Addictive is just another way of saying you didn't caught players attention nor retained what you got. To me it felt like lore lacked content and community. Hearthstone has been trending downwards because of lack of content too, only it's community keeps it alive.
Man, I couldn’t finish this video because it was so much of a bummer. I miss LoR like crazy. It was the first TCG that I was actually able to play competitively because I could afford all the cards. Thanks for the memories!
For me, was the best Card Game ever made. In terms of just purely playstyle and skill, I think Artifact was better, but LoR was the complete package. Now, in the "collectable" department, LoR sucked. There was no component of "completing my collection", which most card gamers love.
@@GrappLri guess that was the issue, it was really free to play and it missed that collection department, maybe if they did what pockemon pocket did now with rare variants it could have worked for them.
@@GrappLrSo sad to watch, if we can see old players play Lor same day to compete climb ladder.just maybe.the best game but sometimes even being the best is not enough
The fact that LoR died and Marvel Snap became the "best" card game on the market tells you everything you need to know about the mental state of humans currently
This failure really hurt me personally. This game had so much potential in both mechanics and storytelling, and is now barely hanging on a thread. Ambesa and Warwick feel like this may be the final
in my humble opinion, the best and most fair card game ever created... im so sad that it got to be this way... i spent all my dawns with grappler on twitch, it was pure fun! i will always remember
The only "A+" F2P experience in card games I've ever played. At the start I was loving the roguelike/deckbuilder mode, but when I got tired of it, there wasn't a good competitive scenario anymore. That said, it was a good run.
LoR was such an amazing game, but I knew from the moment I started playing that it was monetized TOO fairly. This isn’t just bad from a profit standpoint, but a lot of gamers expect at least some gambling in acquiring cards for a game like this, and it’s actually very important for longevity. In paper card games this has been proven over and over than collectible card games outlast expandable card games.
Idk I understand the gamba point of view but for me, the balancing and general pvp game direction is what killed it for me. Addictiveness kind of came from wanting to play new champs or hear new lore interactions
Agreed, wish this was talked about more. The new champions added felt pretty boring and uninspired mechanically. Balancing was always kinda off. Also, it was pretty difficult to return after taking a break, not very generous for returning players. Otherwise, I loved the game.
I understand the argument though it doesn't really apply much to me as even when I played Hearthstone I didn't care much about pack openings. I almost never bought packs directly and mostly just got them from playing Arena (draft).
@@rafasilva1265 Adding new keywords with expansions wasn't a problem but itself. MtG does that with every set, and it's part of what keeps the game exciting. However, in MtG standard format, you only ever have two sets active at a time. So the fatigue of having to continuously remember how every single one of those keywords worked is drastically lessened. LoR did finally attempt rotation, but it was for balancing purposes, not player fatigue.
What I wanna is say is that It seems Marvel snap saw Lors failure and went in the opposite direction but took it to the extreme. It’s sad tbh because what’s holding both these great games back is monetisation
Even now looking back, even though I stopped playing LoR years ago, I still consider it the best online card game and one of the best card games since MtG. It's such a tragedy that it failed the way it did, because it really is a fantastic game in every aspect. Monetization, gameplay, lore, cosmetics. All of it was perfect.
Hate it so much that the big lesson taken from this whole experiment by a lot of people has been basically "card games can only exist profitably through predatory monetization practices". Frankly don't know myself whether that is correct or not, but it is the hugest bummer of all time.
Where it fails to me is when they decided to cut champion level up animation, cut voices, and interactions. They just concentrate in PvE instead of PvP, after that I just lost interest.
Riot stated that they revisit Warwick and Ambessa and give them VO, Animations (and possibly new followers). They pulled back from the generic level up.
I know this might be a hot take, but Swim choosing what he did kind of left a hole in the community. He was a Mobalytics team member, brilliant deck strategist, and a lot of fun to watch. He helped round out the community with Graplr and Snnuy. I watched so many of his videos to better understand the game. I really wish he could have put himself in better positions to make better choices. After he left, the game just didn’t feel the same.
It definitely effected alot just going out of no where being the top watched on yt and twitch for lor he would just bring in random new peolple too boosting the lor category but oh well.
I too learned how to play with swim and level up my game. But knowing what he did I would rather search other guides and creators that continue exploiting the game to the limit.
I think the sunk cost fallacy is a reason people still play hearthstone but making new cards hard to get also increases the longevity of an expansion by a lot. I always felt like expansions just didn't last long enough in LOR which led people to quit instead of keep playing. I also had this weird issue where after i stopped playing the game was actually quite hard to get back into because i had already cleared the whole rewards track and spent all my currency, i was left in this weird state of waiting for weekly rewards to get a few more cards which just made me quit again
I hold the exact opposite feeling. I was only able to get into LOR because I had the ability to drop 20-30 bucks and make the deck I want at any given time. I only stopped playing when the meta got stale and they weren’t reacting fast enough and when they ended pvp support
Expansions being just 3 champions were a huge issue to me. Bandlecity release was the last time I seriously tried to climb ladder or experiment with different decks. After that I just felt that 1-3 extra decks added to the game were just not worth it to sink in time, so I would just play for a day or two and then drop it back and go play something else.
Something that I think people don't remember I forget to mention is that when the game came out it wasn't just f2p friendly, it was P2W UNFRIENDLY, people couldn't spend money to buy all the cards right away. I remember lots of HS streamers being annoyed that they couldn't just buy cards at the start because they wanted to make content around the game and felt time locked. Another issue worth mentioning in my opinion is their failure of the draft mode, HS arena streamers had no interest in it, partly because it had no risk/reward involved like HS arena.
It was definitely non p2w friendly! And the rate of card acquisition was great in set 1. But after that, people had stockpiled so much dust, that future expansions were instantly obtainable.
I agree with the first part, but I was a heavy arena player and played runeterra for the draft mode. The draft mode simply had a few issues that would've been pretty easy to fix.
The first card game to introduce magic interactivity whith the most popular lore wise flavor that lol has, somehow managed to sinked to the abyss of trash games
Artifact... That takes me back. I was so hyped for it and haven't been so disappointed in anything ever since. On the other hand, LoR was so freaking good. But yeah, the non-predatory monetization is what ultimately killed it. It never got "mainstream" big. There was no millions of viewers for tournaments. There was just a couple of guys on Twitch having the time of their life. It stayed super niche and most people won't even know how incredible this game truly was. Sadge
My one hope for LoR is that whenever the MMO comes out, they port it in as an in universe card game, sort of like the reverse of what happened with Gwent.
Honestly lor is still great and I still actively play, and go back and watch the old videos from the creators like yourself. Breaks my heart to see it all slowly dissappear
LoR was increible, and i blame part of the fail on Riot main directors, They took a lot of time to Add a Button to the RIOT CLIENT like tft had to play inmediatly. Cosmetics and Battlepasses were not very good put togheter. Prismatic cards were a downgrade in a lot of card that have Marvelous art. Boards were nice, but too little. Vaults were amazing for casuals, they made you Play the game more so you get the juici lv up. I love LoR, and i m sad how it turned out.
Started watching you and mogwai YEARS ago and never missed an upload with LoR content. It was fun watching the metas shift and seeing you guys try the new cards out and the new decks. Rip
if they make this LoR 2 man even if they make this a gacha type and not as generous as it was, i'll dedicate my money to support the game just to play it back I really miss playing kennen and taliyah
It's pretty simple and blows my mind that it doesn't come up more often. Riot did not leverage the existing league playerbase. TFT did because it was in the league client. It would not have been as successful if that was not the case. LOR didn't get the league client button until it was already dead. I had friends who played league everyday, watched arcane, bought merch, etc. not know the card game existed. When Grapplr says it had a large playerbase i have to disagree because it should have been much higher. The very forgiving monetization structure of LOR could have worked with volume. You need way more people playing the game so that the few whales offset that cost. Yes there is the "Give me something to buy" argument that's valid and a whole other conversation but the reality is, LOR died because a statggering amount of existing league players didnt know it existed. Why LOR didnt get the button until post mortem is truly one of lifes greatest mysteries.
