The way Riot Games prices the champions on League of Legends has been fairly haphazard. New champions have been, with very few exceptions, 6300 influence points or 975 Riot points.
Once a champion is released, by and large their price hasn’t changed. Riot has gone back and lowered the prices on older champions a few times, but there hasn’t seemed to be any particular rhyme or reason to the price reductions and the riot point prices have not been reduced in each occurrence that the influence point has.
Riot Games has not been ignorant of the confusion that this pricing scheme has caused, and has been looking at formulas to apply to its champion pricing that accomplish the task of making newer champions more premium in cost without having to manually go back and lower the prices on older champions.
The New League Order
There is now finally an actual pricing method for League of Legends champions that incorporates the reduction in price of older champions into it. On the bad side, new champions are going to cost 7800 ip, increasing their cost significantly right as they release. That price is only for the first week, however, so it’s mostly a tax on impatience. The riot point cost on the new champions will be 975 despite the higher ip cost in the first week, so if you’re buying champions with money, it won’t change anything for you.
Each time a new champion comes out, the current oldest champion that costs 6300 ip will drop in price down to 4800. Making this process automatic also makes it possible to begin predicting when a given champion will get cheaper, so we don’t have to worry quite so much anymore about buying a champ a month before their cost drops.
With every third champion released, in addition to a champion reducing in price down to 4800, another champion who is already 4800 or less will have their price lowered one grade.
Point Consistency
In addition, League of Legends champions will now also have standardized rp costs based on their ip price, so we won’t have champions anymore who get their price reduced who still cost 975 rp for ages. 4800 ip champions will cost 880 rp, 3150 will translate into 790, and on down.
Combining this with the automatically decreasing ip costs will make for a significantly more consistent champion-purchasing experience all across the League of Legends.
To help get started with this, they’re also reducing the costs of the seven oldest champions currently still priced at 6300 ip, namely Ezrael, Valdimir, Renekton, Nocturne, Lee Sin, Brand, and Vayne. They will all be dropping to the 4800 ip/ 880 rp price tier.
Taking Your Time
The last part of this announcement from Riot Games is something they try to call another part of regulating champion price, but is something that has been coming for a lot longer for an entirely different reason.
You may have already noticed the rate at which we’ve been releasing champions has slowed. Moving forward, we’re targeting 14-17 new champions in 2013 — around one every 3-4 weeks. This gives you more time to accumulate IP between champion releases, and it enables our design team to spend more time developing and polishing each new champion.
While talk of giving people more time to accumulate the greater ip needed to get new champions as they release sounds nice, it seems far more likely that the release schedule is slowing down more due to how many champions there are available.
With Vi being the 109th playable champion in the League of Legends, having another 14 over the next year will still mean that between bans and player selections, draft mode games would still have over 100 champions left unaccounted for, and it’s been theorized for a long time that eventually Riot would stop making champions simply out of necessity to mitigate this.
Time will tell. For now, it’s good to see a bit more structure and consistency with the pricing and better ability to gauge our own spending.
