Refer-a-Friend retires in thirty days

Riot·7/17/2015, 10:45:39 PM·8 votes·341,678 views

Refer-a-Friend, a system built to make it easy and rewarding to bring your friends into League originally launched in 2010. Over the years, we updated Refer-a-Friend a few times to make prize tiers more achievable and reduce botting. Since relaunching RAF earlier this year we’ve been tracking how both new and referring players play with the feature and the results show it’s not helping players find new people to game with. In fact, we experimented with turning RAF off in some regions, and there was no discernible change in social behaviors. League’s social systems should make it easier and more rewarding to hit the Rift with friends, but RAF just doesn’t meet that bar anymore. Because of that, we’re retiring the program in thirty days.

Recent features like Party IP, friend discovery and Team Up and Pool Party helped players play with friends and unlock cool rewards while doing it. We plan on forging ahead, concepting, building, and supporting social systems and features that do all the above.

In the meantime, RAF remains fully operational, so you can still earn up to 5000 IP, as well as Grey Warwick and Medieval Twitch by referring five friends before September 5th. Once the program wraps, the two skins become limited edition, but may return as rewards for another social system somewhere down the line. High-volume referrers from legacy versions of RAF remain on our radar as well. We’re actively working with each individual to fulfill their rewards and won’t consider RAF genuinely wrapped until that work is complete.

RAF closes down on September 5th. We’ll hang around the comments to clear anything up!

666 Comments

Landocommand08/6/2015, 7:11:11 PM188 votes

RAF gets removed but graves... stopped his smoking habit. This is good.

Zombie Grue8/6/2015, 7:31:26 PM142 votes

A friend of mine worked as an IT support operator for a major company and would would refer his customers. He helped something like 12-25 people per shift and after about 2 months he had over 100 referrals. Rito denied him the rewards and claimed he must be botting to accumulate that much volume in such a short time. He got his boss to email, call AND snail mail Riot, but they still denied him. He never played League again in disgust.

one of those stories that won't happen again. RIP RAF.

DeadJokr8/6/2015, 7:25:09 PM62 votes

Too many people are already playing this so its hard to find people to referral Amumu

Thetrex20038/6/2015, 7:27:14 PM23 votes

Lets say you referred a friend and they didn't hit lvl 10 yet. If they hit 10 after the retirement do I still get my reward or no? @rito

ScaredOfClocks8/6/2015, 7:04:17 PM18 votes

I really don't like that idea of just getting rid of the skins. Maybe re-release them as 975 or 750 RP for medieval twitch and 520RP for the Warwick skin? And give the people who got them from refer a friend the vintage edition? It's just that there are people like myself who joined during the boom of people playing League and it was and still is impossible to get anyone to play for more than 5 or even 15 levels without doing it yourself which is a banable offense. I was hoping to get the skin one day legit from bugging people or just actually referring people. But sadly anyone I knew already played or didn't like the game. (Mind you this is the 2 years of me playing I have only gotten 1 person to play to level 15 and that was a friend I bugged to no end )

On a side note though this is also even sadder news cause it is a kind of sign that League has hit it's peak.

R.I.P. Refer system And R.I.P. Gray Warwick and Medieval Twitch. 1 good skin and 1 amazing skin gone to rest.

Darkwolf1288/6/2015, 8:21:22 PM14 votes

Adc has their support

Top Lane has Jungler

And Mid lane has Dragon Mordekaiser

T0PH BEIFONG8/6/2015, 7:11:02 PM11 votes

first graves cant have a cigar and now refer a friend is goneGraves

xLalipop8/6/2015, 7:31:33 PM8 votes

Wait, why exactly are you getting rid of RAF?

McAnnex8/11/2015, 3:59:13 PM5 votes

I just referred a friend and got an email that says " RAF closes down on August 20th." -- The RAF ending article says 9/5... can we get clarification on that?

Fronzens8/6/2015, 8:08:12 PM4 votes

if i dont have these champion ,can i get these skin?

wheatley978/6/2015, 7:23:47 PM4 votes

So what will happen with the Grey Warwick and Medieval Twitch skins?

jOokiNg8/6/2015, 8:31:10 PM4 votes

how can you check to see how many you have?