Refer-a-Friend retires in thirty days

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!