This game was legitimately good because of its generosity and player focus, and I'm glad to have been a part of this game's community even though the game eventually died down
Sadly being pay to win is what makes these games survive. That obviously makes the experience for F2P players worse, but at the same time, the vast majority of the playerbase is more than happy to spend their money
@@pwpqwq7648an important aspect is also that they almost didn’t advertise the game at all. It strangely took some time before the game joined the common riot client with the other games. And look, they announced Atakhan joining the map in league, and they couldn’t even do a simple “Atakhan! That you or may not have seen in our other game Legends of Runeterra”. Also they claimed that the game didn’t make enough money, but what does a multinational company understands as “gain” ? Like did the game actively make them lose money? (Which in my eyes would be their fault anyways) Or did it just not make enough to satisfy their greediness? Because that’s what seems to have happen with the whole riot forge thing.
@@pwpqwq7648 I think you overestimate the playerbase's willingness to spend money in a f2p game. There are gonna be lots of kids who don't have the access to their parents' credit cards, adults that would rather grind and get free stuff instead of buying. In fact, some f2p players are so greedy they actually dare to demand MORE from the developers (not talking about LoR strictly). Like dude, you're not paying shit and you're getting hundreds of hours of content. I think the more justified complaints would be the lacking rewards of battlepasses, things people actually pay for. Look at the LoL side of things, if they so much think they're getting less chests/free rewards, they complain. Some F2P people are just too greedy.
@@Jay9966 I think you underestimate whales. It's not the kids or the adults with any sense of spending their money well, but whales who will just spend their money until they have everything they want, because that's what they enjoy. If the game was less F2P friendly, and you would have to buy cards, I guarantee you, the game would make a lot more. That's exactly why Hearstone is still alive to this day, because it went PayToWin as soon as the numbers started going down League has cosmetics now that go for hundreds of dollars, all because the whales are willing to waste their money on it. The F2P players are obviously nothing in comparison to whales, in terms of income for Riot
Legends of Runeterra is probably the only game where you can get all cards in the game without spending any money and without spending hundreds of thousands hours playing
not really the only game, surprisingly enough, yugioh master duel made by konami is also extremely generous not just at the beginning, you can make a new deck meta or not every 1-2 months, this becomes easier the more staples you get, you just have to play for like 20 mins every other day and you'll get a lot of currency for packs. Of course it would take a while to get all the cards since ygo has 13+ thousand cards and counting. You are actually discouraged from spending money on it by everyone in the community since the prices for currency is absolutely horrendous
Ok, I don't know why people keep saying this but that is not true, Master duel is not nearly as "f2p" as you say it is. Can't believe people fall for the "front loaded gems" trick, as soon as your front loaded currently is gone it becomes a slog. Also you forget how Konami is making more cards SR and UR with every pack. Have you not seen the ni-EXCLUSIVELY SR AND UR DECK LISTS?! that game is Able to be played for free, but it's pretty clear what there trying to do. So you need to be able to bugget well. It is definitely NOT "FRIENDLY".
@malicekerendu3574 almost every mobile games is p2w, those cant even consider a game, the only winner is who have the bigger wallet or the biggest debt
@@joshuax1987 Being pay to win is what made those games thrive. That's the exact reason Heartstone is alive to this day. Ironic isn't it? It might be hard to believe, but people actually want to spend their money on this stuff.
@@joshuax1987that’s technically true but some are just way too generous with their resources that there’s too little incentive to push for paid content and resources when the game’s core mechanics can easily be obtained with just a bit of patience As for cosmetics, unless it’s the extremely dedicated, almost none will buy them
Blame it on the players. The only reason the predatory tactics are successful is because the players eat it up like rats to poison. Self-harming purchases can only be blamed on the consumer
@pwpqwq7648 no, don't absolve the companies making the offer. Someone knowingly making predatory offers is equally at fault for it. If anything more so just because the consumer could legitimately be someone struggling with addiction.
They literaly only delivered trashy cosmetics, tried to sell card skins with zero animations basically Just PNGs to the price of actual lol skins (model, effects, ecc) or tied the few good Ones to shitty limited passes, now Its Just a den of cucks that get excited to spend Money for pve buffs against bots, because "uuuh duuuh pvp Is too toxic for me"
The game is so much fun! The lore, graphics and super varied ways of winning are incredible. I remember winning 8/10 games playing Braum, Bone Club and Cithria, Lady of Clouds... which is an insanely anti-meta deck. 😅😅 I work full time, have kids and run a business so being able to escape into Runeterra was the best.
before even watching: the game was amazing, and the reason it died is because it was so f2p nobody bought anything and the game got its budget cut so much it just died. huge shame.
Don't forget how Riot struggled to figure out how to actually monetize its cosmetics despite the fans practically begging to let them buy more stuff from them.
Well yeah they did have those battlepass things though with me being so casual and not playing very consistently they don't feel very good. Sure they might be "good value" but they certainly don't feel very good when you know you probably won't get it all before it expires.
I literally paid for cards and skins when it launched but stopping giving them money because the direction of the game went to shit, it deserves to die for all the shit decisions made by game directors like Novagedys.
Best card game on the market, but Riot really did nearly nothing to game visible after launch (separate client, no announcements on socials, no cross promotion events.) So many people I talked to didn't even know the game existed. I also think Riot intentionally cut a lot of lore based products to not compete with Arcane, as the in-client short stories, Riot Forge games and LoR were all gutted at the same time. The LoR devs did so much, but management at Riot killed this game, same way they've been ruining the brand as a whole.
There's no point in spending money to promote a game that isn't making them money because it's so consumer-friendly. It's basically throwing funds directly into a sink, all for the sake of making a better game. Good, consumer-friendly games don't survive the Live Service model without a lot of compromises. It's not that it couldn't make money, but it's extremely unlikely that it would for a large investment that might not return at all. It's sad because I'd really prefer it if I could pay for a single version of the game and keep it for myself that way forever, I don't care for updates. If developers actually added some LAN support for once, and we'd be able to find our own way forward.
@@victornguyen1175 In fairness, that's more or less what LoR PvP is right now. I legit cannot remember the last balance patch, so the current meta is pretty much what you got (save for rotation in standard). The silver lining is that the card pool is deep enough and balance is good enough that you can make a looot of decks and take games with them.
Legends of Runeterra has been such a beloved part of my life. It's so extremely well polished but they killed the game with almost zero advertisement. Only adding the LoR button to League client AFTER the announcement on cutting the budget?? I seriously don't understand why they made the game so invisible. It's a massive shame...
I love the game, but it got a few bad points during launch. The animations were good, but it took so long to play a card, from times to times you couldnt even use all your gems
Have you worked only in non profit organizations or at all? Businesses need money, skilled employees especially software engineers demand a good salary, nobody works for free. The game failed because it made no money, period.
Legends of Runeterra was supposed to be a loss leader. Something to draw in more players to the brand in general who would eventually start trickling into League or Wild Rift.
i remember when the game realesed and there was a cap on how much card you could buy witch actual money each week (or day?) for the first couple of weeks so that no one would get too much of a head stasrt and everyone could enjoy the unique gameplay of playing with the limited card pool we had. It was so fun but i still find it funny how some people were ready, credit card in hand, to put hundreds of dolalrs in the game to get what they exactly wanted and riot literally refused that money. The game was literally not money hungry enough for its own good.
I think Legends of Runeterra is the prime example why companies cant be your friend. Because the best efforts and friendliest practices don't guarantee success. It's a shame since I don't think LoR wouldn't have been as lovable as it is if riot did take the strategic route.
how the fuck is your conclusion even related? how "companies can't be your friend" ?? in regard of LoR, the player experience was first and formost, the company was the best of friend. the conclusion should be literally the EXACT opposite, the playerbase can't be trusted. The common idiot will flock to battle passes , microtransactions and $500 ahri skins, disregard to player experience and developer intentions The average player should be considered mentally retarded and should be drained completely for financial gains. Such core values are what that shapes the videogame industry we have today
same honestly I think they meant to say that the game has "low maintenance" or that the developer's goal has shifted, because the game is not at all dead. Case and point, us two lol.
9:45 completely agree here. LoR is/was an awesome game. The gameplay is so fun. Especially the in-game tournaments every 2 months. Riot never really tried marketing LoR to the extend needed. Only after 4 years, when the playerbase was gone they started to directly add LoR to the league client. Most league fans never really got in contact with the game.
They definitely should've pushed it harder in the LoL client. Riot tried to offer free stuff through Amazon Prime Gaming back in the day as well, but many people would just end up claiming the rewards each month and never installing the game at all.
If LoR launched before hearthstone it would be played untill this day, this is one of the best cardgames I've ever played. It's very unfortunate the game died
I really hope that when Riot eventually makes the MMO, they would rerelease runeterra as an ingame card game for players , and you would buy packs with ingame money
the lore and ingame interactions this game offered was way too good to be true, it's been downhill fore riot as a game company ever since they shut down this, riot forge and laid off so much of their workforce in many departments. real good for their upper management tho, that's all that counts, their pockets.
Played it since launch and still do sometimes. I don't believe a card game has to feed into gambling psychology of getting rare drops like a gacha game to be successful. The problem was the cosmetics were simply not appealing enough to invest money in for most players. I bought a couple things but overall there wasn't much that compelled me to spend money. Boards and guardians had limited interactivity and card skins with level-up animations are great but there are many times where you just may never see it in a game due to surrenders. And conversely, these cinematic champion level-up animations also make LoR a much more expensive online TCG to make compared to things like Hearthstone, MTG Arena, etc. So they were actively incurring *more* costs to make the game while also choosing to avoid the predatory business model that is standard for these games. Moving their focus to Path of Champions saved the game and it's in a better spot now as mainly a rogue-like deck-builder. Executive Producer Eric Shen said in an interview with Snnuy that the bundles they sold for Path of Champions since May of this year surpassed their board sales for ALL of 2022. They've also stopped making custom level-up animations and done away with voice-acting too to cut costs. Kinda sad to think about but monetizing some gameplay aspects did in fact save the game, although it's not the addictive gambling approach. I just don't think card games have the broad audience appeal to stand on just a cosmetics monetization model alone, or at least not the way LoR was doing it.