Riot wanted LoR to fail so they can just focus on the TFT and Moba market. This maybe a tin foil theory but LoR is just money laundering from Riot but they were surprised that devs they hired actually put heart into it. 😂
Exactly this + TFT at the start had some big lol streamers try it out because it was the big new thing in the lol client, some like Boxbox going full TFT iirc, there wasn't really a migration of pre existing big streamers to Legends of Runeterra
@@PenguinWithInternetAccess If I recall correctly, I remember streamers like Disguised Toast trying out LoR either on launch or during its beta pre-launch. So I believe there was at least a small subsection of larger content creators playing the game.
Im not a competitive gamer, i dont play lol, i play tft but only played on hyper roll, I've also quit lor but god damnit i love this game. While lol is the one where the story of runeterra emerge from, you can't lie about lor as the one most active in expanding the world of runeterra, and dare i say even more than arcane
it brings back good and bad memories, but it was by far the best part of the league community hands down. it was the only time people from league get together, brainstorm, joked in a community setting. i hope league finds a way to bring us back to lor or they can recreate an experience similar to it. if they made a game and you can play lor as a minigame with people or something I think the game would still have a chance to live. But it was a perfect storm, everything was near free which i love but in a long-term sense i now see how that hurt them.
Exactly! I was a part of the custom card community, and I remember spending long hours coming up with cool designs and hoping I'd show up on one of the many community custom reviews. Being able to talk so freely about ideas for creative cards is something I've yet to find in any game since, even MTG has a sort of gatekeepy approach to custom cards being "viable" or not
I def. have to agree with you that LoR had the opportunity to take our money away if they had a better Gachca system. But im just disappointed that they put the LoR client tab in the LOL base too late. I think if they were to fix this is not just look at hearthstone but many successful other card games like yugioh, pokemon magic. I mean I thought yugioh was dieing but they still have like 2k players at YCS
What drove me off LoR was buying a skin for a champ that got rotated out just a bit later, felt like I just wasted my money. When hearthstone did its first rotation you could recover the cost of the now wild card so you could get card that were in standard, but the skin thing just felt like a scam. Really enjoyed LoR was my favorite card game, sad it failed
Game literally died because it was too good for us. Only digital card game I could get into because it was extremely friendly so I could get all the cards plus it had amazing visuals, themes around decks etc. Such a shame...
The real problem was LOL never doing propaganda or some event for LOR if you remember Lor was entire like a beta (literally you need to search about the game, zero play now and sh1t) with every season having an animation And like i say they never put effort as they did for TFT or Wild Rift 😂😂 I feel bad for the people in LoR because they have more creativity and ideas than actual LOL design of champions
He wasn’t though. This was Riot propaganda. They failed because they made nothing worth buying. All the extra stuff was straight up ass. So many options and ideas and they went with half-assed cosmetics. Then cried that they were to generous giving out cards lmfao Funny seeing the propaganda still being upheld.
I'd actually argue with the title and go ahead and say that LoR didn't fail, it actually did quite well and was my favorite card game hands down to the point where I wish it was made as a physical card game to play in person. Even today I still play quite regularly and go in and build new decks and there were so many synergistic combos and ideas I had after about 5k+ hours in the game. My favorite decks were Anivia, Azir Irelia, Jhin Annie, Soraka Tahm Kench and Viego piles because each one had a different playstyle and each deck won in a different way. The game had a card acquisition model that made it easy to get cards and wasn't money hungry or overly-monetized and I actually wish some of the skins for cards in LoR were actual champion skins in league of legends. LoR didn't fail - Riot stopped supporting the PvP game mode and THAT is where Riot themselves failed, not the game because LoR itself was quite the successful game. Definitely blew Hearthstone out of the water for me, that's for sure.
Long time viewer Grapplr. Came back just to see this video. Wish LoR was successful. Still was fun to watch all your videos and be a part of the journey.
I have played all the popular CCGs on PC and in real life. And Runeterra is the best. The problem is that it’s a very small niche. There are few players who enjoy card games. The same might happen with 2xko, it will most likely be very good, but its online player count is unlikely to even reach 10k people in a couple of months. Casual players who don't want to think and progress. Even LOL might die because of this.
I still remember fondly working my first shitty job in Pest Control in 2020, exhausted all day sweating my ass off walking lawns, sitting down after work in my car with a Tropical Smoothie smoothie watching the Rising Tides Grapplr videos in a routine. Life is so much better now, but LoR and this channel embedded itself into a really nostalgic place in my life.
What killed my enjoyment of the game was the "metatification" of the game. When i got in it was incredible how you could bring an exotic idea to life in a few min and have and deck no one else plays. But after a few extension this feeling left the game. I would always see the exact same decks and those optimized killing machines where too strong for the more exotic strategies to exist. A game cant have that as his main appeal because there will always be a swimm.
Mobalytics and similar services were huge responsibles on LoR's death. A reason which I never reached Platinum+ was I always played my own creations. I fu king hate meta players.
Deckbuilding is hard, no shit. In every card game that is true, so it's not a card game that you are looking for if you want random nonsense to be on the same footing as optimised lists. But interesting and effective strategies did pop up, SwimStrim came up with many like his iceborn poros and Shurima ascension combo, both of which I got to master with. And I had my own fun experiments, like Shellfolk Zilean prank control. Someone else, I forget his name now, but he consistently had a high rank with a control deck with Trundle revival as his sole wincon (and he whooped my ass even against my meta Darkness deck I was proficient with). In other words, skill issue.
For me, this has been the main reason I started playing LoR. Finally a ccg where I can play meta decks without paying a lot of money or month long grinds.
One of LoRs biggest weaknesses was that there was no way to get back once you left. I stopped playing multiple times, saw a cool new set, openened the client but had no way to jumpstart my collection, other than manually buying a specific whole deck, which kills the experimentation part. I wish there would have been booster packs, and that they gave you some for free when the new expansion drops
What sent the game downhill for me was the "on rails" approach to deck building. The developers made champions so obviously paired together, with self contained packages. Many mechanics were never given cards beyond their initial set, which meant mechanics didn't feel fleshed out and had little staying power as the game power crept to new things. While two separate issues, they compound each other. I don't think it's a coincidence that I mostly played Deep and Targon Invoke/Ramp, two of the most well supported legacy archetypes. The mechanics of those decks felt stable, not just "keyword of the month".
One problem not beeing spoken about is the fact you could not use your Riot-points purchased in the league Client for runeterra. The amount of insignificant upgrades (emotes/skins/minis/boards) after your first purchase feel (Personal opinion) repulsive.
I hate opening packs and getting lucky because I’m not a lucky person, I’d much rather work for my cards I’ve collected. Thanks gambling addicts for ruining a great game
I still think Bandle city was the biggest reason for Lor's failure. There were enough payers, you immediately matched into games, some videos reached near millions of views and it was performing nicely on twitch. Obviously there were monetisation issues but if the PvP aspect of the game wasn't butchered by the effects of Bandle, the game would've been able to pay for itself or even provide profit eventually through cosmetics had people seen point in buying them (why would I buy cosmetics if i hate playing PvP because Bandle City killed deckbuilding and balance). This dogshit region ruined everything the game stands for and people were starting to quit on mass. Becoming PvE was a matter of time since this disaster of a region was added to the game
I do not blame the generosity at least completely, I blame a LOT on they pushing the competitive and the E-Sport aspect. At least personally what made me drop the game is how quickly got power creeped, instead of feeling back and forth it was a lot more on what can be generated, what can i draw what can do the next "this ends the game" effect, and to compensate Aggro was kept prevalent, sometimes to the point making a control deck meant add all the board clears and hope for the best.
i played it again and realized some of my cards cant work together anymore like the freedom of building my own cards was gone, it didn't really matter to me too if i lose i knew i was having fun.
