example, idunno... Nidalee. I'd want to refund Leopard Nidalee if I had bought Snowbunny nidalee when the re-release of Xmas skins happened.
I still think you should get another refund per certain amount of RP bought...
Can we please get 1 more free refund?? I will love you guise 5 ever <3
The only time I ever really want a refund is when content is drastically changed for the worse. i.e. when 
was homogenized and made weaker to allow unhealthy/predictable game play, I did not want my Brolaf skin anymore. If I don't like the 
kit gutting that just occured, I wil probably ask for my Skins to be refunded. Thats the issue I have with this ever changing game, some of the recent reworks remove all identity that a champion has in game, so I lose all empathy towards Riot and the choices made and wish to invest in another champion.
Well, when I first started playing LoL and got the free 400 RP, I bought Master Yi because I thought that RP was the in-game currency so, I refunded it to buy Master with the usual 450 IP. Then, I cheated a little with my second refund. I bought Volibear for 975 RP, waited for him to be on sale, then refunded and bought him again for 487 RP. Then the last one was to sell a champion I didn't like as much to buy another one which I prefered.
I would like to have more refunds since I have skins I hate and never use, especially the Mistery Gift ones, but that's another story. I started playing some champions less, or I realized the skin wasn't what I expected and that there was a better skin that I liked for that said champion. This is the case, especially with VUs, although the VU team does an excellent job with Traditional skins and keeping the overall theme of the skins and making them better.
I would like to ask for more refunds or limitless refunds, but I do understand why there's the limit (buying a champion or skin for full price then waiting for sale to refund and buy it for less is not fair for you guys in eMarketing). I personally have spent 300€ in LoL and I'm still waiting for the RP lifetime reward you guys have promised, but I would love it to have more refunds depending on how much RP I have spent.
Maybe you could do that, or make it so you can refund everything you buy but for a more limited set of time, although I would like to have the option of refunding skins I bought MONTHS even YEARS ago. Refund tokens every season maybe? I don't know if that's even plausible but I'm just suggesting...
TL;DR: I spent my Refund tokens on something I didn't want to buy, to buy the same exact item from the store on sale, and to refund a champion I didn't like that much to buy another one I liked more. I'd like to have more Refund Tokens in some way or form, if plausible, especially because I have spent so much money on RPs.
And as for Mistery Gifts, it would be awesome to have at least a chance to reroll the skin we get.
I have found that both many of my friends and I have used refunds on champions that they just really dont enjoy, whether that be they dont enjoy their playstyle or are just bad with them.
will it be at live servers too i mean refunds ? :D
I would like to have the option of try before you buy, a button that launches a game hosted on your computer with just you on the rift so you can walk around look at your skin/ see if you like using the abilities on champs
I think there should be an option just like the summoner name change, you spend a certain amount of IP to buy a refund, you can also put a RP price for it if someone wants to have a new fresh refund faster he can just buy it with RP but anyway my point is that, refunds shouldn't be limited simply because when you do use all of those 3 this refund option simply dies because you can't refund anymore what are you going to do when you click the purchases section in the store ... So yeah, that's just my opinion of course you can make refunds achievable in many other ways, those were just my thoughts.
Regards
Alright WizardCrab, I summon thee back.
I think there has been enough conversation/time, come on back and give us your input perhaps? I think the conversation has been 100% constructive as to player expectations with refunds moving forward.
I mainly use a refund when I buy a champion or skin and later realise that it didn't quite measure up to my expectations, but then again, i guess thats what Free Week is for, but as for skins, when you buy them, you're pretty much stuck with it, an underwhelming mass of pixels that you're stuck with for life, like... lets say: Rusty Blitzcrank, it was pretty much the same as turning down the brightness on your screen, then bam, you have a 520 RP skin for free, there was a large uproar due to the shabby quality of the skin, and subsequently became the first (and if memory serves me correctly, only) skin to be pulled from the store due to negative player feedback, but i'm pretty much still a noob here, so feel free to call me out on this if you think i'm wrong.