I also occasionally play LoR and they didn't just have cosmetics they also had the season pass things. Though obviously expiring season passes are not very appealing for casual players and if they do buy them they will likely not complete them which feels really bad (even if they got "value" for their money still feeling like they didn't everything they paid for still sucks)
Gambling aspect is not true in the slightest. A lot of irl Magic players, especially older ones, almost never interact with booster packs, just buying singles. Especially nowadays, with Commander being the most popular format in the game.
@@MrLuzakman the thing is, you don't interact with a lot of people pulling Magic's gacha wheel. All the newish people at a prerelease love it, the people that play Commander super casually love it, pretty much everyone but entrenched tournament grinders love it. Magic sells as many packs as it does for a reason. People like cracking packs.
@@cousinpatsey2471 a huge chunk of sealed products goes straight to shops, which crack packs and resell singles. That said, I don't deny that people like opening packs. To elaborate on my opinion, I think it's reversed. If I enjoy a game I'd want to spend money on it to enhance my experience further, be it new mythic rare card or some shiny protectors with an anime waifu. In the end there's no point in buying some pieces of cardboard or pngs if I don't enjoy the game. When I go to my locals, I go there to play the game, not to crack some packs. When I boot up a game it's because I want to play it, not because I can't wait to spin the gacha. Then again, I might be in the minority and big whales think differently or something.
I hope Riot find the way to continue support for the game, maybe some gatcha stuff for obtaining random guardians or stickers, more social elements to show other what you get or something like that
Currently they've heavily expanded the monetization of progression in the rougelite mode, Path of Champions, but I'm not surprised most are not aware of this.
Riot didnt wanted this game to suceed. Thats the truth. Not enought spotlight for it to shine. Im a cardgame veteran and i can say thats the best online cardgame made. But without marketing.... even that will die
@GerriFuryman it means that gameplay was frustrating me to no end. I've played it for quite a long time, and quit after realising that almost every game feels like a slog to me, no matter who wins in the end.
TFT > LoR > Summoners Rift Runeterra has so many awesome mechanics and ways to play with both PvP and PvE. I prefer it over hearthstone because it plays more similar to Magic the Gathering and MtG Arena just demands too much of your credit card. Runeterra is constantly handing you free card tokens
There was a time that LoR was my life, i still love this game, but if Riot, the game company that has infinite money doesn't care about the game anymore, why should I?
You never know you are in your golden age until you leave it. LoR has changes my life massively and I love it. I got devastated when it got into a comma. Its not the same anymore and many of the friends I made thanks to the game have been drifting away :(
I love card games, but I hate wasting money, so I never got hooked by one. When LoR came out, it was such a breath of fresh air. It gave me the opportunity to commit and play various decks and strats. It brought me back to a time where I used to play yugioh with my friends in the school cafeteria and ill always be so thankful for it.
I think another issue that LoR had was requiring players to download a completely different client instead of making it available in the LoL client like TFT. If they had done so, I think more players would've tried it and players would keep coming back to it. But out of sight, out of mind. I think they need to retire the standalone client and just incorporate everything into 1 client.
There is also a little thing called the sunken cost fallacy that keeps you returning even during bad metas and such due to having already invested a considerable amount of time and money
as a former competitive LOR player, just to say the monetization was the main problem is incorrect. the playerbase was the issue, and it was entirely due to Riot's lack of interest in advertising the game. They didn't anything in the LoL client to tap in to their already massive user base, and they didn't do much external marketing either. I really do think that if they advertised it more and got people more excited about the game, it could have succeeded.
LoR didn't died. It was murdered. Riot didn't bother giving it spotlight in the client (the fact they added the button after pulling the trigger on competitive is a massive joke). That's literally it. Yeah sure monetization was low, but there was still ways they could make money out of it. Battle passes weren't always on, that should have been the case in the first place (outside of region progression that is). Same thing happened to riot forge too. Stellar games for their price tags. Just no promotion at all. I don't know if it's laziness or oversight, but this is just sad
As someone who plays league and other card games, LOR is kinda the new way to expand the League Lore (LOR) so I think even if its not competitive its there to expand story and to introduce new story lines.
Seeing Warwick having the default level up animation compared to other Champion cards having their own personalized animation felt so painful. Even worse when LoR players have been waiting for Warwick for a long time. 💔
The reason TFT is so much more successful is that like Riot's other successful games they stole a very popular concept by the name of Dota Autochess (made it simpler) and featured it in the launcher for the world's most popular game. TFT market also wasn't saturated, Dota Autochess only ever got popular inside the Dota 2 arcade, and Valve abandoned Dota Underlords. Virtually no competition. LoR is a game where they actually took a lot of time and resources to innovate in a market that is super saturated, and they never thought to monetize it in a way that makes sense for them to keep working on it. I never got that much into LoR due to being busy with life and not having time to game, but it was truly revolutionary in terms of its gameplay. Sad to hear it's gone.
I've played this game since the very first day of alpha. It's one of the games that I've played the most (since you can play from phone anywhere) and I still play today couple games along the coffee time and I never get tired of it. I'm just sad that they refuse to support PVP with the excuse that people only play PVE when in reality they dont support PVP because how hard it was to balance all the cards. Now... saying the game is dead is a bit over the line. The game IS in life balance because they are refusing to update it (same as Starcraft 2 or Heroes of the Storm) but if we saw the numbers we could probably see its up there with other TCGs. LOR gave RIOT the best gift they could have... The entire lore for their series. It was not until LOR came out that they started to really develop the character backgrounds properly. It trully helped Arcane to establish a good story. The riot MMO will also drink a lot from what LOR established, and I believe people are not very aware of how much that means coming from a card game. That to mean does not mean FAILURE at all.
It's not just that. The other issue is that they removed the entire "collection" aspect out of a CCG (collectable card game). When it first launched, it took a bit to get a full collection. After that, everyone had enough resources to instantly craft an entire expansion, day 1, with zero money spent. Opening the weekly "vault" for rewards was literally a chore, and they had to add a button to instantly claim all rewards (since nobody needed rewards). This led to people also getting bored very quickly, because there was no "chase" for cards. Everyone had it all, minute 1. New expansions died much faster than they should. Having a goal to chase long term in card games is a big motivator to play more. Chasing after cards that are hard to get that define decks is sometimes more than half the fun, and the reason you grind a card game (or pay for packs).
@@RedHairShanks-bb3dc master duel most profittable month was when sentouki/sky striker alt card release and current evil twins alt art release which is rarity bumped and you cannot craft the alt card you have to pull them on the pack, i know that yugioh and runeterra dont share the same audience, its japan focused audience game and make most of their money from japan, cute girls sells simple. releasing a rare fanservice card that you cant craft nor pull will piss off the runeterra audiences, also as we can see that most western players that play master duel arent really care about getting a rarer fanservice card when you can just use lower rarity anyway. it works in master duel but i cant see it works in runeterra
no, it just wasn't popular enough due to its gameplay pattern and restrictive deckbuilding TFT and DOTA2 let the player access every game-piece right off the gate and they don't have a problem making money
Loved LoR, played from day 1. It was a great digital card game and I've played them all. One thing I noticed that wasn't mentioned is the barrier to entry and initial skill floor was a tad higher than most digital tcgs. If you weren't familiar with or had a grasp on tcgs, LoR was one of the more intimidating ones to learn compared to hearthstone. Attack ordering, and the champion level up mechanics were not things seen in other card games at that point, while I grasped them quickly, they were definitely not the most intuitive and easy to understand mechanics for League fans migrating that may never had played a digital tcg outside of hearthstone.
The biggiest thing that upset me with LOR was the fact that they had the resources and ideas to make this succeed. They had the audience who would have dropped money for special rarties. but my biggest complaint was that they added a LoR client too late into the base LOL game. They would have gotten more players from there. But I guess they werent thinking.
The problem is that the game just wasn't that engaging and the decks just kind of played themselves. I've played other non-digital TCGs and the good ones have more gameplay and deck building depth to them. I like LoR, but the gameplay felt a bit shallow and repetitive compared to other games on the market so many people got board and moved on.
TFT wass ssuccessful becuase it was in the league of legendsss client. Runeterra was whole different game you had to download. Also im feeling the pack pulling argument as we speak becausse i moved on to pokemon TCG pocket and i dropped too much in a few days just pulling packs.
Started playing LoR like three weeks ago because Arcane S2 made mewant to interact with the world of Runeterra. I have been playing it nearly every day since, it's really fun! Didn't even know it had a budget cut. I can still highly recommend it, even though it "failed".
We spent years complaining about over-monetized piece of garbage games from companies that don't care about the customer and when we finally got a honest to god AMAZING card game that was at the same time 100% F2P we let it die. Maybe we do deserve to get milked by greedy companies, maybe we deserve gacha mechanics, battle passes, overpriced DLC and unfinished games.
Still remember reaching top 200 in EU. Also wrote a song about the song. About the purrfection. It was amazing to be a part of this short history. You had to be there. It was a once in a lifetime situation.
I hope they can develop an offline mode so I could play it more smoothly on transit. Maybe simplifying the Path of Champions would make it better. I'd love to have a randomizer pick any of a certain star level instead of dealing with analysis paralysis. I wish this game didn't have to work against managing server costs and comparisons to TCGs (It might've been more successful if it was a roguelike deckbuilder from the start).