Being the best in a dead genre is always a problem. It's also impossible to play casually. I once heard a Hearthstone player describe it as "too sweaty," and I think that's kind of true. Digital card games work best when they're asynchronous, pick up and play kinda things. I think LoR was the best version of a kind of game that had a low market ceiling. It didn't push the overall form and format enough to be it's own game, instead trying to make the best version of an established Archetype. This is also what League started as, just trying to be a Dota sequel that streamlined and simplified aspects of the genre, but that turned out to have a way higher market cap. I'd love to see them take another Crack at a Freemium card game but just bin all existing expectations and try to come up with a novel format, push the boundaries.
No advertisement, deck building that was watered down to: put together 2 champions and their packages, card acquisition that lets everyone play top tier decks on day one, matches being too long and exhausting bcs the game was too interactive with the spellstack, u couldn't play any spell without opponent having a say on what happens... The game was too taxing on the brain, LoR regularly had matches last longer than ur average League game... I remember when Marvel Snap came out, it was really a breath of fresh air for most LoR players, u had a really fun and interactive card game where matches last 3 minutes instead of 20 minutes, you could cut ur losses, losing a match didn't feel as bad bcs u didn't waste 20 mins of ur life just to lose etc. I feel like release of Marvel Snap was really the moment LoR started going downhill, at least for me, Marvel Snap made me realize just how exhausting it is to play LoR at times...
The game became split between pve & pvp. The choice to do so forever rolled the dice on the game. I wanted a hardcore casual forward competitive card game not a rouge lite
I’ve been playing a lot of TFT recently, and my main question here is: why can TFT be even MORE free to play than LoR, but still bring in plenty of money? You literally can’t pay to win if you tried. I guess the cosmetics gacha system is just better? Plus it’s in league client?
As a guy that likes lerning complex mechanics in games, and wanting to get into magic i found it in LoR somewhat. It didn't cost a load of money, was easy enough to get into and you didnt have to go around looking for people to play with (im refering to the problem that i have with any card game like, for example, magic that you have to know another geek to play with). i was insa hooked on it i loved it with my heart, and than i heard they were cutting the budget and it was painfull but still fair i guess but still, i miss the beginning days of LoR everyday :(
And here we are, yet again, speaking of the best card game period in the channel of the best youtuber, man your hair is so long already. The facts are simple, they had the mechanics, now all they needed was the profit. Limiting rewards, adding a bit of randomness to wild cards, and creating tons of mini esthetic customs interactable within the board and the cards would have been probably enough to get out of red. But they didn't for some reason, I haven't touched the game in a year and there's probably still no skins or animations for dealing big amounts of damage to the nexus, and that's just a simple example of how they could have monetized the game
I'm playing TCGs, CCGs, LCGs for 30 years, I've a huge phisical collection of a lot of famous cards games that have existed. LOR is the best digital card game. I was 1 year without playing and I tried two weeks ago, but knowing that thet are not even doing the power up animation in the new characters was hearthbreaking...
Saying the game did nothing wrong and people were just already glued to other games says that this guy wasn't actually playing the game and is just guessing why it failed,it is what it is
Agree. I started on Riot's games with LoL. I used to play League hours and hours, but by the release of LoR, I did quit LoL at all. I know I am only one case, but what that guy said is just a poor excuse.
I played LoR since the Release with some breaks and finally was able to having even more fun with some new cards and hitting Master. 2 Months later they said they stop the PvP. It really is said. Was my favorite Card Game and ist waaaay more fun to play vs real people than the Path of champions. It was funny but nothing in comparison to PvP.
These are entirely the wrong lessons to take from LOR. LOR didnt fail because of the generous monetization model, rather that's the reason why there was hundreds of thousands of people playing and kept playing time after time. LOR failed because whatever was monetized was overpriced (relying on whales to subsidise the game) and very narrow in scope (only card backs, card skins, pets and arenas). You simply couldn't spend a lot of money on many things before you lost incentive or reason to do so. Anyone who says LOR failed because the cards were free haven't seen Artifact fail, coincidentally another TCG based on a moba that failed because it was priced entry. Saying, oh look Hearthstone succeeded, so did Magic Arena etc. with a p2play model doesn't understand how huge those franchises are in their respective fields and how much they can absolutely throttle their playerbase and still have a following that lifts them up. Did LOR miss some of the "addicting"/"exciting" aspects of card collecting? Sure! But none of that has to cost money to be that way. Look at Yugioh Master Duel, entirely free, not nearly as nice as Runeterra was but their model is pretty freaking close, their pack opening is out of this world exciting, and they're doing great. Look at Pokemon Pocket, entirely free and only subsidised by a premium tier for those who wants premium cards and card backs, their pack opening is equally exciting and they have an incredible array of card customization options (card backs, individual foiling options, flairs on entry etc. etc.) with clear ways to obtain them. All of that would've saved LOR I mean come one! LOR didnt fail because of the easy to obtain cards, it failed because of a various factors that are too difficult to summarize in a 10 minute video. Firstly, it was propped up, and *developed* as a lore based loss leader to prop up the LoL IP, and the monetization was built around the same philosophy LoL has on being premium priced to be subsidised by whales rather than attracting the huge amoung of medium players (10+ eurobucks for 2 pngs and a gif animation i.e. a skin is just too much for any game). These are only a few reasons but there's plenty more real tangiable things to point at that made the game fail. There are 3 reasons why LOR had any success at all and those are: 1. The excellent presentation and art, 2. The excellent card and set design, especially early on, 3. The generous monetization model. The pack openings could've been more interesting sure but look at the game honestly at its release time and look at how Artifact fared and tell me with a straight face, oh if the cards had a hard cost, then it would've succeeded, I can't see how on earth you can serioulsy make that conclusion except that it might be a convenient hand wave.
It so sad to see the game failed you know i am a old subscriber who subscribed you because of how you do so many meme builds and glorious outplay in that game too bad let bygones be bygones good to see you doing great man.
It's kinda funny that they say that gamba is the most exciting part of the tcg. I personally dropped Shadowverse for LoR after ~3 years of playtime and mild financial investment because of terrible gamba roll that season (5 legendaries out of 100 packs with 2 of the being skins I couldn't use in game). Thing is, despite being willing to, I never found a good way to spend my money in LoR. Cards were easy to get just through play, foils are probably worst that I ever saw in any ccg, and both boards and card art felt overpriced for their worth to me. I would've probably paid for PoC in some way, but it was mostly free, and when they announced that they're going to add harsher monetization to it, I dropped it mainly because LoL at the same time added a mandatory spyware.
I see all these comments saying “LoR was such a fun game”, but like you said, LoR still _is_ a fun game. It’s just different from how it used to be. Since the collection of cards in PVP mode is finalized, it’s missing the community excitement that came with each new expansion. However, deckbuilding and PVP are still fun. I play LoR specifically with my friends and family, because none of them have time to keep up with the constantly-updating card rosters of games like Hearthstone or MTG. Path of Champions is also fun, and scratches the same itch for me as Slay the Spire. It’s really well fleshed out and grants XP for rewards that build your PVP collection as a nice bonus. As much as I would like more expansions, I don’t think that the game needs constant updates to be fun.
