Party Rewards may be headed back to the workshop, but we’re curious about your thoughts on the system. We’ll take a look at the results of the test period and report back soon. We’re hopeful that Party Rewards encouraged more games with friends and more friendly games.
Thanks for testing and we’re looking forward to sharing the results!
Instead of the random element to a big reward, just make the prize pool lower and have it give higher rewards every game. So even if the reward is 1.2x what you'd normally get, just make it happen every game. It's pathetic having 5 people in your party and the biggest reward you got was 22 IP bonus.
I'm not sure what the data will tell you, but I can assure you that I never felt like I was getting any rewards, even if I did get a bonus +30ip or whatever.
It just didn't give me any emotional satisfaction at all
First let me say this: It's nice to see that their trying to improve the IP system; it does need work.
Second: Okay, so I understand that this is a business, and the idea is that you have x number of players and it takes y number of games to earn a champion.
Currently the improvement system seems lackluster, and several of my friends who came who don't normally play came and basically said after just 3-4 games "This is stupid, I get like 5 extra IP. Then logged off once again probably for months."
Now lets say it was better and the player felt like they could earn champions quicker, they would likely be more willing to play the game. More willing to stay, spend money on skins, and champions. Dota2 for example gives you ALL the heroes for free! And it is still a successful game!
Okay with that said. So lets do some math.
Lets assume you played 2 games (at least) per day. You lose one and you win one. (50/50)
The win gives you 300 IP (FWoTD bonus (generous estimate)) and the loss (or win, doesn't matter much) gives you on average 70 IP. So you earn 370 IP Per day playing 2 games. With drafting and game start and etc, it takes ~45-60 minutes per game, lets average that to 50 minutes. 370IP/100 minutes = 3.70 IP/min @ 2 games. Extrapolating now.
370IP/100 minutes = 3.70 IP/min @ 2 games 440IP/150 minutes = 2.93 IP/min @ 3 games 510IP/200 minutes = 2.55 IP/min @ 4 games 580IP/250 minutes = 2.32 IP/min @ 5 games 650IP/300 minutes = 2.17 IP/min @ 6 games 720IP/350 minutes = 2.06 IP/min @ 7 games 790IP/400 minutes = 1.98 IP/min @ 8 games 860IP/450 minutes = 1.91 IP/min @ 9 games 930IP/500 minutes = 1.86 IP/min @ 10 games
My point here, is that the dedicated player base is earning less IP per minute.
Lets say a dedicated player plays 5 games at least a day and the casual plays 2.
There are 123 Champions currently costing 480,450IP (avg=3906IP) OR 96365RP (avg=784RP). Therefore currently you could purchase all 123 champions instantly for 650.00 from the store. 6*(100$ RP Bundle) + 1*(50$ RP Bundle)
OR
You can spend: 1298 Days @ 2 games per day. 1091 Days @ 3 games per day. 942 Days @ 4 games per day. 828 Days @ 5 games per day. 739 Days @ 6 games per day. 667 Days @ 7 games per day. 608 Days @ 8 games per day. 558 Days @ 9 games per day. 516 Days @10 games per day. To EARN the IP to buy all the champions!
So these are our y for x players for the entire champion pool(cp). Lets add some real world modelling to this now, lets say player has a minimum wage job at 9$ per hour. They get ~7$ after taxes. So how many overtime hours do they need to work to earn all the champions? Easy 650/7$ = 93 hours. Doing 8 extra hours per month, this could be achieved in just under a year (11.625 months).
Okay so with these numbers now, You can see that the process of getting all the champions is really slow. Over 4 years playing 2 games per day. And playing 10 games (which is the better part of a whole day), takes over 1.5 years. This is the worst of all the moba's out there.
They neeeeed to make this better. I have many many many friends that would play this game if it werent for this insanely disgusting grind. And honestly they would probably spend money on skins if they got into the game. Riot is losing sooo much potential money from the playerbase that would be here if the IP system was better.
I mean. Add a wheel of fortune, that you can spend 2800 IP on to spin which wins you a champion. 2800 for random, and still 6300 for specific. This adds really awesome complexity, people can save up for ones they want, but it also encourages people to spend real money on specifics and roll their ip on randoms. This makes the grind much less painful and people love to gamble! Probably have to add in caveats like, can't spin if you own more than total_number_of_champions-10. It will make you so much money Riot!
