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Does Riot owe you anything for $ spent on in-game purchases after a permaban?

YerroFever·5/3/2017, 5:36:45 PM·96 votes·8,317 views

I see a lot of people complaining about their permabanned accounts and how they spent X dollars on their account purchasing RP so Riot must refund them their money.

**The answer is no. **

You don't own your account. You don't own skins. You don't own champs. You do not own icons. You don't own the hextech loot items (any and all things earned and/or used in the hextech loot crafting system). Riot owes you no money when you violate the EULA and/or TOS and get your account permabanned.

Stop trying to get people's support because you spent money. When you agreed to the EULA and TOS, you agreed to let Riot revoke your license to Riot's intellectual property when you break their rules.

Long answer: When you download and play League of Legends, you are agreeing that you are entering into a licensing agreement and you don't actually own anything. You are just accessing their things. That big thing you click agree to without reading.... yeah, that's a limited licensing agreement.

Now some are going to say "but wait, I purchased RP from Riot!" If you read your EULA and TOS, you actually licensed RP from Riot. You purchased a license to use the in game item called "RP," which is an in game currency to access materials. You don't own that RP.

This RP purchasing system is most likely done for convenience sake so that they aren't burdened with micro-transactions with financial institutions for buying 1 skin and buying 1 chest and buying 1 icon and potentially getting hit with fees three times.Sometimes processing companies that do % fees and sometimes they do a flat fee and sometimes they do a mix. So for convenience sake, they say "everything has a RP value, so once you license the RP, you choose how to use it" and potentially get hit once with a fee. I'm not privy to their finances but for argument sake, say they have a flat $0.25 fee for each transaction. It ends up being crappy to get hit for $0.25 for something that costs $0.50. Three $0.50 purchases nets $0.75 vs getting a $1.50 purchase of RP and getting it by a $0.25 fee, making their net $1.25. Again this is just a hypothetical and I do not know their payment system, but there's at least one plausible explanation as to why the RP system is in place. It also probably has something to do with psychology of buying things. It's easier to crack down on purchases when you see a huge list of Riot purchases on your financial statements but one purchase every now and then makes it easier to justify.

Now, lets compare things you have accessed with RP to real life things.

Example 1: Compare this to a ticket to an amusement park. Your ticket is your license to access the park, just RP is a license to access in game content. It's understood that there are park rules and they're posted. This is like the EULA and TOS. Even though you may not know the rules word for word, you have a general understanding that you shouldn't do certain things in the park. So with that ticket (ie your LOL account) you have access to several different rides (maps, champs, skins, etc). Just because you bought an all day ticket and went on one ride over and over all day long, and then started screaming and harassing other patrons, doesn't mean you can't get kicked out. If you're screaming at other amusement park patrons and harassing them, the park can revoke your license to enter and remain in the park (ie kick you out) and keep your money. When you get kicked out, you can't say "well I didn't use the pass to access other parts of the park so you owe me a refund for the unused portion of my pass." You chose to not spend all of your RP before being a jerk and so when your license is revoked, it's your fault for not using the RP to the fullest extent while you had the license and access to it. The park owes you nothing after kicking you out for breaking their rules. Riot owes you nothing for permabanning you when you break their rules.

If you don't understand the previous analogy Example 2: Compare it to a lease to an apartment. Riot owns the apartment building and you are leasing a fully furnished room there. The lease is the EULA & TOS and the apartment is your account. You can all go down to the rec rooms and go into your lanes and play with each other. There's also a costume store that lets you rent costumes for an unlimited amount of time so you look cooler to your friends when you're playing with them. At the end of the day, even though you're spending real money renting an apartment and renting a costume, you don't own that apartment and you don't own that costume. If the lease says that you can't run up to fellow tenants and scream and harass other tenants, then you can be evicted from that apartment complex if you do scream and harass them. You agreed to those terms in your lease and agreed to let Riot be the judge, jury, and executioner in your lease. When you get evicted from an apartment, the apartment complex owes you nothing for the money you spent while living in their space. You don't get a refund for the years you spent living there. The apartment complex owes you nothing after you broke their rules and got evicted. Riot owes you nothing for permabanning you when you break their rules.

You have a limited license to access Riot's intellectual property. You do not own anything and you even agreed to let Riot revoke your access to their game and content for breaking their rules. You are responsible for your own actions and if your actions lead to a revocation of the license to access their game and content, then it's your fault you lost money. If you spent money you should do everything you can to make sure you can keep accessing that stuff by not being a toxic player because you don't own anything here.