My mom watched my Yugioh tournaments when I was working the stream, and the casters made primary elements understandable to her. The high barrier for understanding a cardgame as an esport is because the casters don’t know how to present lines of understanding the gamestate and storylines
Sad this happened to LoR, but I'm still happy the devs are still doing what they can with PoC. With their newest post about still doing animations and voice lines for pve champions, I'm glad the LORe part I love still live on.
Also there were some horrible metas that caused a lot of people to quit. The blade dance incident should be a cautionary tale about balancing on win% only. They got balance right at the end though, Darkin expansion was awesome
Hello fellow former VainGlory player. I do want to add some other reasons that lead to the game's demise: - bad connection problem - bad optimization for phone - the remove of wild card for skins: the playerbase did have fault in this when there were a lot of ppl doing illegal payment at that time
@@quocanhnguyen8000 Nah, bad connection was only really a problem in indonesia, phillipines, thailand and vietnam. India was still developing rapidly at the time. Optimization was kinda nutty, considering it ran on cheap android phones and still looked better than pc mobas. The wild card system was the biggest downfall in the game, it gave the player the ability to get exactly what the want consistently without buying ICE, it prevented SEMC from collecting the money needed to keep the game running, and the backlash that came from removing it didnt help.
Shitty marketing strategies (basically, no strategies at all) killed my 3 favorite CCG one by one: MMDoC (Ubisoft, Might and Magic universe), TESL (Bethesda, Elder Scrolls universe) and LoR. TESL and LOR could easily use cross-game promotion, but no... How many Elder Scroll Online (ESO) players know about TESL? Or LoL/TFT players about LoR? Not too many. Make an event, give something from one of yours games to other and vice versa. Is it so hard or what? Have you ever tried? I can remember only 1 cross-promotion in TESL (on Brotherhood set release), they gave an mount (black wolf) for ESO.
@@xVanquishx As someone who in the past played Mobile Legends, Arena of Valor and currently Wild Rift, what held me back from playing Vainglory was how it had more hardware requirements and also being 3v3 as the standard game mode.
Vainglory killed their own game when they alienated the people who made it popular in the first place by completely shifting to 5v5. It’s weird seeing the dev propaganda for that game still being spewed by fools.
I still mourn LoR´s death... I think the reason they failed its they lacked greed, the cards were "too free" come to pokemon poket bro... its doing good these days
Thing is they didn't do everything right. - No button on LoL Launcher directing players towards the card game FOR YEARS (heck they added it after the PvP Support ended which is crazy to me) - No cross games event with Wild Rift or LoL to get some items/cosmectics - No skins for cards other than champions (which was heavilty requested by the community, they didn't even try to do it with some popular package) I am truly sad for LoR. But honestly they didn't do everything they could (or couldn't we might never know)
What if as for last resort they make a huge change of gameplay for pvp: increasing the number of regions for a deck and a mtg-commander-like system for the champion
i played LoR on/off for awhile, the reason why is because i only ever seen either of champions every 1/2 games. it honestly felt like i'd see Champ A 20% of the time. Champ B 20% of the time. Both about % of the time and almost fittingly. Skins for champs where kinda akward. because 60% of the time you'd not see the skin. and when they pivoted into PoC. it didn't solve that issue. i could have 6+ copies of my decked out champ... and all it took was one game, when my deck didn't give me it in my opening hand. and i got OTK'd or 2TKd by 6* stages. and to time gate the Constellation materials to an amount that doesn't even max 1 Champ per update.... thats basically forcing you to buy the stuff, which always has the opposite effect. should have been 100% or 150% of material materials needed, but they release 2 champs per update. so you are always playing catch up, but have the things necessary to max the champ(s) you want too. (just like how Gachas often force you to pick and choose banners)
I think I still stand by saying that they failed on the monetization of cosmetics. Card skins were expensive and underwhelming, they were explicitly the champion itself and maybe any created cards the champion makes. It needed to include associated followers and spells to match the flavour. Also they stopped doing battle passes for a year and act surprised that people stopped paying for them. Boards needed to have the kind of music like we got in the trailers, aka the Pantheon trailer had that epic background music but we don't get to have that ingame. So many little things that wouldn't have really cost alot for them, that they just didn't bother with.
As much as I loved (and still love) LoR, it didn't helped indeed the fact that the timing of this game was in a moment in time when I feel most of card game players were kinda fatigued with the CCG formula (Hearthstone, MTG Arena, Artifact, etc), where all of this great card games popped up at the same time, and it was really difficult to keep up with every single one of them. So if one game failed to deliver CONSTANT interesting content for player to dig up, it was basically losing crucial momentum. That's why I guess card game is such a goddamm hard genre to nail.
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
I am incredibly sad to see LoR fail.
Tru dat sir
Same :(
We lost one of the greatest card games released in recent years
It all went downhill when Riot introduced Rotation...
@@2Kaleb Or, maybe they should have monetized it better. Standard didnt make people spend less money, they just didnt give us anything worth buying
It's genuinely so sad seeing a game die for being too good. I wish CCGs were a bigger niche
The Jesus Christ of the CCGs
It’s didn’t die because it was good lmfao It died because they’re morons.
damn I misread the ending of that sentence heavy
it died for riot to launch tcg
A physical card would help , damn investor wannabe like those niche
LoR is my first and deeply loved card game. Played it for 2 years until Feb 2024. So much fun there was.
Same for me here. I fell in love with it and religiously played everyday until february. It hurts so much
@@y_pator it ended on my birthday 😔
Same here
"the game failed because it wasn't addictive"
we've really fucked up as a species
Imagine.
There'll be no streams, just short videos. Every AAA games will be free but gacha. Each toy will be put behind blind box.
Oh no. Wait.
Addictive is just another way of saying you didn't caught players attention nor retained what you got.
To me it felt like lore lacked content and community. Hearthstone has been trending downwards because of lack of content too, only it's community keeps it alive.
That was the best thing about it. I could miss one season and there was no fomo. You just come back and have fun.
@@TheSilverwolf97 I could agree on that as well.
@@TheSilverwolf97It’s another way of saying that profit incentive rules everything.
Man, I couldn’t finish this video because it was so much of a bummer. I miss LoR like crazy. It was the first TCG that I was actually able to play competitively because I could afford all the cards. Thanks for the memories!
For me, was the best Card Game ever made. In terms of just purely playstyle and skill, I think Artifact was better, but LoR was the complete package. Now, in the "collectable" department, LoR sucked. There was no component of "completing my collection", which most card gamers love.
@@GrappLri guess that was the issue, it was really free to play and it missed that collection department, maybe if they did what pockemon pocket did now with rare variants it could have worked for them.
@@GrappLrSo sad to watch, if we can see old players play Lor same day to compete climb ladder.just maybe.the best game but sometimes even being the best is not enough
same bro that game was so good im still sad.
LoR didn't fail, it was a success for players, Riot failed monetizing it.
Riot took 8 years to create the greatest digital card that ever was. RIP LoR❤
LoR gave us the King of Papayas and for that I’m grateful, thank you Grapplr for all the laughs and missed allegiances.
Don't be sad that it's over, be happy it happened. I found your channel thanks to LoR, and I stayed for your personality. For that I am greatful.
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The fact that LoR died and Marvel Snap became the "best" card game on the market tells you everything you need to know about the mental state of humans currently
I was rooting for magic spellslingers when marvel snap was getting attention but it suffered the same fate as LoR 😭
I guess "monitization".. u'll get what I mean
Snap also become greedy and now its ppl are dooming hard and quitting in droves 😂
Snap at its core is a better game
This failure really hurt me personally. This game had so much potential in both mechanics and storytelling, and is now barely hanging on a thread. Ambesa and Warwick feel like this may be the final
in my humble opinion, the best and most fair card game ever created... im so sad that it got to be this way... i spent all my dawns with grappler on twitch, it was pure fun! i will always remember
The only "A+" F2P experience in card games I've ever played.