The whole time I was thinking "Okay, 1-8 IP every match is fine and dandy since I'm only playing with 1-2 other people, but I wish it'd be more consistent."
I'd say do something more consistent than a bell curve with 95% of results at the bottom 5% of rewards. Like actual randomness with a lower ceiling.
5 people = 50%-200% bonus 4 people = 40%-160% bonus 3 people = 30%-120% bonus 2 people = 20%-80% bonus
Seems the most fair to me. That way the average comes out to be a pretty nice bonus for us (still ~30 games to get a 6300 champ vs the old ~70 with a full party) without totally killing your RP sales.
Rito pls.
I completely agree with Knightress "just make the prize pool lower and have it give higher rewards every game.", I love the idea of starting low with rewards then gradually getting higher amounts. Think of it like a combo timer. The more you do something the higher the points. Thank you for taking your time to read this Rito.
Thank you for 15ip. it was well worth the 15 games
The problem: Rewards are rare. Noticeable rewards are super rare. Nobody is going to party up for a small chance at more IP -- at least not with party rewards in mind.
Your goal should be to make us want to play with friends. Make us not want to play solo if we could be playing with friends. Right now party rewards doesn't do that.
Personally I love the idea of consistent rewards. Despite having played LoL for a very long time, I'm not even close to owning all of the content buyable with IP, despite buying some with RP. I know that you guys want to avoid people owning everything for the sake of business, but at the same time, new players have it super rough these days. There are so many things that are almost mandatory to play competitively and it takes forever to grind it out without paying money. It's one of LoL's most unattractive features, alongside the leveling process.
**Rather than disjointedly replying to other people's comments and hoping for the best, I'll leave my remarks here so they're hopefully seen and taken into consideration. **
I absolutely loved the concept, foremost. Anything that adds incentive for making friends and playing with them consistently over always playing with new people from a pool of, what, 12m people?, is a blessing. I can't tell you how eager I was to get into game and tear into this, hoping for that big jackpot. I gathered up my online friends, got them to gather up their friends, added everyone to my friends list, and we took off into the rift.
Now, at the end of the event, I can safely say if any rewards were earned, if any jackpot was earned, it completely slipped by me and my scouring of the endgame stats and match history.
Scott Wade: I'm not sure what the data will tell you, but I can assure you that I never felt like I was getting any rewards, even if I did get a bonus +30ip or whatever.
It just didn't give me any emotional satisfaction at all
Exactly this. I partied up constantly the entire time this event was active and I'm pretty sure I got no rewards. If anything, it just built up the expectation that "something awesome is going to happen!" and it never once paid off. I get that it's a jackpot, and it's not going to happen all that often, but not once? Easily 40~60 games, and not once did I get any reward? Bad times.
If you hit the jackpot, there should be some celebration/splash/sfx on the endgame stats page -- something very obviously alerting you to the fact that, hey, you hit the jackpot, baby!
It would be nice if there was definitely a more consistent and worthwhile reward for playing with friends. Not only would it incentivize better behavior (so that you can make friends in games), it just makes the game more fun all around to get to know the playstyles of, and learn to rely on, your teammates. Piddly rewards with a chance at a reward somewhat less piddly isn't doing that.
This is not something that should happen for a short period of time. This is definitely a part of how the game should be, period. That it boosts the IP gain of people that actually play nicely together with people is not a bad thing -- they should absolutely be rewarded in a way that doesn't feel completely insignificant. This should happen on a fairly regular basis, though, and in an amount equal to the effort of grouping with x number of players. The jackpot should be an added bonus on top of already solid group rewards.
Possible problems here:
-- 1. So we're talking about incentivizing playing nicely, making friends, and playing with said friends, right? What about the people that don't want to do this? They just get shafted?
To say that not doing something resulting in not being rewarded is getting shafted is a strange interpretation of things, me. This being a mainstay feature in the game would help Riot out in many ways, not the least of which is encouraging and incentivizing positive player behavior. If you choose to continue to be a unfriendly/antisocial (or, even worse, toxic) player, should you be rewarded? You're not contributing all that much to the community, but hey, you still get to play the game the way you want to. The best reward you can hope for if you choose to do nothing is that nothing changes for you. And nothing will. Yippee!
