Welcome to ‘Is it Pay to Win’ – a column where we examine a game and decide if that game is has aspects of pay to win and to what extent. Check out Is it Pay to Win?: Defined to see how we break down the components of pay to win (p2w), such as pay for advantage, pay for convenience, and cosmetics.
League of Legends is one of the most popular MOBA games of all time. It is free to play with an earnable currency and a purchasable currency that is used to buy their premium items.
Scoring:
- Pay for Power: 0/5
- Pay for Advantage: 1/5
- Pay for Convenience: 3/5
- Pay for Cosmetics: 5/5
- Pay to Win: 1.6/5*
Keep reading to see a rough game description, our basis for these scores and our overall verdict.
Game Play: In typical MOBA fashion, League features a map of 1, 2 or 3 lanes with either 3v3 or 5v5 group sizes. The object of the game is to destroy the enemy base at the opposite side of a roughly mirrored map. Minions spawn from each sides’ base and progress towards the other, only to meet in the middle and be killed by the enemy minions and towers. Each team farms the minions for gold, destroys the towers blocking the lane to the enemy base, and kills the other team via (typically) 4 active abilities and a passive. You earn gold and experience to buy items and level up but it all resets each match.
Monetization: The actual cash purchase in this game, as is common with free to play games, is an in game currency – not direct items. I think there’s some sleazy legal loophole in this, but it changes absolutely nothing. Paying for currency and buying stuff with currency is exactly the same as buying stuff with money. In this case, the user will buy Riot Points or RP. Base cost for RP is $5.00 USD per 650 RP, but, as it always does, it gets a better rate if you spend more money per transaction.
From there, you can use that RP to buy a variety of things. The champions themselves can be bought with premium currency, however, you can also buy that with the in-game earned currency Blue Essence. BE comes buy playing games naturally and accrues at a pretty quick rate. Additionally with RP, you can buy skins, emotes, and other cosmetics. Some of this can be earned in game or through free promotions, but all earning of cosmetics is random. The ONLY way to intentionally get skins or cosmetics that you want is to spend cash (RP) on them. Some of these skins can cost up to $20-$30 each.
Additionally, you can buy XP boosts that help you level your “summoner” (account level, basically). These summoner levels unlock certain champs, cosmetics, give BE, but most importantly give access to a couple things such as your rune pages (talents trees that do affect the game) and at level 30 you can participate in ranked content. There are also season passes to buy as well, letting you earn access to unique cosmetics at a drastically higher rate than anyone playing for free.
Finally, no cash shop is complete without some loot boxes. There are a variety of loot boxes to buy with RP that have random chances at essentially the same things you could choose to buy directly, though sometimes there are special items that might be limited to such boxes.
Scoring: Here we break down the scores.
Pay for Power: 0/5. There is nothing you can buy with money that gives a direct power increase in game.
Pay for Advantage: 1/5. Generally speaking, LoL does not have any pay for advantages. You can’t pay money to help you increase the rate at which you gain power in game. However, it is being rated 1/5 because you can pay for experience boosts and rune (talent) pages. The XP boosts allows you to gain access to rune pages faster, which does provide a power boost in game. On the other hand, it isn’t a significant impact because once you pass that summoner level, everyone is back on an even playing field and it doesn’t take very long to do.
Pay for Convenience: 4/5. Being able to buy experience boosts to increase summoner level faster is inherently paying for convenience. Being able to buy the champions faster than earning them in game can be nice as well. Additionally, since cosmetics are so important to players in this game, the season passes that increase the rate you earn seasonal cosmetics is also a convenience factor.
Pay for Cosmetics: 5/5. League of Legends cash shop is almost exclusively focused on their cosmetics – particularly the champion skins. Nearly any skin can be bought with money or earned quicker because of money and it’s incredibly difficult to target a specific skin for a champion without forking out the cash. Due to the scope of their cosmetic shop along with the struggle to earn the items for free, we’re giving the max score for pay for cosmetics.
Summary and Verdict: Given that the pay for power has a score of zero, and pay for advantage only a 1, we’re going to have to call this one as not pay to win. It is, still, important to mention that the heavily monetized cosmetics could be off-putting for those who value that aspect of the game experience above others. For most, though, it’s one of the best examples of a free to play game that currently exists as you can get the full game play experience entirely for free.