At the start I was loving the roguelike/deckbuilder mode, but when I got tired of it, there wasn't a good competitive scenario anymore. That said, it was a good run.
4:01 so true, omg, i can literally say every text from every card on the 1st expansion, thats crazy
LoR was such an amazing game, but I knew from the moment I started playing that it was monetized TOO fairly. This isn’t just bad from a profit standpoint, but a lot of gamers expect at least some gambling in acquiring cards for a game like this, and it’s actually very important for longevity. In paper card games this has been proven over and over than collectible card games outlast expandable card games.
Idk I understand the gamba point of view but for me, the balancing and general pvp game direction is what killed it for me. Addictiveness kind of came from wanting to play new champs or hear new lore interactions
Same
Agreed, wish this was talked about more. The new champions added felt pretty boring and uninspired mechanically. Balancing was always kinda off. Also, it was pretty difficult to return after taking a break, not very generous for returning players. Otherwise, I loved the game.
@@ajwizkid every new champ having at least one new keyword... eugh
I understand the argument though it doesn't really apply much to me as even when I played Hearthstone I didn't care much about pack openings. I almost never bought packs directly and mostly just got them from playing Arena (draft).
@@rafasilva1265 Adding new keywords with expansions wasn't a problem but itself. MtG does that with every set, and it's part of what keeps the game exciting. However, in MtG standard format, you only ever have two sets active at a time. So the fatigue of having to continuously remember how every single one of those keywords worked is drastically lessened. LoR did finally attempt rotation, but it was for balancing purposes, not player fatigue.
What I wanna is say is that It seems Marvel snap saw Lors failure and went in the opposite direction but took it to the extreme. It’s sad tbh because what’s holding both these great games back is monetisation
Even now looking back, even though I stopped playing LoR years ago, I still consider it the best online card game and one of the best card games since MtG. It's such a tragedy that it failed the way it did, because it really is a fantastic game in every aspect. Monetization, gameplay, lore, cosmetics. All of it was perfect.
Hate it so much that the big lesson taken from this whole experiment by a lot of people has been basically "card games can only exist profitably through predatory monetization practices". Frankly don't know myself whether that is correct or not, but it is the hugest bummer of all time.
card games in general have a culture. LoR did something that deviates from it
Lesson is not that. Lor would suck and die even with bad monetisation, the game just wasn’t that good and got worse with patches.
Where it fails to me is when they decided to cut champion level up animation, cut voices, and interactions. They just concentrate in PvE instead of PvP, after that I just lost interest.
Riot stated that they revisit Warwick and Ambessa and give them VO, Animations (and possibly new followers). They pulled back from the generic level up.
I know this might be a hot take, but Swim choosing what he did kind of left a hole in the community. He was a Mobalytics team member, brilliant deck strategist, and a lot of fun to watch. He helped round out the community with Graplr and Snnuy. I watched so many of his videos to better understand the game. I really wish he could have put himself in better positions to make better choices. After he left, the game just didn’t feel the same.
It definitely effected alot just going out of no where being the top watched on yt and twitch for lor he would just bring in random new peolple too boosting the lor category but oh well.
I too learned how to play with swim and level up my game. But knowing what he did I would rather search other guides and creators that continue exploiting the game to the limit.
What happened to Swim?
@@pedrovskidantini2324 he was involved in some controversial topics all result of his own actions irl
@@pedrovskidantini2324 an quit streaming for probably ever. We don't even know where he is rn, he stopped beeing a person online
Man, the "breathe" music video was something else
I think the sunk cost fallacy is a reason people still play hearthstone but making new cards hard to get also increases the longevity of an expansion by a lot. I always felt like expansions just didn't last long enough in LOR which led people to quit instead of keep playing. I also had this weird issue where after i stopped playing the game was actually quite hard to get back into because i had already cleared the whole rewards track and spent all my currency, i was left in this weird state of waiting for weekly rewards to get a few more cards which just made me quit again
I hold the exact opposite feeling. I was only able to get into LOR because I had the ability to drop 20-30 bucks and make the deck I want at any given time. I only stopped playing when the meta got stale and they weren’t reacting fast enough and when they ended pvp support
Expansions lasted so shortly because everyone had full access to expansions minute 1.
@@GrappLrbasically they were too generous which suck because it shows how people are gambling addicts by opening packages. It really is sickening.
Expansions being just 3 champions were a huge issue to me. Bandlecity release was the last time I seriously tried to climb ladder or experiment with different decks. After that I just felt that 1-3 extra decks added to the game were just not worth it to sink in time, so I would just play for a day or two and then drop it back and go play something else.
Thing is Hearthstone is also a very unique card game, it may drive people off but it also makes people interested in it.
Something that I think people don't remember I forget to mention is that when the game came out it wasn't just f2p friendly, it was P2W UNFRIENDLY, people couldn't spend money to buy all the cards right away. I remember lots of HS streamers being annoyed that they couldn't just buy cards at the start because they wanted to make content around the game and felt time locked.
Another issue worth mentioning in my opinion is their failure of the draft mode, HS arena streamers had no interest in it, partly because it had no risk/reward involved like HS arena.
It was definitely non p2w friendly! And the rate of card acquisition was great in set 1. But after that, people had stockpiled so much dust, that future expansions were instantly obtainable.
@@GrappLr true
I agree with the first part, but I was a heavy arena player and played runeterra for the draft mode. The draft mode simply had a few issues that would've been pretty easy to fix.
I played LoR till the end, but I gotta admit that I started hating it around a year before its actual fall due to aggro being everywhere and so OP.
The first card game to introduce magic interactivity whith the most popular lore wise flavor that lol has, somehow managed to sinked to the abyss of trash games
Artifact... That takes me back. I was so hyped for it and haven't been so disappointed in anything ever since.
On the other hand, LoR was so freaking good. But yeah, the non-predatory monetization is what ultimately killed it. It never got "mainstream" big. There was no millions of viewers for tournaments. There was just a couple of guys on Twitch having the time of their life. It stayed super niche and most people won't even know how incredible this game truly was. Sadge
I used to love watching you and Snnuy playing LOR. Brilliant content!😅
My one hope for LoR is that whenever the MMO comes out, they port it in as an in universe card game, sort of like the reverse of what happened with Gwent.
Honestly lor is still great and I still actively play, and go back and watch the old videos from the creators like yourself. Breaks my heart to see it all slowly dissappear
It didn’t fail. It was the best card game of its genre. Riot just didn’t care enough
LoR was increible, and i blame part of the fail on Riot main directors,
They took a lot of time to Add a Button to the RIOT CLIENT like tft had to play inmediatly.
Cosmetics and Battlepasses were not very good put togheter.
Prismatic cards were a downgrade in a lot of card that have Marvelous art.
Boards were nice, but too little.
Vaults were amazing for casuals, they made you Play the game more so you get the juici lv up.
I love LoR, and i m sad how it turned out.
Started watching you and mogwai YEARS ago and never missed an upload with LoR content. It was fun watching the metas shift and seeing you guys try the new cards out and the new decks. Rip
There is solution for this if they really want to keep going and its Lor 2.0
This exactly!
It sucks they just gave up, they should at this point just rework the game to appeal to the gamba
if they make this LoR 2 man even if they make this a gacha type and not as generous as it was, i'll dedicate my money to support the game just to play it back I really miss playing kennen and taliyah
they have since announced their "solution" 💀
This video is sort of odd since it doesn't focus on Path of Champions, which is pretty much the current state of the game.
