orcishgamer: If you're interested in more limited skins:
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/news/arcade-sona-and-riot-graves-head-pax I received card codes for both, but they're supposed to be activated on my account anyway for going to the NA Regionals, so we'll see if I need them or not.
Skate: I wonder if any AAA titles will come out in the same genre. I wouldn't mind seeing a game without all the micro-transactions.
orcishgamer: Maybe, but MOBA style games need a huge community to succeed, you'd have to sell very well to generate that kind of playerbase.
League of Legends had a cosplay right before the NA Regional final match at PAX. One gal had 8100 man hours poured into her costume. She wasn't the only one with that kind of cosplay (I really need to process my PAX pics, but I'm thinking I might need another day of sleeping). TSM won the match, just for regionals I think their purse was 150,000 USD (that might have been total purse, but I think that was their award), there's 5 regions which I assume have similar purses. The purse for world is 1 million for 1st (2 million in total purses). A couple of the top teams at regionals seemed to have corporate sponsors.
I don't think any of the above would have been possible without F2P.
Oh yeah, if you don't need those codes I'd be glad to take them off your hands. That being said, I'd actually suggest you give them to Skate since I think I probably have more champs than him. :)
Skate: If you have any skins available I definitely wouldn't be opposed.
I understand the need of a large player base. Still, I'm sort of anti-micro transaction, so I wouldn't mind having some sort of way to avoid them.
At the very least you can buy the important things (champs and runes) via IP which you get by playing, so that's nice. Saving up for a top-price champ takes FOREVER, but it's still nice. To be honest, the main frustration with IP is that I doubt they'll ever release a champ below the top two IP costs. At least they occasionally permanently drop the IP cost of old guys.
