I honestly just don't believe this. F2P comes with a massive trust deficit, and so does any persistent game. I think Riot's done about as well as any company has ever done, but there are always going to be people who are convinced that you're evil for what boil down to weird personal reasons. I would be interested in what specific things you feel were untrustworthy here!
for me the big one is replays, riot has always promised things like that, then took them away with a casual justification and moved on. replays, a basic thing that's core to your competitive esport game that every other single game has
like devil daggers has replays ffs and it's made by like 3 finnish dudes off a game jam or whatever
and league is way more complex but doto has it, starcraft has it, fighting games and sports games have replays, i'm pretty sure those games are as complicated as league
they said they were gonna redo the nidalee splashes like 3 years ago. they said europe is better for bo2s because europeans love ties.
doing things like that are what make people not trust you so much. it's not respectful for your players to think they just "believe you're an evil corporation" or whatever. you've let your players down, that's why they don't trust you.
mind you i'm not saying riot is all about greed and money or whatever. i totally believe that even when they fuck up they have good intentions. riot isn't evil, they're just a company like any other. no fairy tales and mustache twirling, just a regular company that communicates more often normal (and imo sometimes more often than they should, as it happened with ao shin) and gets burned for it
I mean, fundamentally chromas are "can we make a customization product at a lower price point for people who don't want to spend as much as a skin costs." I don't really see how that's against player interests.
The other argument is that, like, if players love playing League of Legends then it's in their interests for Riot Games to continue to exist, and ultimately that means monetization. But even then Riot is famously terrible at monetization, which is pretty good evidence to me that they really are driven by player experience and feedback, because players hate monetization. (They're also clearly pretty design driven because designers really hate monetization.)
chromas are bullshit cos you're offered a 3x1 when no one asked for that. and the reason it works like that it's cos for riot it's probably almost the same work to make one of those skins than three, so financially it only makes sense to offer chromas that way
other games just give chromas away for free or sell them for in-game currency. other games have all champions for free. league asks you to pay for avatars
i have to grind a whole new account if i want to play with my na friends, and then i have to spend money to buy champions cos fuck if i'm gonna grind the ip all over again
i've been waiting for fucking ever for riot to make that ahri nendo available and instead of that they shut down the latin american merch store lol
then there's this chest gambling crap that i don't even wanna get too much into. i'll just say i appreciate they seem to have put some restrictions on it to prevent people from hurting themselves gambling. that's the kind of thing i expect from riot, despite all the above
and it's ok to monetize, i'm just saying it's not true that everything is for the players and in the players best interests. there's a reason why chromas are not made anymore, people complained about that model on release and riot insisted that it was what players wanted. clearly they weren't a successful thing which is why chromas are no longer being made (and rioters have mentioned this before). i'm not calling it a cash grab, but i'm saying it's not in my best interest to be sold chromas like that. that's just what riot wanted, and it's fair for them to do things the way they want, it's their game and all, but you can't really pretend you were looking out for me when you sold me a 3x1 when i didn't ask for it