PoC may as well not exist for the LoR dead narrative (most players).
because path of champions is to LoR what TFT is to LoL. it's not the same game, and so LoR is dead.
tbh grap as long as you stream something you honestly have fun with it will be perfect
I disagree about people getting burn out of the genre or lack of publicity. Monetization is the main reason by far of why the game failed.
It's pretty simple and blows my mind that it doesn't come up more often. Riot did not leverage the existing league playerbase. TFT did because it was in the league client. It would not have been as successful if that was not the case. LOR didn't get the league client button until it was already dead. I had friends who played league everyday, watched arcane, bought merch, etc. not know the card game existed. When Grapplr says it had a large playerbase i have to disagree because it should have been much higher.
The very forgiving monetization structure of LOR could have worked with volume. You need way more people playing the game so that the few whales offset that cost. Yes there is the "Give me something to buy" argument that's valid and a whole other conversation but the reality is, LOR died because a statggering amount of existing league players didnt know it existed. Why LOR didnt get the button until post mortem is truly one of lifes greatest mysteries.
Riot wanted LoR to fail so they can just focus on the TFT and Moba market. This maybe a tin foil theory but LoR is just money laundering from Riot but they were surprised that devs they hired actually put heart into it. 😂
Exactly this + TFT at the start had some big lol streamers try it out because it was the big new thing in the lol client, some like Boxbox going full TFT iirc, there wasn't really a migration of pre existing big streamers to Legends of Runeterra
@@PenguinWithInternetAccess If I recall correctly, I remember streamers like Disguised Toast trying out LoR either on launch or during its beta pre-launch. So I believe there was at least a small subsection of larger content creators playing the game.
Stop with that bs. Everyone knew it existed, people tried it on launch and it was bad, people never returned
@curiavoca I had multiple friends on league who had never heard of it. A small sample size true, but I also didn't try it on release
Im not a competitive gamer, i dont play lol, i play tft but only played on hyper roll, I've also quit lor but god damnit i love this game. While lol is the one where the story of runeterra emerge from, you can't lie about lor as the one most active in expanding the world of runeterra, and dare i say even more than arcane
When they revealed Atakhan as a new neutral monster for League in 2025 it reopened my wounds.
it brings back good and bad memories, but it was by far the best part of the league community hands down. it was the only time people from league get together, brainstorm, joked in a community setting. i hope league finds a way to bring us back to lor or they can recreate an experience similar to it. if they made a game and you can play lor as a minigame with people or something I think the game would still have a chance to live. But it was a perfect storm, everything was near free which i love but in a long-term sense i now see how that hurt them.
Exactly! I was a part of the custom card community, and I remember spending long hours coming up with cool designs and hoping I'd show up on one of the many community custom reviews. Being able to talk so freely about ideas for creative cards is something I've yet to find in any game since, even MTG has a sort of gatekeepy approach to custom cards being "viable" or not
Also didn't/couldn't release LoR in China which is the world's largest TCG market
runeterra saved me, but now its very sad to see that the game is dying.
I def. have to agree with you that LoR had the opportunity to take our money away if they had a better Gachca system. But im just disappointed that they put the LoR client tab in the LOL base too late. I think if they were to fix this is not just look at hearthstone but many successful other card games like yugioh, pokemon magic. I mean I thought yugioh was dieing but they still have like 2k players at YCS
What drove me off LoR was buying a skin for a champ that got rotated out just a bit later, felt like I just wasted my money. When hearthstone did its first rotation you could recover the cost of the now wild card so you could get card that were in standard, but the skin thing just felt like a scam. Really enjoyed LoR was my favorite card game, sad it failed
Marketing was definitely a problem, everybody who play LoL knows TFT, but actually few of those people knew LoR :(
Game literally died because it was too good for us. Only digital card game I could get into because it was extremely friendly so I could get all the cards plus it had amazing visuals, themes around decks etc. Such a shame...
0:46 GrappLr The Ender of Card Games
All they had to do was to make an “Traditional Yone” skin for LoL just for those who played LoR and unlocked the Yone card.
RIP LoR.
The real problem was LOL never doing propaganda or some event for LOR if you remember Lor was entire like a beta (literally you need to search about the game, zero play now and sh1t) with every season having an animation
And like i say they never put effort as they did for TFT or Wild Rift 😂😂
I feel bad for the people in LoR because they have more creativity and ideas than actual LOL design of champions
to me at least the timing of LoR was perfect i was burned by blizzard and their monetization of hearthstone but i still had the card game itch.
You called that the lack of gamba was a problem for the game and they all shitted on you in reddit back then, you were right.
Indeed.
Which is sad if you think that gambling addiction is preferred over fun mechanics and generosity
@@Maotrix-RandomGameStuff I prefer the game not dying
@ same, I’m just saying it’s sad how it works
He wasn’t though. This was Riot propaganda. They failed because they made nothing worth buying. All the extra stuff was straight up ass.
So many options and ideas and they went with half-assed cosmetics. Then cried that they were to generous giving out cards lmfao
Funny seeing the propaganda still being upheld.
I'd actually argue with the title and go ahead and say that LoR didn't fail, it actually did quite well and was my favorite card game hands down to the point where I wish it was made as a physical card game to play in person. Even today I still play quite regularly and go in and build new decks and there were so many synergistic combos and ideas I had after about 5k+ hours in the game. My favorite decks were Anivia, Azir Irelia, Jhin Annie, Soraka Tahm Kench and Viego piles because each one had a different playstyle and each deck won in a different way. The game had a card acquisition model that made it easy to get cards and wasn't money hungry or overly-monetized and I actually wish some of the skins for cards in LoR were actual champion skins in league of legends.
LoR didn't fail - Riot stopped supporting the PvP game mode and THAT is where Riot themselves failed, not the game because LoR itself was quite the successful game.
Definitely blew Hearthstone out of the water for me, that's for sure.
Same I still play it, I still find eternal casual matches pretty fast can’t wait to do ranked
Before arcane, I loved how this game expanded the lore, characters, voice lines, arts, and obviously I enjoyed playing it Cait/Annie agro ftw
Long time viewer Grapplr. Came back just to see this video. Wish LoR was successful. Still was fun to watch all your videos and be a part of the journey.
I have played all the popular CCGs on PC and in real life. And Runeterra is the best. The problem is that it’s a very small niche. There are few players who enjoy card games. The same might happen with 2xko, it will most likely be very good, but its online player count is unlikely to even reach 10k people in a couple of months. Casual players who don't want to think and progress. Even LOL might die because of this.
I still remember fondly working my first shitty job in Pest Control in 2020, exhausted all day sweating my ass off walking lawns, sitting down after work in my car with a Tropical Smoothie smoothie watching the Rising Tides Grapplr videos in a routine. Life is so much better now, but LoR and this channel embedded itself into a really nostalgic place in my life.
Those were good times! Glad life is better now as well!
man I miss LoR. Moved on to the One Piece TCG but LoR has a special place in my heart. Literally watched your videos for years
What killed my enjoyment of the game was the "metatification" of the game. When i got in it was incredible how you could bring an exotic idea to life in a few min and have and deck no one else plays. But after a few extension this feeling left the game. I would always see the exact same decks and those optimized killing machines where too strong for the more exotic strategies to exist.
A game cant have that as his main appeal because there will always be a swimm.
Mobalytics and similar services were huge responsibles on LoR's death. A reason which I never reached Platinum+ was I always played my own creations. I fu king hate meta players.
Deckbuilding is hard, no shit. In every card game that is true, so it's not a card game that you are looking for if you want random nonsense to be on the same footing as optimised lists.
But interesting and effective strategies did pop up, SwimStrim came up with many like his iceborn poros and Shurima ascension combo, both of which I got to master with.