I am a new player that came from Slay the Spire, I also play League and love the Lore. The PVE game mode is amazing to just play at 2x-4x speed while watching youtube on a second monitor and the battlepasses provide good value for starting out your champion pool (I have bought 4 so far). The problem lies in marketing, the game is fun, polished, amazing art, amazing story. One thing I would improve is how path of champions is presented, if the story was presented the same as Age of empires 2 campaign, it would be amazing for us Lore junkies.
On a positive note, recently they said they're on a up turn and recent monetization has finally started to generate income, things might get better by next year. I still put all the blame in the lack of marketing outside of the reléase era
One simple reason why LoR died: its finance department is dog shit. Players were BEGGING the game devs to give them things to buy, but the few items there are in the shops (skins, card backs, legends, etc.) were overpriced as shit, so even if players want to support the game, only whales can stomach spending their money.
It still boggles my mind how generous LoR is. I remember playing it for the first time and I was able to build 1 meta deck, 2 troll decks, and my own experimental deck in a week. I was not even playing heavily. Maybe 2 to 5 games in a day. On top of that, you get 2 or 3 pre-built decks when starting out.
As a player who spent quite a bit on the game and bought skins and boards, what made me quit was actually the balance. My favorite part of the game was just picking a deck and mastering it, buying skins, getting mastery points on my fav champs, and getting boards to match with those decks. I would spent decent money on a deck to make it my own, I would get good at the deck, and then it would just get nerfed. And I don't mean like a small touch, like the deck would go from 55% wr to 49%. It was really demoralizing when I would spend money and time on a deck just to have it be completely worthless the next day, and eventually it happened enough times to make me decide enough was enough
I agree completely. I played LoR quite a lot on official release, quit, then returned, then quit for good after the last batch of PvP champions. It feels like a complete echo chamber has formed around the surviving LoR community where they just repeat the same cope statements over and over.
This is why I feel like card cosmetics just don't work : you need to have a playable deck where the card is included, where you can play it and then look at it for some time until it dies.
As a SEA player where this type of game is unpopular, i really love this game. The champion level up system is so good. Already played this game since 2020 and never get bored. I wish this game could continue for a long time so i can still play it.
Pokemon card game is way more popular because people enjoy pulling for cards and showing off rare finds to friends. LoR was good game, but lacked the "ownership" feeling people have with their cards.
After the MASSIVE success of Pokémon TCGP, we can say that the genre is NOT dead! It just needed more attention to some important aspects, one of them being the marketing.
I tried LOR when it first launched but I soon got tired of it not because of the game itself but because I was already burnt out on years of hearthstone. It wasn't till after I had not played any tcg for a little over 2 years I picked up LOR again and fell in love with the design and how the game played. Unfortunately the time I fell in love with LOR it was shortly announced that development and updates were gonna slow down.
Does anyone think that the level up animations (as good as they were!) were unnecessary. I do understand some special cases like for the ascend trio but every single champion didnt need a whole cutscene. I feel like that was a decent part of the budget in some cases. I the fancy card flip was more then enough
Yes. For me, it also got old reeal quick. Even seeing my own champion's animations made me tired after a while, it gave me the feeling of "yeah, yeah, I get it, can we go back to the game?"
I like level ups, but they should stick to the simple and quick animations. Later they were playing a fucking cinematic that is longer and probably more expensive.
@@michel0dyit's even worse for the champions you play ; at least if the meta is varied enough you'll face different decks and champions, but the champs you play you get to see their animation every single game to the point where it's not that exciting anymore
If they just turned the skin lines into a gacha a lot of whales would want to grab it, and show it off on pvp, plus a lot of active players espcially in the twitter community really want to spend money on the game but they dont know where to spend it, since the skins are limited and some of the skins are mostly being centered on a one champion rather than the other existng or old champion whether it is meta or not
easily my favorite game Riot has put out to date, it’s a shame it was never marketed to the wider League audience. took forever for it to be added to the official client
I would be so ready to put my money back in this game if they return to the pvp experience, it was genuinely the most fun I had with tcgs in a long time
I truly loved the game. Played it from the Beta. Climbed to the very top with decks ahead of the meta. I had a blast. Introduced almost a dozen friends who also fell down the rabbit hole. Held in-house tournaments (had a lot of fun clutching those). I stopped playing around the time eternal began and rotations started, just before Vayne/Kayle etc joined. It felt like a lot of my favourite cards were being put on the shelf and told "you've got to go because you're either too good or too bad". And the expansions were coming out too quickly for me. I wanted more time to collect and grow and tinker, but everything kept changing completely every 2-3 months and the playstyles I liked would suddenly get killed by new decks. In combination with the increasing consistency of playing against incredibly frustrating decks (Kaisa/Viego) I realised I wasn't having as much fun anymore. I played a lot of fair midrange decks and slow control decks that gave my opponents the chance to play their cards and take their best shot at me. And I kept going against aggro decks that would either win the game or surrender by turn 7. Or queue into a combo deck I couldn't beat. Or get rock paper scissored by other control decks that specifically made their decks to beat other control decks while I tried to make my decks viable vs aggro/midrange/combo/control. The norms changed. I didn't enjoy my opponents always surrendering the moment I got ahead and before I actually got to do my thing. I never surrender so the community increased norm of "just go next" sucked a lot of the fun out of the game for me. When the game first began it didn't have that but as people played more games they lost the feeling of wonder and would just leave. I don't derive my fun from winning or climbing, even if I was top 5-10% at it. I derived it from pulling out clutch outplays, strategies I set in motion earlier paying off. Using my understanding of the game, my knowledge of their decks, etc to lay traps and counterplay. The final nail was the impossibility of playing around the amount of RNG that kept getting added. Invokes were fine cause the pool was limited, and choices of invokes within those pools were often even moreso. So I could play around what I thought someone would pick from 3-5 cards. Mind games. It just became impossible to play around one of 30-50 cards. Especially as a lot of them were new and I hadn't built too much familiarity with, and when I finally was, the next expansion would hit and I'd have to do it all over again. In terms of the PVE, I got absolutely screwed by the RNG of unlocking champions so hard over and over and over that I stopped trying to unlock them cause I was just going to roll Annie for a 14th time. I did really enjoy those adventures and building wild-ass decks though.
Legends of Runeterra is largely very good. Of course, their focus on getting players up to speed and being generous with cards is awesome, but, from where I'm standing, the biggest issues were these. - They didn't really market the game much at all. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for organic growth, but considering how late to the party LoR was, they really should've been targeting creators in the TGC space with ambassadorships etc. To get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. If more people knew that it was reletively low investment, I think more people would've tried it. - The game flow is perfectly fine, but unintuitive. I think a genuine problem with the game is how turn structure works, and how that impacts the first time player experience. Frankly, it feels too different from the majority of other games at a systems level, and that's likely to make people bounce off, even if the system is functional in a vacuum You know the "Huh, this is kinda strange" aversion you get when something bucks your expectations at a very fundamental level, that'll churn a lot of people right out of the experience, and I think that happened here. - Because the game flow is so different from standard, it makes the game harder to spectate, and spectating is a big part of marketing and growing the game on its own. If you're someone who's not familiar with the game, it's very difficult to recognize core elements of the experience at a glance. Interactivity is great, but when taken to the extent of simultaneous turns, that's difficult to parse. They made a niche product that mostly appeals to those that are fairly dedicated, when their bussiness model relied on their audience being the opposite. Happy accidents *do* happen, but usually that requires some very deloberate and conspicuous intervation to overcome, and sometimes it's outright dropped, e.g., Fortnite with its building mechanics. At a core level, is a significant departure from FPS/Battle Royale standards, the only reason it didn't sink the game is because of... everything else about Fortnite, and they've been waffling on that mechanic every since the game released, which should indicate something. It's probably too late for LoR, but I hope some of the designers get a chance to work on a smaller product and make some changes, because it really is a great game, even past the generous bussiness model.
I've never feel so depressed of a game on dying state like this game is right now. The game was so fun and very f2p friendly. One of the best digital card game out there with great art and lore. And it just fumble like that
It's insane to see how TFT got so much bigger and stayed perfectly f2p friendly but at the same time getting advertisement and being easily accessible through the lol client greatly helped
I think generosity was a developmental failure, but what did it for me was that champions got rotated out of the standard set that was up, so when I didn't want to play the expanded set of cards I couldn't play my favorite champions after they got rotated out
Instead of making free to own all cards, its better to implement trading system like traditional tcg where you can focus on build a deck you want to play, still cheap and have a goal to work towards to
I always believe that card games are a collection game first than gameplay. I could be losing a lot in game but having a card deck unique to mine that not everyone has in their collection will always feel fulfilling.
Something that kinda went under the radar is how the LOR devs tried to pivot to PVE years ago and were denied. Crazy stuff was teased like co-op, they tried to save it before it got to this point but higher ups didn’t see the vision
Please keep fighting legends of runeterra players! Just in a dark spot right now funnily enough during luxs pve expansion Hope one day we get to see it all come back! Imagine ultimate board skins like dj sona and more!
Im sad to see the lore aspect go, it really didnt move the lore forward but expanded it outward to make the world feel real and lived in with all the interactions and card text
the lack of promotion and starting monetization too late through skins/boards/mates/etc feels like the bigger problem though. Making every card easily earnable (at least early on) seems like a genius idea for getting people to join from other card games. It greatly lowers the required investment, real or perceived
That the thing with free to play stuff, if no one’s buying anything in them, they don’t make money and lose support. Not only that - but there is more loyalty for a game that a player invested time and money in. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve refused to delete league of legends just because I spent 20 dollars on 3 skins in like 2014. And sure, you can buy cosmetics in LOR but cosmetics in a card game aren’t cared about as much as the actual cards. This is why Konami can exploit Yu Gi Oh players, they know their players already spent so much money on getting rare and powerful cards - which keep players invested into the game.
I do think mechanically and design wise, each expansion removed what made LoR LoR and made it more like any generic TCG. Every new champion card came with a new keyword, a new mechanic, rather than adapting the champions into the lens of the card game and what it already had established. It really made me dislike the game. Champion design was mid, we had bangers like TF, Aphelios, Swain, and then keyword soup.
