Olivia R. February 21, 2019
Riot has announced some changes to its Riot Points system, which will go into effect in March.
The main in-game currency for League of Legends will have its price increased in several regions to account for new tax laws and inflation. According to Riot, the company reviews global pricing annually, but this year they’ve seen more changes than usual in the affected regions.
The United States has recently added a tax on digital goods, and American players can now expect to see up to 10 percent additional sales tax on RP purchases depending on their location. This is a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2018 decision to overturn some state tax rulings.
Other countries were impacted similarly, including a 15% additional sales tax in parts of Europe, Korea, and New Zealand. Some European countries will see an 11% increase, including Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary.
Increased inflation has caused some “wild swings” in other countries, causing Riot to level prices with other currencies within their respective servers. The most significant change was in Uruguay, where the cost of RP went up 40%. Turkey will see a 20% increase, and Mexico 12%.
Riot also made some changes to the company’s refund system.
Currently, each League of Legends account gets three refund tokens to use over the course of its life, and players are unable to refund any purchase without them. The new system sees accounts starting with three refund tokens, and each year they’ll receive at least one more token for use.
Certain unused items will be able to be returned directly to the client within a week of purchase without using a refund token. Three will remain the maximum amount of refund tokens a single account can have at any given time.
To help buffer the bad news for so many players, Riot also announced that it would be offering “bonus RP” to go along with RP purchases made through March 5.