And I had my own fun experiments, like Shellfolk Zilean prank control. Someone else, I forget his name now, but he consistently had a high rank with a control deck with Trundle revival as his sole wincon (and he whooped my ass even against my meta Darkness deck I was proficient with).
In other words, skill issue.
For me, this has been the main reason I started playing LoR. Finally a ccg where I can play meta decks without paying a lot of money or month long grinds.
One of LoRs biggest weaknesses was that there was no way to get back once you left. I stopped playing multiple times, saw a cool new set, openened the client but had no way to jumpstart my collection, other than manually buying a specific whole deck, which kills the experimentation part. I wish there would have been booster packs, and that they gave you some for free when the new expansion drops
What sent the game downhill for me was the "on rails" approach to deck building. The developers made champions so obviously paired together, with self contained packages. Many mechanics were never given cards beyond their initial set, which meant mechanics didn't feel fleshed out and had little staying power as the game power crept to new things. While two separate issues, they compound each other.
I don't think it's a coincidence that I mostly played Deep and Targon Invoke/Ramp, two of the most well supported legacy archetypes. The mechanics of those decks felt stable, not just "keyword of the month".
One problem not beeing spoken about is the fact you could not use your Riot-points purchased in the league Client for runeterra. The amount of insignificant upgrades (emotes/skins/minis/boards) after your first purchase feel (Personal opinion) repulsive.
I hate opening packs and getting lucky because I’m not a lucky person, I’d much rather work for my cards I’ve collected. Thanks gambling addicts for ruining a great game
Hot take the failure was not swapping to POC faster in LoR since it was already becoming more popular then pvp a long while ago
I still think Bandle city was the biggest reason for Lor's failure. There were enough payers, you immediately matched into games, some videos reached near millions of views and it was performing nicely on twitch. Obviously there were monetisation issues but if the PvP aspect of the game wasn't butchered by the effects of Bandle, the game would've been able to pay for itself or even provide profit eventually through cosmetics had people seen point in buying them (why would I buy cosmetics if i hate playing PvP because Bandle City killed deckbuilding and balance). This dogshit region ruined everything the game stands for and people were starting to quit on mass. Becoming PvE was a matter of time since this disaster of a region was added to the game
I do not blame the generosity at least completely, I blame a LOT on they pushing the competitive and the E-Sport aspect.
At least personally what made me drop the game is how quickly got power creeped, instead of feeling back and forth it was a lot more on what can be generated, what can i draw what can do the next "this ends the game" effect, and to compensate Aggro was kept prevalent, sometimes to the point making a control deck meant add all the board clears and hope for the best.
LoR will hold a special place in my heart, I have kind of replaced the void it left in me with balatro, but holy shit am I sad it failed...
Well now that you say it... no wonder I'm so addicted to balatro
i played it again and realized some of my cards cant work together anymore like the freedom of building my own cards was gone, it didn't really matter to me too if i lose i knew i was having fun.
Being the best in a dead genre is always a problem. It's also impossible to play casually. I once heard a Hearthstone player describe it as "too sweaty," and I think that's kind of true. Digital card games work best when they're asynchronous, pick up and play kinda things.
I think LoR was the best version of a kind of game that had a low market ceiling. It didn't push the overall form and format enough to be it's own game, instead trying to make the best version of an established Archetype. This is also what League started as, just trying to be a Dota sequel that streamlined and simplified aspects of the genre, but that turned out to have a way higher market cap.
I'd love to see them take another Crack at a Freemium card game but just bin all existing expectations and try to come up with a novel format, push the boundaries.
I will never stop playing LoR , right now LoR PoC is genuinely really well made and interesting enough to keep me playing it almost every single day
No advertisement, deck building that was watered down to: put together 2 champions and their packages, card acquisition that lets everyone play top tier decks on day one, matches being too long and exhausting bcs the game was too interactive with the spellstack, u couldn't play any spell without opponent having a say on what happens...
The game was too taxing on the brain, LoR regularly had matches last longer than ur average League game... I remember when Marvel Snap came out, it was really a breath of fresh air for most LoR players, u had a really fun and interactive card game where matches last 3 minutes instead of 20 minutes, you could cut ur losses, losing a match didn't feel as bad bcs u didn't waste 20 mins of ur life just to lose etc. I feel like release of Marvel Snap was really the moment LoR started going downhill, at least for me, Marvel Snap made me realize just how exhausting it is to play LoR at times...
The game became split between pve & pvp. The choice to do so forever rolled the dice on the game. I wanted a hardcore casual forward competitive card game not a rouge lite
I’ve been playing a lot of TFT recently, and my main question here is: why can TFT be even MORE free to play than LoR, but still bring in plenty of money? You literally can’t pay to win if you tried.
I guess the cosmetics gacha system is just better? Plus it’s in league client?
Don't be sad that it's gone- be glad that it happened. LoR is what ignited my passion for game design, and creators like you were what got me hooked.
As a guy that likes lerning complex mechanics in games, and wanting to get into magic i found it in LoR somewhat. It didn't cost a load of money, was easy enough to get into and you didnt have to go around looking for people to play with (im refering to the problem that i have with any card game like, for example, magic that you have to know another geek to play with). i was insa hooked on it i loved it with my heart, and than i heard they were cutting the budget and it was painfull but still fair i guess but still, i miss the beginning days of LoR everyday :(
And here we are, yet again, speaking of the best card game period in the channel of the best youtuber, man your hair is so long already.
The facts are simple, they had the mechanics, now all they needed was the profit.
Limiting rewards, adding a bit of randomness to wild cards, and creating tons of mini esthetic customs interactable within the board and the cards would have been probably enough to get out of red. But they didn't for some reason, I haven't touched the game in a year and there's probably still no skins or animations for dealing big amounts of damage to the nexus, and that's just a simple example of how they could have monetized the game
I click so fast when it comes to you making lor content.
X2
I'm playing TCGs, CCGs, LCGs for 30 years, I've a huge phisical collection of a lot of famous cards games that have existed. LOR is the best digital card game. I was 1 year without playing and I tried two weeks ago, but knowing that thet are not even doing the power up animation in the new characters was hearthbreaking...
I like the part where grapplr reacted to grapplr talking about runeterra
Saying the game did nothing wrong and people were just already glued to other games says that this guy wasn't actually playing the game and is just guessing why it failed,it is what it is
Agree. I started on Riot's games with LoL. I used to play League hours and hours, but by the release of LoR, I did quit LoL at all.
I know I am only one case, but what that guy said is just a poor excuse.
I played LoR since the Release with some breaks and finally was able to having even more fun with some new cards and hitting Master. 2 Months later they said they stop the PvP. It really is said.
Was my favorite Card Game and ist waaaay more fun to play vs real people than the Path of champions. It was funny but nothing in comparison to PvP.
These are entirely the wrong lessons to take from LOR. LOR didnt fail because of the generous monetization model, rather that's the reason why there was hundreds of thousands of people playing and kept playing time after time. LOR failed because whatever was monetized was overpriced (relying on whales to subsidise the game) and very narrow in scope (only card backs, card skins, pets and arenas). You simply couldn't spend a lot of money on many things before you lost incentive or reason to do so.
Anyone who says LOR failed because the cards were free haven't seen Artifact fail, coincidentally another TCG based on a moba that failed because it was priced entry. Saying, oh look Hearthstone succeeded, so did Magic Arena etc. with a p2play model doesn't understand how huge those franchises are in their respective fields and how much they can absolutely throttle their playerbase and still have a following that lifts them up.