I don't think what you said from 6:30 is accurate. I don't think there are any games to which normal people watch the eSports of. Every game has barriers where people who don't know what's going on can't fully enjoy it. Only Runeterra players watched runeterra eSports, that's true but that's the case with every eSports game i believe. Simple the playerbase is incredibly large for those game. LoR failed coz riot did not market it properly. They failed to advertise the game to the core league fanbase.
I don't think monetization was the problem. The problem was that other TGCs are more intuitive. I understand that people here like it. But being a MTG player, i can tell you, the turn structure is a mess. And the "Battlefield" seemed like a bunch of squares with numbers clashing. Instead of representing the characters in the cards. The art in the cards are the last thing you see. Card types and card interactions should be on the board. This would've been better if the use a paper version at development. Heartstone devs did it, and the result is a lot more intutive.
I think they needed to implement a battle pass or subscription from the start. The game was generous and I really appreciate that, but I think everything else was expensive, In all my life playing LoR I only bought a board and with the remaining money I bought wildcards, Buying wildcards with money was very expensive. There was a time where I wanted to buy wildcards to finish a deck, but when I saw the prices... I decided to just wait a week or 2 to get the cards by playing. Now they're using a battle pass for the PvE and I like that, because it makes everything easier to get and I don't have to grind that much.
Runeterra fail has nothing to do with the rewards system. Rather gameplay is way too complex for a casual card game and way too similar to other titles like MtG. Its a good game, visuals are top notch, but when I play it I feel like I am playing a clone of MtG. I would love to feel like I am playing an actual champion from league or at least something different then all other card games. With Artifact its similar story. Way too complex, extremely hard to understand for viewers and huuge barier of entry. I played Artifact when it dropped and I think it was better then most card games including Runeterra, very deep and rewarding gameplay, but it was overcomplicated for the average player.
One of the things I hate HATE when people talk about LoR is that they blame its death on generosity which IMO makes no sense. The reality of the situation is that they made an amazing game and proceeded to gut it in every way. They didn't promote it so barely anyone knew about it, they didn't create enough worthwhile cosmetics (people who played will know that they started to slowly stop making new Board Companions, Boards, etc and the ones we did have weren't extremely high quality), they put a lot of money into high quality art and voicelines which backfired since its a huge money sink (and those who saw the debacle with Ambessa and Warwick recently know exactly whats up. They did say they'll be giving them the voicelines tho). Most importantly tho we can't delude ourselves. This game has absolutely awful metas. AzirIrelia is famous (and I think Bilgewater and Targon had their fair share of insufferable metas. Looking at you TF, Fizz, Veiled Temple. Shout out to Lee Sin) but card design went down hill after Bandle City. Poppy, Tristana, and Veigar were absolutely terrible design wise. Galio, Rumble, Yuumi were also pretty bad. All the Runterran cards had one problem or the other, but notably Jhin and Bard are some the worst designs. Neeko, Nidalee, and Poro King's entire expansion was a low point. It hurts more when the team can't commit to better and more frequent balance patches, on top of deciding to all but stop reworking old champ designs. Then there's the decision to start making unique champions before we had every LoL champ, the design-locks self-inflicted by "Region Identity", and the idea to commit to rotation which split the PVP player base (not in half mind you, but still) and created the unbalanced mess that was eternal while allowing a somewhat ok meta to exist in Standard (tho there are always problems). And don't get me started on Path of Champions. I know people love playing it, but Im honestly surprised it makes as much money as it does. I can't speak to what it does to warrant it, but it's crazy to think about. but yeah TLDR: The game is good, but it made a lot of mistakes. Generosity didn't kill the game, a whole lot of mistakes did overtime, but generosity was not one of them.
Yeah the cosmetics were not very appealing. They did also sell those season pass things which I did buy a couple of times but I stopped as expiring passes are just not very good or appealing for a casual player like me (even if I probably still got "value" for my money not getting everything still feels pretty bad)
Agreed, the game felt REALLY horrible when it feels horrible, and NOT AS GOOD when it feels good. For example, when you queue against azirelia with normal deck at the previous meta, you're going to lose no matter what you do (that deck have >60% WR for that reason), but if you specifically counter it, MAYBE, you can win the game and when you win, it does not feel great. Tried coming back to the game on GNAR meta, it's NOT GOOD AT ALL. The game is still practically a rock paper scissor with gnar mixed in. How come the #1, #2, and #3 deck at that time, have like 70-30 W/L ratio against some decks, and 30/70 ratio against other? The outcome of the match is decided the moment riot match makes you with your counter OR your "food". It's not fun at all. Also, 1 more thing, the game is slowwww as hell. The rope is introduced after what? 1 minutes every action? And a turn can have more than 3-4 actions. But IG this one is more of my personal preferences.
I agree, it was a very good game in the beta and the Bilgewater expansion, but with each expansion the game became worse until it became too much with Bandle City.
@@mariogunawan5844abso-fuken-lutely my point. The game often feels like it drags on for eternity, even worse in certain matchups where both players just sit there and wait until one of them snaps and does something, because both know that whatever they play would be immediately destroyed/countered and then they won't have enough mana to counter the opponent's next turn, etc... and then it snowballs into a real shitty experience.
Before watching the video, the game was great - issues it had been overall monetization. Boards were killed that people wanted to spend money on, skin's pricing was weird. It was $10-$15 for a skin with no new animations etc so people didn't want to bother. When people saw marvel snap come out and the cool borders and such on their special cards, people shouted for the same that never came. People really wanted to spend money on the game, but didn't really provide good ways for them to do as such. After watching - Talking about TFT being huge, but it was also built into the core client. LoR had basically no advertisement behind it where TFT was advertised super heavily.
I think there definitely are a few angles to this though. One is that yes riot was very generous, but the other is that the gameplay was so streamlined it did mean that many mechanics felt very adjacent to one another, and the bounds of their design space became very clear. Basically, they leaned too far towards hearthstone with autotargeting mechanics, many random mechanics, limited board sizes, and no visibly accessible discard pile, when they could have leaned closer to Magic and allowed there to be a greater sense of complexity that made for an extremely deep play experience to keep getting new players invested. The gameplay is still super fun, and it’s still much better than hearthstone, but they boxed themselves in a bit too much mechanically.
I bought plenty of cosmetics for LoR when I was playing. I played from just after Foundations up until they initiated Rotation. My favorite champion to play with and build around was Swain and I loved playing Ranked. But they decided the expanded format wasn’t going to be available for ranked play and rewards so I lost interest because I couldn’t play with Swain in the way that I enjoyed anymore.
This game was legitimately good because of its generosity and player focus, and I'm glad to have been a part of this game's community even though the game eventually died down
Sadly being pay to win is what makes these games survive. That obviously makes the experience for F2P players worse, but at the same time, the vast majority of the playerbase is more than happy to spend their money
@@pwpqwq7648 kinda disagree with that.LoR is probably one of the best F2P experience.while the whale just get cosmetic that doesnt impact the gameplay
@@pwpqwq7648an important aspect is also that they almost didn’t advertise the game at all.
It strangely took some time before the game joined the common riot client with the other games.
And look, they announced Atakhan joining the map in league, and they couldn’t even do a simple “Atakhan! That you or may not have seen in our other game Legends of Runeterra”.
Also they claimed that the game didn’t make enough money, but what does a multinational company understands as “gain” ?
Like did the game actively make them lose money? (Which in my eyes would be their fault anyways)
Or did it just not make enough to satisfy their greediness?
Because that’s what seems to have happen with the whole riot forge thing.
@@pwpqwq7648 I think you overestimate the playerbase's willingness to spend money in a f2p game. There are gonna be lots of kids who don't have the access to their parents' credit cards, adults that would rather grind and get free stuff instead of buying.
In fact, some f2p players are so greedy they actually dare to demand MORE from the developers (not talking about LoR strictly). Like dude, you're not paying shit and you're getting hundreds of hours of content.
I think the more justified complaints would be the lacking rewards of battlepasses, things people actually pay for.
Look at the LoL side of things, if they so much think they're getting less chests/free rewards, they complain. Some F2P people are just too greedy.
@@Jay9966 I think you underestimate whales. It's not the kids or the adults with any sense of spending their money well, but whales who will just spend their money until they have everything they want, because that's what they enjoy. If the game was less F2P friendly, and you would have to buy cards, I guarantee you, the game would make a lot more. That's exactly why Hearstone is still alive to this day, because it went PayToWin as soon as the numbers started going down
League has cosmetics now that go for hundreds of dollars, all because the whales are willing to waste their money on it. The F2P players are obviously nothing in comparison to whales, in terms of income for Riot
Legends of Runeterra is probably the only game where you can get all cards in the game without spending any money and without spending hundreds of thousands hours playing
not really the only game, surprisingly enough, yugioh master duel made by konami is also extremely generous not just at the beginning, you can make a new deck meta or not every 1-2 months, this becomes easier the more staples you get, you just have to play for like 20 mins every other day and you'll get a lot of currency for packs. Of course it would take a while to get all the cards since ygo has 13+ thousand cards and counting. You are actually discouraged from spending money on it by everyone in the community since the prices for currency is absolutely horrendous
You need to pay a lot to get all cards or to play a lot
Ok, I don't know why people keep saying this but that is not true, Master duel is not nearly as "f2p" as you say it is. Can't believe people fall for the "front loaded gems" trick, as soon as your front loaded currently is gone it becomes a slog. Also you forget how Konami is making more cards SR and UR with every pack. Have you not seen the ni-EXCLUSIVELY SR AND UR DECK LISTS?! that game is Able to be played for free, but it's pretty clear what there trying to do. So you need to be able to bugget well. It is definitely NOT "FRIENDLY".
