With the huge buzz around the Loot and Crafting feature that has been implemented to League of Legends, I figured this would be a great opportunity to talk about my opinions on Hextech Chests. Riot announced a few days ago that two new items will be set as Hextech exclusives. Originally, Hextech Annie was the only exclusive loot you could get from a Hextech Chest. The rest of the drops were just champions and skins that you can buy with IP/RP. Now, Soulstealer Vayne and the Hextech Ward skin will be added to the exclusive drop list!
Hextech Chests are basically the same thing as a mystery box, except you don’t NEED to pay real money for them. However, if you want to get anything exclusive, you’re pretty much forced to. When you compare the price of a good skin on the market and the chance of getting an exclusive Hextech skin, there’s a huge difference. For example, the three ultimate skins in the game, Pulsefire Ezreal, Spirit Guard Udyr, and DJ Sona, are each about $25 in U.S. currency. Brofresco, a popular YouTuber, spent around $500 dollars to get the Hextech Annie skin. I understand that he did it for the sake of a video and he obviously wanted the skin, but the casual League of Legends player is probably not willing to drop that amount of cash for a CHANCE to get ONE skin. Aside from the fact that it’s exclusive to a loot drop, there is absolutely nothing substantial enough to make me spend an extra $475 dollars instead of just getting an ultimate skin.
Riot has also announced that you can get the Soulstealer Vayne and the Hextech Annie skin for 10 gems, and the Hextech Ward skin for 5 gems. After doing some research, people have been reporting that they got all 10 gems after spending around 300-500 dollars. These things are all random though, so you might get 10 gems in 10 chests. You may also get 1 gem in 1,000 chests. You just don’t know and there has to be a point where the risk is no longer worth the reward. Clearly this is a huge money grab attempt by Riot, so much so that they’ve recently announced that the gems will be going on sale for RP, but only in small amounts. This may very well be a huge disguise and a big attempt by Riot to take even more of your money! I’ve played League for many years and I think Riot has implemented a ton of baits to get people to spend money. As a player that’s probably put around $300 dollars into the game over 4 years, I totally understand the desire to spend money and get some cool stuff. Going back to buying gems with real money, I’ve come up with a fairly simple scenario that Riot can easy put into action.
Let’s create a quick scenario. 1 out of 100 people spend $300 on chests to get 10 gems. What if Riot automatically gave everybody 5 gems for free? How many more people would spend money trying to get the last 5? Now that people can be halfway there, let’s say the number jumps up to 1 out of every 10 players will spend $150 to get the remaining 5 (These numbers are also based on you getting a gem for every $30 you spend and Riot not lowering the drop rates of gems even further). If we compare these numbers, for every 100 players Riot used to get $300. After the gems are for sale, the number has jumped to 1 out of 10 (or 10 out of every 100), and if they spend $150 then Riot is making $1,500 bucks for every 100 players. By doing this, Riot has increased their profit 5x and, in the meantime, makes people believe that they have the player’s best interest in mind. Basically, what I’m trying to say here is that the new skins are awesome and Riot obviously knows that people really want exclusive things, but you need to know when to draw the line here. Riot is not your friend in a situation like this and they really try to fill you up with false hope so they can make a ton of money off of a free-to-play game.
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