-- 2. Does it mean they'll play the game less because they get to a point where they don't need any IP?
Doubtful. They're playing a team game with friends. Even if they want to get out of it, their friends will usually pull them back in. If it's not the friends encouraging them to rejoin, it's simply being on vent/curse voice/skype with the friends and hearing how much fun they're having in LoL that'll do it.
-- 3. Doesn't this mean they wouldn't be spending real money on the game? Isn't that the opposite of what Riot wants?
Here's the thing. Let's say the party rewards become a full-time feature. All the time, this is just how the game is now. People that make friends and play nicely are now able to have enough IP to get a good portion of the things they want without needing to open up their wallets. This is just the way things should be.
Paying real money for something you can get if you're just a little patient does not feel good at all. Not needing to pay money for said things makes the experience of a F2P game feel more wholesome and rewarding. It's like the game is being good to you for you being good to it. In our stupid monkey brains, and this is a real thing that happens, this creates massive goodwill to the company that creates the game. We start thinking of Riot as an entity that is nice to us. (Corporations = people, right?) League of Legends is our friend. We start to want to support the game that is so good to us. Thus, we open our wallets. Even people that would otherwise 100% oppose ever spending money on something silly like a cosmetic change in an otherwise free video game would do so.
-- 4. So some people will spend because they like Riot. Doesn't that equate to an overall loss, though, because they're no longer spending on IP Boosts and other money-wasting garbage that doesn't feel good or rewarding anyway?
It's a loss because they're no longer having to spend on stupid shit, yes, but it's an overall gain because brand loyalty is a crazy thing. The more goodwill we feel toward League of Legends, the more we play. The more we play, the more invested we get into it. The more invested we are, the more we justify spending a few bucks here and there to pick up something nifty like ward/champ skins to make us stand out in-game. Basically, the more we love the game, the more we really, really love it. And we reward Riot by showering them with our affection/money.
This also translates massively to spreading the word, encouraging/pressuring friends/family/acquaintances/strangers into playing the game, too. The happier we are with the game, the more people we spread the word to. The happier we are with the game, the better the word we're spreading is. (e.g. instead of saying, "Yeah, I play League of Legends. It's alright." and turning people off to the game forever, we say, "DUDE, have you played League of Legends? No? Seriously? Go download it, now. Or you're dead.") The more people playing, the more people spending. Net gain.
-- 5. But with all of those extra people, everyone is still spending less than if everything was frustrating to earn the slow way, right?
Nope. Quality of life (in the gaming world) all leads to brand loyalty. Everything's coming up Riot! More fans. More fans that are fanatic about the game. More fanatic fans (not to be confused with Fnatic fans) means more fanart, more community involvement, more exposure, more word-of-mouth recommendations, and more people attending live League events. (Like me, in May!) And, of course, more money for Riot.
In summation, I love League of Legends, and League of Legends loves me. I think. Sometimes.
Its interesting to see how Riot made this Party Rewards system in order to experiment with the amiability among players within games in which people are getting together in larger groups and more often. Somewhere along the way, it had been construed to fit the false pretense that Riot did this to give out free IP, and while the vast majority of players are salty that they didn't get their "much deserved" jackpot reward, I find it sad that once again, we're looking at it as a means to spoil ourselves, rather than to improve the in-game community. Would Riot re-implement this system again? Maybe. I have no doubt in my mind that it did in fact reduce the "toxic factor" in games, yet there's still a question worth asking: Is it less toxic because people are playing in groups, or is it less toxic because people are drooling over the IP bonus to come?
I would like to comment on a negative side effect that I saw from this system. The extra I, though small, was nice and I understand not wanting to ruin your economy by making the amounts anything large. I appreciate the desire to give the community a chance to earn the IP a little more quickly.
However, I normally play with 1-2 other people so we rely on solo players to fill up the rest of our spaces. With party rewards added in, no one wanted to play solo and this made the wait for solo players a ton longer almost instantaneously. There were times we were waiting over 20 minutes in team builder for a player. Without having a junglers and support already in your team when you start searching it almost became not worth it to play because the wait was so long. The extra IP was great, but I think we made more IP before because we didn't have to wait do long to start up a game.