@@FyrenReiMG is good enough to let make a few decks you want for free but i'm no universe a f2p can get everthing or always enough for the next deck
@@FyrenReiin LoR you could get a new meta deck every week
"too generous for their own good"
now that a phrase i never thought i would hear from a game
A lot of dead mobile games with good gameplay seem to share that fate
@malicekerendu3574 almost every mobile games is p2w, those cant even consider a game, the only winner is who have the bigger wallet or the biggest debt
@@joshuax1987 Being pay to win is what made those games thrive. That's the exact reason Heartstone is alive to this day. Ironic isn't it? It might be hard to believe, but people actually want to spend their money on this stuff.
@@joshuax1987that’s technically true but some are just way too generous with their resources that there’s too little incentive to push for paid content and resources when the game’s core mechanics can easily be obtained with just a bit of patience
As for cosmetics, unless it’s the extremely dedicated, almost none will buy them
it is though, without some monetary 'investment', players don't feel like they are as attached to game
The biggest issue of Runeterra: There were no promotion from Riot. The game wasn't even in LoL launcher like TFT.
They added the button recently, there was even video about it on LOR channel 😁
@@creolophus8276 after the pvp was announced to be shut down xd
Also not enough cosmetics. Hell, give us chromas
@@WhimzyInteractive exactly, you know it's bad when they released 1 single legendary skin for Kai'sa
@@byxis101 the pvp is not shut down just its not a focus as they lost lots of the dev team and they focus on poc because all the players are there
Opposing to popular believe, honest game gets shut down and scummy practices make money.
Blame it on the players. The only reason the predatory tactics are successful is because the players eat it up like rats to poison. Self-harming purchases can only be blamed on the consumer
@@pwpqwq7648 it's called "predatory" for a reason. You fall for it without even realizing.
@@pwpqwq7648 I agree, but honestly, would you spend on a game that gives you everything for free?
@pwpqwq7648 no, don't absolve the companies making the offer. Someone knowingly making predatory offers is equally at fault for it. If anything more so just because the consumer could legitimately be someone struggling with addiction.
They literaly only delivered trashy cosmetics, tried to sell card skins with zero animations basically Just PNGs to the price of actual lol skins (model, effects, ecc) or tied the few good Ones to shitty limited passes, now Its Just a den of cucks that get excited to spend Money for pve buffs against bots, because "uuuh duuuh pvp Is too toxic for me"
This was legitimately one of the best games I've ever played.
The game is so much fun! The lore, graphics and super varied ways of winning are incredible. I remember winning 8/10 games playing Braum, Bone Club and Cithria, Lady of Clouds... which is an insanely anti-meta deck. 😅😅
I work full time, have kids and run a business so being able to escape into Runeterra was the best.
truly. legends of runeterra is by far riot's best game
before even watching:
the game was amazing, and the reason it died is because it was so f2p nobody bought anything and the game got its budget cut so much it just died.
huge shame.
Don't forget how Riot struggled to figure out how to actually monetize its cosmetics despite the fans practically begging to let them buy more stuff from them.
@@hutyro yea
there is a "being too nice" in game design and lor proved it.
@@hutyrobecause is card game the model is clear sell cards just look how much TCG pocket did in a month with less that 250 in rotation
Well yeah they did have those battlepass things though with me being so casual and not playing very consistently they don't feel very good. Sure they might be "good value" but they certainly don't feel very good when you know you probably won't get it all before it expires.
I literally paid for cards and skins when it launched but stopping giving them money because the direction of the game went to shit, it deserves to die for all the shit decisions made by game directors like Novagedys.
Best card game on the market, but Riot really did nearly nothing to game visible after launch (separate client, no announcements on socials, no cross promotion events.) So many people I talked to didn't even know the game existed. I also think Riot intentionally cut a lot of lore based products to not compete with Arcane, as the in-client short stories, Riot Forge games and LoR were all gutted at the same time.
The LoR devs did so much, but management at Riot killed this game, same way they've been ruining the brand as a whole.
There was a long running theory that the lore for the game was going to be used for the LoL MMO but that project got sent back to the drawing board
There's no point in spending money to promote a game that isn't making them money because it's so consumer-friendly. It's basically throwing funds directly into a sink, all for the sake of making a better game. Good, consumer-friendly games don't survive the Live Service model without a lot of compromises. It's not that it couldn't make money, but it's extremely unlikely that it would for a large investment that might not return at all.
It's sad because I'd really prefer it if I could pay for a single version of the game and keep it for myself that way forever, I don't care for updates. If developers actually added some LAN support for once, and we'd be able to find our own way forward.
@@victornguyen1175 In fairness, that's more or less what LoR PvP is right now. I legit cannot remember the last balance patch, so the current meta is pretty much what you got (save for rotation in standard).
The silver lining is that the card pool is deep enough and balance is good enough that you can make a looot of decks and take games with them.
That guy at 5:30 makes a great point.
bruy it's you 🗿
Not so much at 5:35 though
We'll never forget you papaya
Fuck I miss you Grap and the LOR community
Agreed
Legends of Runeterra has been such a beloved part of my life. It's so extremely well polished but they killed the game with almost zero advertisement. Only adding the LoR button to League client AFTER the announcement on cutting the budget?? I seriously don't understand why they made the game so invisible. It's a massive shame...
a game failed for being too generous
what a world we live in
That's how business works lol.
I love the game, but it got a few bad points during launch. The animations were good, but it took so long to play a card, from times to times you couldnt even use all your gems
Have you worked only in non profit organizations or at all? Businesses need money, skilled employees especially software engineers demand a good salary, nobody works for free. The game failed because it made no money, period.
@@alexv5581thanks sherlock, but i dont remember asking
Legends of Runeterra was supposed to be a loss leader. Something to draw in more players to the brand in general who would eventually start trickling into League or Wild Rift.
To add on: At launch the game wasnt even advertised in the league of legends client whereas tft was baked in client from start.
i remember when the game realesed and there was a cap on how much card you could buy witch actual money each week (or day?) for the first couple of weeks so that no one would get too much of a head stasrt and everyone could enjoy the unique gameplay of playing with the limited card pool we had. It was so fun but i still find it funny how some people were ready, credit card in hand, to put hundreds of dolalrs in the game to get what they exactly wanted and riot literally refused that money. The game was literally not money hungry enough for its own good.
I think Legends of Runeterra is the prime example why companies cant be your friend. Because the best efforts and friendliest practices don't guarantee success. It's a shame since I don't think LoR wouldn't have been as lovable as it is if riot did take the strategic route.
TFT and DOTA2 seem to be succesful despite not selling any gameplay-related items
@@rickmel-q7myou didnt understood his comment. Its not about being a game p2w or not
@@affirazer so what are the "friendly practices"?
how the fuck is your conclusion even related? how "companies can't be your friend" ??
in regard of LoR, the player experience was first and formost, the company was the best of friend.
the conclusion should be literally the EXACT opposite, the playerbase can't be trusted. The common idiot will flock to battle passes , microtransactions and $500 ahri skins, disregard to player experience and developer intentions
The average player should be considered mentally retarded and should be drained completely for financial gains. Such core values are what that shapes the videogame industry we have today
@@rickmel-q7mtft sells 300 dollar boards
Me playing LoR as i watch this video: "Babe, you didn't tell me you were a dead game :("
same
honestly I think they meant to say that the game has "low maintenance" or that the developer's goal has shifted, because the game is not at all dead. Case and point, us two lol.
Artifact is not dead either because the servers are still online, come on guys 😅
9:45 completely agree here. LoR is/was an awesome game. The gameplay is so fun. Especially the in-game tournaments every 2 months.
Riot never really tried marketing LoR to the extend needed. Only after 4 years, when the playerbase was gone they started to directly add LoR to the league client. Most league fans never really got in contact with the game.
They definitely should've pushed it harder in the LoL client. Riot tried to offer free stuff through Amazon Prime Gaming back in the day as well, but many people would just end up claiming the rewards each month and never installing the game at all.
I miss seasonals :(
I quit just after they lost the focus on the PvP, in TCG i am not fan of PVE.
If LoR launched before hearthstone it would be played untill this day, this is one of the best cardgames I've ever played. It's very unfortunate the game died
I really hope that when Riot eventually makes the MMO, they would rerelease runeterra as an ingame card game for players , and you would buy packs with ingame money
that sounds nice, like gwent with the witcher
the lore and ingame interactions this game offered was way too good to be true, it's been downhill fore riot as a game company ever since they shut down this, riot forge and laid off so much of their workforce in many departments. real good for their upper management tho, that's all that counts, their pockets.
Played it since launch and still do sometimes. I don't believe a card game has to feed into gambling psychology of getting rare drops like a gacha game to be successful. The problem was the cosmetics were simply not appealing enough to invest money in for most players. I bought a couple things but overall there wasn't much that compelled me to spend money. Boards and guardians had limited interactivity and card skins with level-up animations are great but there are many times where you just may never see it in a game due to surrenders. And conversely, these cinematic champion level-up animations also make LoR a much more expensive online TCG to make compared to things like Hearthstone, MTG Arena, etc. So they were actively incurring *more* costs to make the game while also choosing to avoid the predatory business model that is standard for these games.
Moving their focus to Path of Champions saved the game and it's in a better spot now as mainly a rogue-like deck-builder. Executive Producer Eric Shen said in an interview with Snnuy that the bundles they sold for Path of Champions since May of this year surpassed their board sales for ALL of 2022. They've also stopped making custom level-up animations and done away with voice-acting too to cut costs.
Kinda sad to think about but monetizing some gameplay aspects did in fact save the game, although it's not the addictive gambling approach. I just don't think card games have the broad audience appeal to stand on just a cosmetics monetization model alone, or at least not the way LoR was doing it.
