How League Of Legends Can Best Compensate Players For Runes

With rune changes on the horizon in the upcoming Runes Reforged format that’ll combine runes and masteries in a new format, changes have been met with questions at every turn. How will each of the players’ favorite champions be balanced out without raw stats that runes grant, what kinds of runes can we expect, and most of all, how will players be compensated for all of their runes purchases over the past couple of years?

Players were a bit annoyed to say the lease to find out that they wouldn’t be reimbursed for the rune pages that have been purchased over the years, learning that these pages would instead be incorporated into the new system.

If you’re still fuzzy on the details of both the rough compensation plans as well as Riot Games’ response to the feedback, you can catch up on that here. But as for compensation methods, there are a few attractive options that would satisfy players when it comes to rune refunds.

A Straight IP Refund Is Not The Way To Go

While there have been some solid ideas presented, there have also been some suggestions that players have been quite opposed to. Rejecting a refund of any kind may seem like a bit of an entitled move, but receiving a full IP refund for all of the IP that you’ve invested over the years would truly feel like an awful gift.

The issue with this plan is that the players who are looking for the refunds the most – the ones that have been here for years – won’t be able to enjoy the reimbursement as much as others can. By this point, they’ve likely already sunk their IP into champions, previous runes, and more recently, Chromas. But with all of that purchased, there’s hardly anything left to spend the IP on.

Riot has said recently that they’re looking to add more ways for players to spend IP, but unless it’s a pretty attractive option, this refund would probably be a bad idea.

Bring Back Legacy Content

An option that would likely best be combined with some other form of compensation, bringing back Legacy content is just one of the ways that could help pacify players and give them something to look forward to. While not all of these older skins are nearly up to the same level of quality that newer ones are, they get updated as soon as champions’ visuals do, and many of them are already attractive options.

This solution could also benefit both new and old players. Older players who remember these skins fondly but didn’t buy them will once again be able to purchase them, and those who never even got the chance to purchase them will get the opportunity to do so. Whether it’s giving out Legacy content for free or allowing players to purchase the skins, opening the Legacy vault could be a viable part of a larger solution. Of course, some players might not be keen on giving more RP if they aren’t happy with the changes, which brings to mind another option that plenty of players have suggested.

An IP-To-RP Conversion

While one of the suggestions from players has been to give massive loads of RP to players at a 1:1 ratio for the IP that they invested in runes, that seems like a very unlikely solution. Riot Games has already said in their responses that they’d be losing money on the rune changes, so giving out that insane amount of RP to each player worldwide who purchased runes would cost them a great deal of money that would normally be made through RP and skins. However, a different conversion rate might be a better solution for both parties.

Even if players were only given around 10 percent of their IP spent back as RP, that would still be quite a bit of in-game currency. One of the main gripes about runes was how costly they’ve been in the past years, so getting back a portion of effort invested into the grind to spend on some new cosmetics would definitely be a welcome option. Some of the other options may be less appealing, but this is basically the equivalent of a business giving you back in-store credit for a purchase – it’s not the same as getting real money back, but it’s as close as it can get.

Specialized Loot

While getting back some virtual currency to spend at your leisure would be one of the best options, getting free content that you can’t control would still be a decent enough option, though possibly not on its own. Like the Legacy content, it’ll likely work best when combined with another option, but giving away some loot in the form of skin shards gotten through the loot system is something that many players wouldn’t mind, as long as it’s done well.

Of course, getting skin shards or other champion shards that you either don’t need or don’t want can feel pretty bad, so special loot boxes would probably be the way to go. We’ve seen it done through the Riven vs. Yasuo event and other special loot box opportunities, so creating a loot reward tied to the rune purchases wouldn’t be out of the question.

Exclusive Content Based On Spending Tiers

A resounding half-joke about the runes reimbursement is that players will be gifted with a Summoner Icon for all of their grinding and investing over the years. While this is likely not the plan that’s in the works, it’d be insane at this point to gift players with an icon based on how much they spent. However, other tier-based rewards that improve based on spending would reward those players who have stuck with the rune system for years.

Creating new skins based on IP spending doesn’t seem like too viable of an option since that would take a lot of work for skins that players might not even be happy with, but giving out free skins of varying prices based on how much IP you’ve spent would be the way to go with that method. Creating a special ward for each spending tier would likely be less of a time investment than creating all new skins, and combining that with some free content would allow veteran players to show off their dedication to the rune grind.

So What’s The Plan?

With plenty of suggestions, the question still remains: What’s the plan for compensating players? According to some responses from Rioters, there’s not one solution that’s been settled on at this point, but there are definitely some viable options being considered.

More posts are coming each week about the Runes Reforged system, so we’ll hopefully be able to get some more information about these rune reimbursement plans very soon. As was mentioned in the more recent posts about the runes, a much larger announcement is scheduled to come sometime in early September, so if we don’t hear something before then, we definitely will at that time.