I played duos for all my games immediately after the system was implemented, and then yesterday while playing with four friends, I got my first reward: 1 lp. So. Yeah, I would say the system was unsatisfying as 
's experience reaching the top cupboard for some cereal in the morning.
The random % of rewards that we got were much more often less than the regular rewards that were given from simply playing a 5v5 custom game. My friends and I played 5 man queues often during this and only received larger than a 15-20IP bonus for playing maybe once or twice during the weeks this was live.
I really liked this in concept but if you were to make this a permanent part of League of Legends, then I would suggest tweaking the rewards or the random possibility generator for getting bonus IP rewards.
I agree that this would make others play together more often, increasing team play and synergy among friends. But this also has a good possibility to increase positive community growth and give players an opportunity to see how League of Legends is supposed to be seen as and play as.... A team game! One where every role is important and not one person is ever to blame for a loss because there are ALWAYS opportunities for a cohesive team to make plays together (short of trolling).
I usually play with 3 or 4 people and I think the most we ever got was +34 ip. It was more of a joke to see how little we would get every game. Most of the time it was between 1-5. Getting 1 bonus ip was always good for a laugh!
This bothered me a lot as we got 5 people together just trying to get the high rewards and we never got anything higher than 13 and saying we could get 16X was really a let down when we got none.
(from EUW) I just felt like it's the most useless "feature" in the game. I play with at least 2 other friends all the time, sometimes 3, and 4 if we're lucky. But all we have gotten so far, is 16IP max. And that's this one time only. We got 7IP once, and then most of the time it's 1 and 2 IP. Like it does not change anything at all. I probably only got like 50 IP out of these 2 weeks. Especially when you hype the whole thing up like "you can win a jackpot of up to a few thousands of IP!!!", it just makes us disappointed lol.
The first day or two of this in matches where I remembered to look to see how much I got I almost always got no bonus at all. After that I started to notice I would get some but it was usually so little that I felt cheated. A few days ago I teamed with two friends and got one whole IP from one match in which we lost. The next match we added two more, having a full team and we got nothing extra from a match we won. The matches were ARAM matches. The most I think I got all week was from a match with one of my friends where we won 82 IP from winning the match and another 17, I think, from being teamed together. I get why Summoner's Rift gets the most attention and the like but I prefer ARAM and especially for something like this that is based off team size like the other match types get cheated by that favoritism.
Basically I felt like I got little to no extra IP no matter how many people I had on my team going into a match which seems to defeat the purpose of this change. It wasn't long before I was wondering if there was something I did wrong to get so little all the time or if the rewards were just skewed so low that they weren't really worth pursuing. From the description before hand I thought I would get a good amount of bonus IP since I usually team with friends but the reality fell frustratingly far short of that expectation.
I feel like the Jackpot should be more consistent, even if the maximum is lowered
The "lottery" approach to giving participation incentives is the result of much research. The problem is that it doesn't apply here.
Businesses seeking to get people to, say, participate in a survey have done studies and found that more people say they will participate if there's an ambiguous chance at a large prize, versus if there's a smaller (but reliable) reward.
But League is different. It's people already choosing to participate in a reward system, and an entity wanting to entice them into a long-term change in how they do so. A bonus that is usually absurdly trivial, with a microscopic chance at a huge bonus, isn't going to work for that. It just annoys people.
And, anyway, the company doing a survey is able to obfuscate the insanely small odds of you winning. "A chance at a thousand dollars" doesn't point out that it's one in a million. But in League, people quickly learn that the odds are too small.
Besides, the companies who use the "chance at a prize" system to get survey responses are making a mistake in the first place, they just haven't figured this out, yet:
They are creating a self-selecting pool of participants, the same sorts of nitwits who keep casinos and state-monopolized lotteries in business. Not the average people who do those things on rare occasion for amusement, but the ones who seriously think they're likely to win.
Did the company really want to survey only the dumbest potential customers? Of course not. At some point they'll figure that out and the trendy "chance for a prize if you take the survey" tactic will fall out of fashion.
But it doesn't even work to start, in this case.
What is desired is a global change in behavior among the population pool, not just the snagging of the bad edge of the bell curve regarding any grasp of logic or mathematics.