I also occasionally play LoR and they didn't just have cosmetics they also had the season pass things. Though obviously expiring season passes are not very appealing for casual players and if they do buy them they will likely not complete them which feels really bad (even if they got "value" for their money still feeling like they didn't everything they paid for still sucks)
Gambling aspect is not true in the slightest. A lot of irl Magic players, especially older ones, almost never interact with booster packs, just buying singles. Especially nowadays, with Commander being the most popular format in the game.
@@MrLuzakman the thing is, you don't interact with a lot of people pulling Magic's gacha wheel. All the newish people at a prerelease love it, the people that play Commander super casually love it, pretty much everyone but entrenched tournament grinders love it.
Magic sells as many packs as it does for a reason. People like cracking packs.
@@cousinpatsey2471 a huge chunk of sealed products goes straight to shops, which crack packs and resell singles. That said, I don't deny that people like opening packs. To elaborate on my opinion, I think it's reversed. If I enjoy a game I'd want to spend money on it to enhance my experience further, be it new mythic rare card or some shiny protectors with an anime waifu. In the end there's no point in buying some pieces of cardboard or pngs if I don't enjoy the game. When I go to my locals, I go there to play the game, not to crack some packs. When I boot up a game it's because I want to play it, not because I can't wait to spin the gacha. Then again, I might be in the minority and big whales think differently or something.
limited interactivity? point me to a CG with more effort put into the cosmetics
Legitimately one of the best projects to come out of Riot and it is heartbreaking that the game never got the popularity it deserve(s/d)
I hope Riot find the way to continue support for the game, maybe some gatcha stuff for obtaining random guardians or stickers, more social elements to show other what you get or something like that
Currently they've heavily expanded the monetization of progression in the rougelite mode, Path of Champions, but I'm not surprised most are not aware of this.
Riot didnt wanted this game to suceed. Thats the truth. Not enought spotlight for it to shine. Im a cardgame veteran and i can say thats the best online cardgame made. But without marketing.... even that will die
I'm a card game veteran and can say that LoR was the most frustrating online cardgame I've ever played. And that's including Vanguard Zero.
@@MrLuzakman what? The game was easy af to learn wtf are you talking about.
@@GerriFuryman where did I say anything about learning the game?
@@MrLuzakman "most frustrating online cardgame I've ever played" what tis that mean then? my god...
@GerriFuryman it means that gameplay was frustrating me to no end. I've played it for quite a long time, and quit after realising that almost every game feels like a slog to me, no matter who wins in the end.
TFT > LoR > Summoners Rift
Runeterra has so many awesome mechanics and ways to play with both PvP and PvE. I prefer it over hearthstone because it plays more similar to Magic the Gathering and MtG Arena just demands too much of your credit card. Runeterra is constantly handing you free card tokens
There was a time that LoR was my life, i still love this game, but if Riot, the game company that has infinite money doesn't care about the game anymore, why should I?
You never know you are in your golden age until you leave it. LoR has changes my life massively and I love it. I got devastated when it got into a comma. Its not the same anymore and many of the friends I made thanks to the game have been drifting away :(
I love card games, but I hate wasting money, so I never got hooked by one. When LoR came out, it was such a breath of fresh air. It gave me the opportunity to commit and play various decks and strats. It brought me back to a time where I used to play yugioh with my friends in the school cafeteria and ill always be so thankful for it.
LoR failed to be predatory and incite gambling and that is a bad thing ....
I think another issue that LoR had was requiring players to download a completely different client instead of making it available in the LoL client like TFT. If they had done so, I think more players would've tried it and players would keep coming back to it. But out of sight, out of mind. I think they need to retire the standalone client and just incorporate everything into 1 client.
They can't make the download be 200gb and valorant seems to be successful having it's own client (and distinct IP for whatever reason)
@@Hoellenseherit was still in the riot launcher from release, unlike LoR, which was put there much after valorant
@BrolaireThebright I can't remember, they changed the launcher and client so much over the last years
I remember that when irelia and azir become soo op that i rage quit the game like the game isn’t updated fast enough to fix the card.
There is also a little thing called the sunken cost fallacy that keeps you returning even during bad metas and such due to having already invested a considerable amount of time and money
the irony to this is when there was a speceficly bad meta in lor, the card sunk cost was the highest wr in the game lol
as a former competitive LOR player, just to say the monetization was the main problem is incorrect. the playerbase was the issue, and it was entirely due to Riot's lack of interest in advertising the game. They didn't anything in the LoL client to tap in to their already massive user base, and they didn't do much external marketing either. I really do think that if they advertised it more and got people more excited about the game, it could have succeeded.
LoR didn't died. It was murdered.
Riot didn't bother giving it spotlight in the client (the fact they added the button after pulling the trigger on competitive is a massive joke).
That's literally it. Yeah sure monetization was low, but there was still ways they could make money out of it. Battle passes weren't always on, that should have been the case in the first place (outside of region progression that is).
Same thing happened to riot forge too. Stellar games for their price tags. Just no promotion at all. I don't know if it's laziness or oversight, but this is just sad
As someone who plays league and other card games, LOR is kinda the new way to expand the League Lore (LOR) so I think even if its not competitive its there to expand story and to introduce new story lines.
Seeing Warwick having the default level up animation compared to other Champion cards having their own personalized animation felt so painful. Even worse when LoR players have been waiting for Warwick for a long time. 💔
The budget cuts were too much… it’s absolutely tragic, this was by far the best card game on the market and it failed because it wasn’t greedy enough
Worry not, theyre working on all the bad things on that part
The reason TFT is so much more successful is that like Riot's other successful games they stole a very popular concept by the name of Dota Autochess (made it simpler) and featured it in the launcher for the world's most popular game. TFT market also wasn't saturated, Dota Autochess only ever got popular inside the Dota 2 arcade, and Valve abandoned Dota Underlords. Virtually no competition.
LoR is a game where they actually took a lot of time and resources to innovate in a market that is super saturated, and they never thought to monetize it in a way that makes sense for them to keep working on it. I never got that much into LoR due to being busy with life and not having time to game, but it was truly revolutionary in terms of its gameplay. Sad to hear it's gone.
I've played this game since the very first day of alpha. It's one of the games that I've played the most (since you can play from phone anywhere) and I still play today couple games along the coffee time and I never get tired of it. I'm just sad that they refuse to support PVP with the excuse that people only play PVE when in reality they dont support PVP because how hard it was to balance all the cards.
Now... saying the game is dead is a bit over the line. The game IS in life balance because they are refusing to update it (same as Starcraft 2 or Heroes of the Storm) but if we saw the numbers we could probably see its up there with other TCGs.
LOR gave RIOT the best gift they could have... The entire lore for their series. It was not until LOR came out that they started to really develop the character backgrounds properly. It trully helped Arcane to establish a good story. The riot MMO will also drink a lot from what LOR established, and I believe people are not very aware of how much that means coming from a card game. That to mean does not mean FAILURE at all.
Do you think Legends of Runeterra was too generous with card acquisition leading to people spending less and the game is running at a loss?
I think card games are meant to be Gacha, it's just fun getting rare cards when you purchase them with real money
It's not just that. The other issue is that they removed the entire "collection" aspect out of a CCG (collectable card game). When it first launched, it took a bit to get a full collection. After that, everyone had enough resources to instantly craft an entire expansion, day 1, with zero money spent.
Opening the weekly "vault" for rewards was literally a chore, and they had to add a button to instantly claim all rewards (since nobody needed rewards).
This led to people also getting bored very quickly, because there was no "chase" for cards. Everyone had it all, minute 1. New expansions died much faster than they should.
Having a goal to chase long term in card games is a big motivator to play more. Chasing after cards that are hard to get that define decks is sometimes more than half the fun, and the reason you grind a card game (or pay for packs).
@@GrappLr There's just no Dopamine on getting rare cards, that's the problem of this game
@@RedHairShanks-bb3dc master duel most profittable month was when sentouki/sky striker alt card release and current evil twins alt art release which is rarity bumped and you cannot craft the alt card you have to pull them on the pack, i know that yugioh and runeterra dont share the same audience, its japan focused audience game and make most of their money from japan, cute girls sells simple.
releasing a rare fanservice card that you cant craft nor pull will piss off the runeterra audiences, also as we can see that most western players that play master duel arent really care about getting a rarer fanservice card when you can just use lower rarity anyway.
it works in master duel but i cant see it works in runeterra
no, it just wasn't popular enough due to its gameplay pattern and restrictive deckbuilding
TFT and DOTA2 let the player access every game-piece right off the gate and they don't have a problem making money
Loved LoR, played from day 1. It was a great digital card game and I've played them all. One thing I noticed that wasn't mentioned is the barrier to entry and initial skill floor was a tad higher than most digital tcgs. If you weren't familiar with or had a grasp on tcgs, LoR was one of the more intimidating ones to learn compared to hearthstone. Attack ordering, and the champion level up mechanics were not things seen in other card games at that point, while I grasped them quickly, they were definitely not the most intuitive and easy to understand mechanics for League fans migrating that may never had played a digital tcg outside of hearthstone.
The biggiest thing that upset me with LOR was the fact that they had the resources and ideas to make this succeed. They had the audience who would have dropped money for special rarties. but my biggest complaint was that they added a LoR client too late into the base LOL game. They would have gotten more players from there. But I guess they werent thinking.
It sounds like people want to spend a lot of money to get the cards, rather than playing to get the same cards. It's giving addiction.
The problem is that the game just wasn't that engaging and the decks just kind of played themselves. I've played other non-digital TCGs and the good ones have more gameplay and deck building depth to them.
I like LoR, but the gameplay felt a bit shallow and repetitive compared to other games on the market so many people got board and moved on.
true
TFT wass ssuccessful becuase it was in the league of legendsss client. Runeterra was whole different game you had to download. Also im feeling the pack pulling argument as we speak becausse i moved on to pokemon TCG pocket and i dropped too much in a few days just pulling packs.