Did LOR miss some of the "addicting"/"exciting" aspects of card collecting? Sure! But none of that has to cost money to be that way. Look at Yugioh Master Duel, entirely free, not nearly as nice as Runeterra was but their model is pretty freaking close, their pack opening is out of this world exciting, and they're doing great. Look at Pokemon Pocket, entirely free and only subsidised by a premium tier for those who wants premium cards and card backs, their pack opening is equally exciting and they have an incredible array of card customization options (card backs, individual foiling options, flairs on entry etc. etc.) with clear ways to obtain them. All of that would've saved LOR
I mean come one! LOR didnt fail because of the easy to obtain cards, it failed because of a various factors that are too difficult to summarize in a 10 minute video. Firstly, it was propped up, and *developed* as a lore based loss leader to prop up the LoL IP, and the monetization was built around the same philosophy LoL has on being premium priced to be subsidised by whales rather than attracting the huge amoung of medium players (10+ eurobucks for 2 pngs and a gif animation i.e. a skin is just too much for any game). These are only a few reasons but there's plenty more real tangiable things to point at that made the game fail.
There are 3 reasons why LOR had any success at all and those are: 1. The excellent presentation and art, 2. The excellent card and set design, especially early on, 3. The generous monetization model. The pack openings could've been more interesting sure but look at the game honestly at its release time and look at how Artifact fared and tell me with a straight face, oh if the cards had a hard cost, then it would've succeeded, I can't see how on earth you can serioulsy make that conclusion except that it might be a convenient hand wave.
It so sad to see the game failed you know i am a old subscriber who subscribed you because of how you do so many meme builds and glorious outplay in that game too bad let bygones be bygones good to see you doing great man.
It's kinda funny that they say that gamba is the most exciting part of the tcg. I personally dropped Shadowverse for LoR after ~3 years of playtime and mild financial investment because of terrible gamba roll that season (5 legendaries out of 100 packs with 2 of the being skins I couldn't use in game).
Thing is, despite being willing to, I never found a good way to spend my money in LoR. Cards were easy to get just through play, foils are probably worst that I ever saw in any ccg, and both boards and card art felt overpriced for their worth to me. I would've probably paid for PoC in some way, but it was mostly free, and when they announced that they're going to add harsher monetization to it, I dropped it mainly because LoL at the same time added a mandatory spyware.
I see all these comments saying “LoR was such a fun game”, but like you said, LoR still _is_ a fun game. It’s just different from how it used to be.
Since the collection of cards in PVP mode is finalized, it’s missing the community excitement that came with each new expansion. However, deckbuilding and PVP are still fun. I play LoR specifically with my friends and family, because none of them have time to keep up with the constantly-updating card rosters of games like Hearthstone or MTG.
Path of Champions is also fun, and scratches the same itch for me as Slay the Spire. It’s really well fleshed out and grants XP for rewards that build your PVP collection as a nice bonus.
As much as I would like more expansions, I don’t think that the game needs constant updates to be fun.
My mom watched my Yugioh tournaments when I was working the stream, and the casters made primary elements understandable to her. The high barrier for understanding a cardgame as an esport is because the casters don’t know how to present lines of understanding the gamestate and storylines
Sad this happened to LoR, but I'm still happy the devs are still doing what they can with PoC. With their newest post about still doing animations and voice lines for pve champions, I'm glad the LORe part I love still live on.
Also there were some horrible metas that caused a lot of people to quit. The blade dance incident should be a cautionary tale about balancing on win% only.
They got balance right at the end though, Darkin expansion was awesome
What happened to Vainglory is what's happening to Lor. ZERO advertisement.
Hello fellow former VainGlory player. I do want to add some other reasons that lead to the game's demise:
- bad connection problem
- bad optimization for phone
- the remove of wild card for skins: the playerbase did have fault in this when there were a lot of ppl doing illegal payment at that time
@@quocanhnguyen8000 Nah, bad connection was only really a problem in indonesia, phillipines, thailand and vietnam. India was still developing rapidly at the time.
Optimization was kinda nutty, considering it ran on cheap android phones and still looked better than pc mobas.
The wild card system was the biggest downfall in the game, it gave the player the ability to get exactly what the want consistently without buying ICE, it prevented SEMC from collecting the money needed to keep the game running, and the backlash that came from removing it didnt help.
Shitty marketing strategies (basically, no strategies at all) killed my 3 favorite CCG one by one: MMDoC (Ubisoft, Might and Magic universe), TESL (Bethesda, Elder Scrolls universe) and LoR. TESL and LOR could easily use cross-game promotion, but no... How many Elder Scroll Online (ESO) players know about TESL? Or LoL/TFT players about LoR? Not too many. Make an event, give something from one of yours games to other and vice versa. Is it so hard or what? Have you ever tried? I can remember only 1 cross-promotion in TESL (on Brotherhood set release), they gave an mount (black wolf) for ESO.
@@xVanquishx As someone who in the past played Mobile Legends, Arena of Valor and currently Wild Rift, what held me back from playing Vainglory was how it had more hardware requirements and also being 3v3 as the standard game mode.
Vainglory killed their own game when they alienated the people who made it popular in the first place by completely shifting to 5v5.
It’s weird seeing the dev propaganda for that game still being spewed by fools.
I still mourn LoR´s death... I think the reason they failed its they lacked greed, the cards were "too free"
come to pokemon poket bro... its doing good these days
Thing is they didn't do everything right.
- No button on LoL Launcher directing players towards the card game FOR YEARS (heck they added it after the PvP Support ended which is crazy to me)
- No cross games event with Wild Rift or LoL to get some items/cosmectics
- No skins for cards other than champions (which was heavilty requested by the community, they didn't even try to do it with some popular package)
I am truly sad for LoR. But honestly they didn't do everything they could (or couldn't we might never know)
I miss you Mr. Papaya
16:14 Didn't realise I was going to be getting some pretty solid life advice in this video lol
What if as for last resort they make a huge change of gameplay for pvp: increasing the number of regions for a deck and a mtg-commander-like system for the champion
i played LoR on/off for awhile, the reason why is because i only ever seen either of champions every 1/2 games.
it honestly felt like i'd see Champ A 20% of the time. Champ B 20% of the time. Both about % of the time
and almost fittingly. Skins for champs where kinda akward. because 60% of the time you'd not see the skin.
and when they pivoted into PoC. it didn't solve that issue.
i could have 6+ copies of my decked out champ... and all it took was one game, when my deck didn't give me it in my opening hand. and i got OTK'd or 2TKd by 6* stages.
and to time gate the Constellation materials to an amount that doesn't even max 1 Champ per update.... thats basically forcing you to buy the stuff, which always has the opposite effect. should have been 100% or 150% of material materials needed, but they release 2 champs per update. so you are always playing catch up, but have the things necessary to max the champ(s) you want too. (just like how Gachas often force you to pick and choose banners)
I think I still stand by saying that they failed on the monetization of cosmetics. Card skins were expensive and underwhelming, they were explicitly the champion itself and maybe any created cards the champion makes. It needed to include associated followers and spells to match the flavour. Also they stopped doing battle passes for a year and act surprised that people stopped paying for them. Boards needed to have the kind of music like we got in the trailers, aka the Pantheon trailer had that epic background music but we don't get to have that ingame.
So many little things that wouldn't have really cost alot for them, that they just didn't bother with.
“I am not your failure obiwan, you didnt kill legends of runeterra. I did.”
-riot
Hearing the old labs soundtrack brings so much nostalgia. 😞 6:43
As much as I loved (and still love) LoR, it didn't helped indeed the fact that the timing of this game was in a moment in time when I feel most of card game players were kinda fatigued with the CCG formula (Hearthstone, MTG Arena, Artifact, etc), where all of this great card games popped up at the same time, and it was really difficult to keep up with every single one of them. So if one game failed to deliver CONSTANT interesting content for player to dig up, it was basically losing crucial momentum. That's why I guess card game is such a goddamm hard genre to nail.
That guy at 5:30 makes a great point.