EDIT: There are several posts about lack of testing the case law and not reading subsequent comments on all of the pages so here are the links:

last year someone tried to sue another big company.

Here is the complaint: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2943889/july7filing.pdf (click on the icon)

Here is the case progression: https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/15127781/CB_v_Valve_Corporation

The case was voluntarily dismissed by the cheater who used third party programs and lost their skins after the permaban. As stated in the comments, in Federal Court, if you lose, in many cases, the losing party has to pay the winning party's legal fees. In a voluntary dismissal, you can almost always get the case dismissed to have each party bear their own costs, which means they only pay their own legal fees and walk away. In many cases with large companies, legal fees through trial can be in the millions. Each firm bills at different rates but I can tell you it's very expensive.

139 Comments

Eternal Torment5/3/2017, 5:44:55 PM20 votes

this is very accurate, precise and correct. but the sad Thing is the people you address in this post are not even gonna read past the the answer is no before downvoting and angrily stomping away i fear. it wouldn't be this much of an issue if you could reason with them, after all.

Hyrum Graff5/3/2017, 10:06:45 PM9 votes

This RP purchasing system is most likely done for convenience sake so that they aren't burdened with micro-transactions with financial institutions

I'm sure this is part of it, but

It's easier to crack down on purchases when you see a huge list of Riot purchases on your financial statements but one purchase every now and then makes it easier to justify.

This is the real reason. If they were primarily interested in grouping microtransactions, they'd just make 1 RP = 1 cent; using a different currency makes it harder for people to do value comparisons with the real world. Eg, 1820 RP might seem like a reasonable price for a skin, but a lot of people wouldn't buy it if it said $12.50 instead.

Scary Door5/3/2017, 5:52:06 PM8 votes

While I agree with the sentiment that you're trying to project here, there are a couple of issues...

  1. The people that already know this don't really need to hear it/read it.

  2. The people that don't know this will ignore your thread much in the same way that they ignore the ToS/EULA.

So, you're ostensibly preaching to the choir.

With all of that having been said, there's an additional issue with your analogy.

{quoted}

If you don't understand the previous analogy Example 2: Compare it to a lease to an apartment. Riot owns the apartment building and you are leasing a fully furnished room there. The lease is the EULA & TOS and the apartment is your account. You can all go down to the rec rooms and go into your lanes and play with each other. There's also a costume store that lets you rent costumes for an unlimited amount of time so you look cooler to your friends when you're playing with them. At the end of the day, even though you're spending real money renting an apartment and renting a costume, you don't own that apartment and you don't own that costume. If the lease says that you can't run up to fellow tenants and scream and harass other tenants, then you can be evicted from that apartment complex if you do scream and harass them. You agreed to those terms in your lease and agreed to let Riot be the judge, jury, and executioner in your lease. When you get evicted from an apartment, the apartment complex owes you nothing for the money you spent while living in their space. You don't get a refund for the years you spent living there. The apartment complex owes you nothing after you broke their rules and got evicted. Riot owes you nothing for permabanning you when you break their rules.

The ToS is NOTHING like a lease on an apartment.

If the landlord or building owner wants to kick you out, they have to give proper notice, they can not just evict you at any time or for any reason in the way that Riot can. If a landlord evicts a tenant without following the law then they are subject to sanctions. Landlord-tenant law is very complicated and has many layers that protect both sides from one another and, as such, there is a lot of give-and-take when it comes to the law there. With Riot, there is absolutely no give-and-take... it's their way or the highway, you are completely at their mercy---which is fine because you agreed to that when creating an account, just understand that it is NOTHING like leasing an apartment.

In an apartment lease, the tenant has rights, in a private, online video game, you don't have rights other than basic consumer rights that may protect you from fraud, etc.

Ad Astra per Asp5/3/2017, 8:55:19 PM7 votes

So let me get this straight, because Riot decided to make it so when you buy something you don't own it in their license agreements, they get to fuck you over and steal what you bought. The sad part is people will defend this as if it's common practice. It's too common place in the world of corporate greed where taking things from consumers, including rights, is met with someone with a stick up their butt condescendingly spouting legal verbage to you and telling you why Riot will get their way. And they will. Unless enough people are unhappy with it and stick up for their rights. Which you OP, are clearly not doing. I have not been perma'd and I do not want perma'd. But I once read a comment by a Riot employee about how it was a money making machine to ban toxic players and take all their stuff they purchased and then they just go buy it again. You can say whatever you want about caring about perma'd players as human beings or not (hint, they are still humans even if you don't like them) but you're basically justifying Riot screwing over the consumer which I think is very stupid being as how I am a consumer and I don't want Riot to dream up more legalized BS ways to be able to screw me over. What is next, if I had an afk they can take a skin b/c my internet DC'd? Or all skins are now leased and you can only rent them? I mean, if you don't draw the line here, what's the expression, give and inch they take a mile? Yah, that's every greedy corp ever so I don't care what you think of toxic players or whatever I don't like them either but this is about consumer rights and as a consumer I care.