Started playing LoR like three weeks ago because Arcane S2 made mewant to interact with the world of Runeterra. I have been playing it nearly every day since, it's really fun! Didn't even know it had a budget cut. I can still highly recommend it, even though it "failed".
We spent years complaining about over-monetized piece of garbage games from companies that don't care about the customer and when we finally got a honest to god AMAZING card game that was at the same time 100% F2P we let it die.
Maybe we do deserve to get milked by greedy companies, maybe we deserve gacha mechanics, battle passes, overpriced DLC and unfinished games.
They should just wrap it up as a roguelike or adventure card game and sell it on steam, not everything has to be a live-service to be successful.
Still remember reaching top 200 in EU. Also wrote a song about the song. About the purrfection.
It was amazing to be a part of this short history. You had to be there. It was a once in a lifetime situation.
I hope they can develop an offline mode so I could play it more smoothly on transit.
Maybe simplifying the Path of Champions would make it better. I'd love to have a randomizer pick any of a certain star level instead of dealing with analysis paralysis.
I wish this game didn't have to work against managing server costs and comparisons to TCGs (It might've been more successful if it was a roguelike deckbuilder from the start).
I am a new player that came from Slay the Spire, I also play League and love the Lore. The PVE game mode is amazing to just play at 2x-4x speed while watching youtube on a second monitor and the battlepasses provide good value for starting out your champion pool (I have bought 4 so far). The problem lies in marketing, the game is fun, polished, amazing art, amazing story. One thing I would improve is how path of champions is presented, if the story was presented the same as Age of empires 2 campaign, it would be amazing for us Lore junkies.
Hands down the best Digital TCG ever made.
On a positive note, recently they said they're on a up turn and recent monetization has finally started to generate income, things might get better by next year. I still put all the blame in the lack of marketing outside of the reléase era
One simple reason why LoR died: its finance department is dog shit. Players were BEGGING the game devs to give them things to buy, but the few items there are in the shops (skins, card backs, legends, etc.) were overpriced as shit, so even if players want to support the game, only whales can stomach spending their money.
It still boggles my mind how generous LoR is. I remember playing it for the first time and I was able to build 1 meta deck, 2 troll decks, and my own experimental deck in a week. I was not even playing heavily. Maybe 2 to 5 games in a day. On top of that, you get 2 or 3 pre-built decks when starting out.
As a player who spent quite a bit on the game and bought skins and boards, what made me quit was actually the balance. My favorite part of the game was just picking a deck and mastering it, buying skins, getting mastery points on my fav champs, and getting boards to match with those decks. I would spent decent money on a deck to make it my own, I would get good at the deck, and then it would just get nerfed. And I don't mean like a small touch, like the deck would go from 55% wr to 49%. It was really demoralizing when I would spend money and time on a deck just to have it be completely worthless the next day, and eventually it happened enough times to make me decide enough was enough
I agree completely. I played LoR quite a lot on official release, quit, then returned, then quit for good after the last batch of PvP champions. It feels like a complete echo chamber has formed around the surviving LoR community where they just repeat the same cope statements over and over.
This is why I feel like card cosmetics just don't work : you need to have a playable deck where the card is included, where you can play it and then look at it for some time until it dies.
And now, imagine coming from Magic the gathering, you buy a deck that cost you around 500 dollars and the key cards get straight up banned.
I think about this game regularly and then when I thought I finally could let it go, you guys had to make this damn video.
As a SEA player where this type of game is unpopular, i really love this game. The champion level up system is so good. Already played this game since 2020 and never get bored. I wish this game could continue for a long time so i can still play it.
Pokemon card game is way more popular because people enjoy pulling for cards and showing off rare finds to friends. LoR was good game, but lacked the "ownership" feeling people have with their cards.
After the MASSIVE success of Pokémon TCGP, we can say that the genre is NOT dead! It just needed more attention to some important aspects, one of them being the marketing.
I tried LOR when it first launched but I soon got tired of it not because of the game itself but because I was already burnt out on years of hearthstone. It wasn't till after I had not played any tcg for a little over 2 years I picked up LOR again and fell in love with the design and how the game played. Unfortunately the time I fell in love with LOR it was shortly announced that development and updates were gonna slow down.
Does anyone think that the level up animations (as good as they were!) were unnecessary. I do understand some special cases like for the ascend trio but every single champion didnt need a whole cutscene. I feel like that was a decent part of the budget in some cases. I the fancy card flip was more then enough
Yes.
For me, it also got old reeal quick. Even seeing my own champion's animations made me tired after a while, it gave me the feeling of "yeah, yeah, I get it, can we go back to the game?"
@michel0dy Couldn't agree more 😂
I like level ups, but they should stick to the simple and quick animations. Later they were playing a fucking cinematic that is longer and probably more expensive.
Especially when playing with Ascended decks and having to watch 3 heroes level up at the same time for like 30 seconds! 😂
@@michel0dyit's even worse for the champions you play ; at least if the meta is varied enough you'll face different decks and champions, but the champs you play you get to see their animation every single game to the point where it's not that exciting anymore
If they just turned the skin lines into a gacha a lot of whales would want to grab it, and show it off on pvp, plus a lot of active players espcially in the twitter community really want to spend money on the game but they dont know where to spend it, since the skins are limited and some of the skins are mostly being centered on a one champion rather than the other existng or old champion whether it is meta or not
easily my favorite game Riot has put out to date, it’s a shame it was never marketed to the wider League audience. took forever for it to be added to the official client
I would be so ready to put my money back in this game if they return to the pvp experience, it was genuinely the most fun I had with tcgs in a long time
I truly loved the game. Played it from the Beta. Climbed to the very top with decks ahead of the meta. I had a blast. Introduced almost a dozen friends who also fell down the rabbit hole. Held in-house tournaments (had a lot of fun clutching those).
I stopped playing around the time eternal began and rotations started, just before Vayne/Kayle etc joined. It felt like a lot of my favourite cards were being put on the shelf and told "you've got to go because you're either too good or too bad". And the expansions were coming out too quickly for me. I wanted more time to collect and grow and tinker, but everything kept changing completely every 2-3 months and the playstyles I liked would suddenly get killed by new decks.
In combination with the increasing consistency of playing against incredibly frustrating decks (Kaisa/Viego) I realised I wasn't having as much fun anymore. I played a lot of fair midrange decks and slow control decks that gave my opponents the chance to play their cards and take their best shot at me. And I kept going against aggro decks that would either win the game or surrender by turn 7. Or queue into a combo deck I couldn't beat. Or get rock paper scissored by other control decks that specifically made their decks to beat other control decks while I tried to make my decks viable vs aggro/midrange/combo/control.
The norms changed. I didn't enjoy my opponents always surrendering the moment I got ahead and before I actually got to do my thing. I never surrender so the community increased norm of "just go next" sucked a lot of the fun out of the game for me. When the game first began it didn't have that but as people played more games they lost the feeling of wonder and would just leave. I don't derive my fun from winning or climbing, even if I was top 5-10% at it. I derived it from pulling out clutch outplays, strategies I set in motion earlier paying off. Using my understanding of the game, my knowledge of their decks, etc to lay traps and counterplay. The final nail was the impossibility of playing around the amount of RNG that kept getting added. Invokes were fine cause the pool was limited, and choices of invokes within those pools were often even moreso. So I could play around what I thought someone would pick from 3-5 cards. Mind games. It just became impossible to play around one of 30-50 cards. Especially as a lot of them were new and I hadn't built too much familiarity with, and when I finally was, the next expansion would hit and I'd have to do it all over again.
In terms of the PVE, I got absolutely screwed by the RNG of unlocking champions so hard over and over and over that I stopped trying to unlock them cause I was just going to roll Annie for a 14th time. I did really enjoy those adventures and building wild-ass decks though.
Legends of Runeterra is largely very good. Of course, their focus on getting players up to speed and being generous with cards is awesome, but, from where I'm standing, the biggest issues were these.
- They didn't really market the game much at all. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for organic growth, but considering how late to the party LoR was, they really should've been targeting creators in the TGC space with ambassadorships etc. To get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. If more people knew that it was reletively low investment, I think more people would've tried it.
- The game flow is perfectly fine, but unintuitive. I think a genuine problem with the game is how turn structure works, and how that impacts the first time player experience. Frankly, it feels too different from the majority of other games at a systems level, and that's likely to make people bounce off, even if the system is functional in a vacuum
You know the "Huh, this is kinda strange" aversion you get when something bucks your expectations at a very fundamental level, that'll churn a lot of people right out of the experience, and I think that happened here.
- Because the game flow is so different from standard, it makes the game harder to spectate, and spectating is a big part of marketing and growing the game on its own. If you're someone who's not familiar with the game, it's very difficult to recognize core elements of the experience at a glance. Interactivity is great, but when taken to the extent of simultaneous turns, that's difficult to parse.
They made a niche product that mostly appeals to those that are fairly dedicated, when their bussiness model relied on their audience being the opposite. Happy accidents *do* happen, but usually that requires some very deloberate and conspicuous intervation to overcome, and sometimes it's outright dropped, e.g., Fortnite with its building mechanics. At a core level, is a significant departure from FPS/Battle Royale standards, the only reason it didn't sink the game is because of... everything else about Fortnite, and they've been waffling on that mechanic every since the game released, which should indicate something.
It's probably too late for LoR, but I hope some of the designers get a chance to work on a smaller product and make some changes, because it really is a great game, even past the generous bussiness model.
I've never feel so depressed of a game on dying state like this game is right now. The game was so fun and very f2p friendly. One of the best digital card game out there with great art and lore. And it just fumble like that
In my opinion one of the best card games out there that captures the spirit of the Runeterra universe so well!
