14 DAY TRIAL // Developer Riot Games has announced that it will move toward the deactivation of League of Legends skin codes, as a counter-measure to fight the proliferation of fraudulent third-party skin resellers.
The number of League of Legends players scammed into buying rare and pricey skin codes is on the rise, and as such the developer of the highly popular multiplayer online battle arena game has decided to put a stop to it all.
Riot Games is deactivating the previously released skin codes, in order to diminish the impact of fraudulent resellers on its user base, after many reports of the digital products never being delivered after the players paid for them online surfaced on the online forums.
The trend of buying and selling special codes in order to obtain extra gaming content is by no means a recent one, and there are several games that have veritable black markets where players can get more elusive customization content.
The selling of champion skins is one of the main ways that Riot Games uses to monetize its free-to-play game, and it's a very lucrative business, the company announcing a total revenue figure of $624 million / €459 million for 2013, being only surpassed in the free-to-play sector by Korean shooter CrossFire.
The skins alter the way a certain in-game playable character looks, changing the color scheme or character model slightly, some of the more expensive ones even adding reworked animations, and going for as much as $1000 / €740 on third-party websites.
"They charge excessive prices (we found one skin for over $1,000!) and sometimes take payment and never provide the content. You can't predict the outcome, and no purchase is ever guaranteed regardless of what the seller says. To make matters worse these services typically use bots. Bots are lame to play with and chew up additional server bandwidth, negatively impacting everyone," Riot says in a post on the game's official forums.
In addition to the measure of deactivating skin codes, developer Riot Games is also recommending to multiple payment processors to stop processing the fraudulent payments from the websites in question.
For players owning legitimate skin codes, the company has provided a window until July 23 for the codes to be redeemed, by sending a request to Player Support, giving proof of ownership, after which Riot Games will automatically redeem the code for you.
Although the company will not retroactively remove any content redeemed prior to its decision to discontinue skin codes, it will no longer redeem any codes, for any reason, after the deadline of July 23.