CØulrophobia5/3/2017, 10:18:52 PM5 votes

I could go citating over ToS and argue about many "facts", eventualy resulting in 30 posts long disscussion which ends up in you calling me names and me telling you to fk off, or i can just nod and say i agree 100% with this BS.

*Nod *Nod I agree 100% The system works perfectly and RIOT should in fact strangle their great source of income so that LoL can finaly become p2p game, thus ridding it of 90% playerbase(because who doesnt like extended queue times, bad in game support, patch ever half a year and YT rants)

It is 100% good choice to kick out players that helped the game grow and that supported it over the years. Makes you make even more loyal customers.

It doesn't encourage accaunt marketing at all.

It won't ever help boosters.(nor hackers, scripters and cheaters)

Can i now say Noob without getting permabanned?

YerroFever5/3/2017, 7:53:31 PM3 votes

There are exceptions to notice but those are usually cases arising for 3rd party programs. If you flag someone and let them know they're using a 3rd party program, then this gives the cheaters an opportunity to remake their program to make it harder to detect and thus enabling cheaters to ruin the gaming experience for the rest of the community on a never ending basis. By doing bans in waves without notice and not instantaneously, it makes it harder for developers to make cheating programs that are undetectable. This is a strategic thing for cost saving measures and also another hurdle for programmers because they don't know why their program got someone banned. I completely agree with their logic on this. Make it harder for people to hack their games.

For toxicity, they do often use notice and only in the most extreme of severe cases, they will just outright permaban.

As for EULA's and TOS's, they are potentially shaky grounds but there are lots of things that have already been set by both legislation and by courts. When a TOS and/or EULA is so one sided that it could constitute an unconscionable contract term, yes. However, there is a lot of consumer protection case law that shows EULA's and TOS to be valid.

There are things that won't hold up in every single court, however, in many courts they will. For example, in California, say you're an eSports player for a California team corporation that signed a non-compete clause for playing games for other teams after they've left. It's actually invalid in California under the law and holds no weight in the contract but people still put it in there to put the fear in pro players to try and get people to stay through fear instead of building a good relationship and loyalty between team owner and players. However, if you're in a place that says non-competes are fine if they are reasonable (based on their own case law) then that non compete holds and you may be stuck with a non-compete that will be valid.

To say they're shaky is kind of true because depending on where you go to court, it may be valid or may be invalid. However, unconscionable is quite a high bar and it has to be a really insane or the situation has to be so oppressive and there is no bargaining power for one party to get a court to invalidate the term.

If you're thinking about the AT&T case in Washington which had the TOS which had parts overturned, (the most notable clause was that it prevented people from suing in class actions and had to do arbitration), you should be aware that the case had a lot of other reasons and had a combination of factors that led to several terms being overturned together and not a ban on each and every term individually.

To show that the Washington case was about a set of terms that were overturned because of their combination and not because every single term individually should be overturned, there was also an AT&T case that went all the way up to the US Supreme Court that actually held that preventing class actions was completely valid under the federal arbitration act. (AT&T Mobility v Concepcion).

I agree that it's a shaky subject because there are a lot of nuances that go into it and not everyone will understand the case law.

Goldilux5/5/2017, 6:02:23 PM3 votes

HE'S TROLLING YOU

{quoted}

I could go citating over ToS and argue about many "facts", eventualy resulting in 30 posts long disscussion which ends up in you calling me names and me telling you to fk off

He told you he does this before. He's baiting you to harass him on the forums to get you punished by typing completely nonsensical things and aggravating your sense of logic.

abbbez5/3/2017, 10:57:01 PM2 votes

I've never gotten banned at all in league, but I still think that permanent ban is a bit harsh, I do agree that they should be banned but a more appropriate ban time like 6 months to a year.

FlowDartX5/4/2017, 1:27:32 AM2 votes

The issue with the "Riot owns your account your skins and your experience" is that they use the connotation of buying skins and buying RP. The connotation implies that you now own said RP skins or other objects. And if taken to any court about this issue, Riot would lose because they falsely advertised what they are actually doing under the knowledge that nobody reads terms of use.

Nobody has challenged it because people like you exist that firmly believe that Riot is in the right for performing a white collar crime known as extortion.