It's insane to see how TFT got so much bigger and stayed perfectly f2p friendly but at the same time getting advertisement and being easily accessible through the lol client greatly helped
I think generosity was a developmental failure, but what did it for me was that champions got rotated out of the standard set that was up, so when I didn't want to play the expanded set of cards I couldn't play my favorite champions after they got rotated out
Instead of making free to own all cards, its better to implement trading system like traditional tcg where you can focus on build a deck you want to play, still cheap and have a goal to work towards to
A trading system like Artifact?..
I always believe that card games are a collection game first than gameplay. I could be losing a lot in game but having a card deck unique to mine that not everyone has in their collection will always feel fulfilling.
Something that kinda went under the radar is how the LOR devs tried to pivot to PVE years ago and were denied. Crazy stuff was teased like co-op, they tried to save it before it got to this point but higher ups didn’t see the vision
And now they've announced a PHYSICAL CARD GAME. Aside from lor
Please keep fighting legends of runeterra players! Just in a dark spot right now funnily enough during luxs pve expansion
Hope one day we get to see it all come back! Imagine ultimate board skins like dj sona and more!
Ironically I have found more ads nowadays that it was when pvp scene was active.
Im sad to see the lore aspect go, it really didnt move the lore forward but expanded it outward to make the world feel real and lived in with all the interactions and card text
Still find it baffling that technically Artifact made more money than LoR
When they stop supporting competitive, I was done with it
the lack of promotion and starting monetization too late through skins/boards/mates/etc feels like the bigger problem though. Making every card easily earnable (at least early on) seems like a genius idea for getting people to join from other card games. It greatly lowers the required investment, real or perceived
I finally reached Top 500 players on Ladder. 2 weeks later, they announced it was going to Maintenance Mode.
It sounds like Riot did not have a strategy to build a competitive league. Did they assume one would form naturally?
feels rough too seeing Travis be the talking head for the video when he wasn't really in the scene at all
That the thing with free to play stuff, if no one’s buying anything in them, they don’t make money and lose support. Not only that - but there is more loyalty for a game that a player invested time and money in.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve refused to delete league of legends just because I spent 20 dollars on 3 skins in like 2014. And sure, you can buy cosmetics in LOR but cosmetics in a card game aren’t cared about as much as the actual cards.
This is why Konami can exploit Yu Gi Oh players, they know their players already spent so much money on getting rare and powerful cards - which keep players invested into the game.
I do think mechanically and design wise, each expansion removed what made LoR LoR and made it more like any generic TCG.
Every new champion card came with a new keyword, a new mechanic, rather than adapting the champions into the lens of the card game and what it already had established. It really made me dislike the game. Champion design was mid, we had bangers like TF, Aphelios, Swain, and then keyword soup.
I don't think what you said from 6:30 is accurate. I don't think there are any games to which normal people watch the eSports of. Every game has barriers where people who don't know what's going on can't fully enjoy it. Only Runeterra players watched runeterra eSports, that's true but that's the case with every eSports game i believe. Simple the playerbase is incredibly large for those game. LoR failed coz riot did not market it properly. They failed to advertise the game to the core league fanbase.
I can even begging to express how much it hurt me when they first announced they'd be moving to PvE
I don't think monetization was the problem. The problem was that other TGCs are more intuitive. I understand that people here like it. But being a MTG player, i can tell you, the turn structure is a mess. And the "Battlefield" seemed like a bunch of squares with numbers clashing. Instead of representing the characters in the cards. The art in the cards are the last thing you see.
Card types and card interactions should be on the board. This would've been better if the use a paper version at development. Heartstone devs did it, and the result is a lot more intutive.
I think they needed to implement a battle pass or subscription from the start.
The game was generous and I really appreciate that, but I think everything else was expensive, In all my life playing LoR I only bought a board and with the remaining money I bought wildcards, Buying wildcards with money was very expensive. There was a time where I wanted to buy wildcards to finish a deck, but when I saw the prices... I decided to just wait a week or 2 to get the cards by playing.
Now they're using a battle pass for the PvE and I like that, because it makes everything easier to get and I don't have to grind that much.
LOR é o melhor card game já feito, espero que consiga se reerguer.
i knew the day would come this game would be covered in this channel, and it still hurts all the same
Runeterra fail has nothing to do with the rewards system. Rather gameplay is way too complex for a casual card game and way too similar to other titles like MtG. Its a good game, visuals are top notch, but when I play it I feel like I am playing a clone of MtG. I would love to feel like I am playing an actual champion from league or at least something different then all other card games.
With Artifact its similar story. Way too complex, extremely hard to understand for viewers and huuge barier of entry. I played Artifact when it dropped and I think it was better then most card games including Runeterra, very deep and rewarding gameplay, but it was overcomplicated for the average player.
One of the things I hate HATE when people talk about LoR is that they blame its death on generosity which IMO makes no sense.
The reality of the situation is that they made an amazing game and proceeded to gut it in every way. They didn't promote it so barely anyone knew about it, they didn't create enough worthwhile cosmetics (people who played will know that they started to slowly stop making new Board Companions, Boards, etc and the ones we did have weren't extremely high quality), they put a lot of money into high quality art and voicelines which backfired since its a huge money sink (and those who saw the debacle with Ambessa and Warwick recently know exactly whats up. They did say they'll be giving them the voicelines tho).
Most importantly tho we can't delude ourselves. This game has absolutely awful metas. AzirIrelia is famous (and I think Bilgewater and Targon had their fair share of insufferable metas. Looking at you TF, Fizz, Veiled Temple. Shout out to Lee Sin) but card design went down hill after Bandle City. Poppy, Tristana, and Veigar were absolutely terrible design wise. Galio, Rumble, Yuumi were also pretty bad. All the Runterran cards had one problem or the other, but notably Jhin and Bard are some the worst designs. Neeko, Nidalee, and Poro King's entire expansion was a low point. It hurts more when the team can't commit to better and more frequent balance patches, on top of deciding to all but stop reworking old champ designs.
Then there's the decision to start making unique champions before we had every LoL champ, the design-locks self-inflicted by "Region Identity", and the idea to commit to rotation which split the PVP player base (not in half mind you, but still) and created the unbalanced mess that was eternal while allowing a somewhat ok meta to exist in Standard (tho there are always problems).
And don't get me started on Path of Champions. I know people love playing it, but Im honestly surprised it makes as much money as it does. I can't speak to what it does to warrant it, but it's crazy to think about.
but yeah TLDR: The game is good, but it made a lot of mistakes. Generosity didn't kill the game, a whole lot of mistakes did overtime, but generosity was not one of them.
Yeah the cosmetics were not very appealing. They did also sell those season pass things which I did buy a couple of times but I stopped as expiring passes are just not very good or appealing for a casual player like me (even if I probably still got "value" for my money not getting everything still feels pretty bad)
Agreed, the game felt REALLY horrible when it feels horrible, and NOT AS GOOD when it feels good. For example, when you queue against azirelia with normal deck at the previous meta, you're going to lose no matter what you do (that deck have >60% WR for that reason), but if you specifically counter it, MAYBE, you can win the game and when you win, it does not feel great.
Tried coming back to the game on GNAR meta, it's NOT GOOD AT ALL. The game is still practically a rock paper scissor with gnar mixed in. How come the #1, #2, and #3 deck at that time, have like 70-30 W/L ratio against some decks, and 30/70 ratio against other? The outcome of the match is decided the moment riot match makes you with your counter OR your "food". It's not fun at all.
Also, 1 more thing, the game is slowwww as hell. The rope is introduced after what? 1 minutes every action? And a turn can have more than 3-4 actions. But IG this one is more of my personal preferences.
I agree, it was a very good game in the beta and the Bilgewater expansion, but with each expansion the game became worse until it became too much with Bandle City.
@@terrariaco8301 this
@@mariogunawan5844abso-fuken-lutely my point. The game often feels like it drags on for eternity, even worse in certain matchups where both players just sit there and wait until one of them snaps and does something, because both know that whatever they play would be immediately destroyed/countered and then they won't have enough mana to counter the opponent's next turn, etc... and then it snowballs into a real shitty experience.
It's very sad. I loved to play it and got so hooked, I immediately cashed 30 bucks. Very rare for me to do that in F2P.
Before watching the video, the game was great - issues it had been overall monetization. Boards were killed that people wanted to spend money on, skin's pricing was weird. It was $10-$15 for a skin with no new animations etc so people didn't want to bother. When people saw marvel snap come out and the cool borders and such on their special cards, people shouted for the same that never came. People really wanted to spend money on the game, but didn't really provide good ways for them to do as such.
After watching - Talking about TFT being huge, but it was also built into the core client. LoR had basically no advertisement behind it where TFT was advertised super heavily.
I think there definitely are a few angles to this though. One is that yes riot was very generous, but the other is that the gameplay was so streamlined it did mean that many mechanics felt very adjacent to one another, and the bounds of their design space became very clear. Basically, they leaned too far towards hearthstone with autotargeting mechanics, many random mechanics, limited board sizes, and no visibly accessible discard pile, when they could have leaned closer to Magic and allowed there to be a greater sense of complexity that made for an extremely deep play experience to keep getting new players invested. The gameplay is still super fun, and it’s still much better than hearthstone, but they boxed themselves in a bit too much mechanically.
The problem was not that it didn't have enough player. It's just that those players had nothing to buy. The cards were too easy to get
They removed the arena/expedition option so I had no reason to keep playing. Draft to me is so much more fun than constructed.
all we can hope, that one day riot will actually try with something other than tft in china and gacha mechanics again.
It died the moment they put focus on finite singleplayer modes instead of infinite multiplayer potential
This is ridiculously stupid because that happened after the game was failed, and rakes in vastly more money
I bought plenty of cosmetics for LoR when I was playing. I played from just after Foundations up until they initiated Rotation. My favorite champion to play with and build around was Swain and I loved playing Ranked. But they decided the expanded format wasn’t going to be available for ranked play and rewards so I lost interest because I couldn’t play with Swain in the way that I enjoyed anymore.