Around 10 a.m. PST on January 10, Riot pushed the Blood Moon event loot to the live servers. For those of you not familiar with the loot in League of Legends, it’s similar to the seasonal events in Overwatch. Players can purchase capsules, which are loot boxes just by a different name, that can contain skin shards, champion shards, Blue Essence, Orange Essence, and a few other rarer items. All of these items are the free way to unlock items for your account.

The singular Blood Moon capsule and the Prestige Point were purchasable for one Blue Essence in addition to the 750 RP (about $6) price tag. That was a mistake that was live for about 14 minutes. During that 14-minute window plenty of players took advantage of the bug.

For context, Blue Essence is your basic, free-to-play currency in League of Legends. You earn it by playing and disenchanting champion shards and then use it to unlock champions. Your average game will net you anywhere from 60 to 100 Blue Essence. A new champion costs players 6300 Blue Essence.

As you can imagine, it’s a serious time investment for players to unlock all the champions in the game without spending money.

But during that brief, 14-minute window, around 100 players were able to take advantage of this bug and nab themselves Blood Moon capsules and Prestige Points for one Blue Essence each.

Why Is This A Big Deal?

Riot was easily able to track the purchases of Prestige Points and the associated skin purchases (like Blood Moon Aatrox above) with them and refund them making that part of this problem disappear. But they ran into the problem of not being able to take a lot of action against those that purchased the Blood Moon capsules. Why? Product Manager Ken Adams posted on the forums about it, but here’s the most poignant part:

Since we don't keep easily reversible backups of an earlier version of your account's state, properly reverting the capsules purchased using BE yesterday would be nearly impossible and come at the expense of other features we’re working on for players. For this reason, we're choosing to only take away the Prestige Points and Blood Moon Aatrox Prestige Editions that were obtained with BE.

Okay, so some people got some free stuff, who cares? A lot of people care, including myself. Capsules, no matter what event they’re from, contain a lot of goodies. The $6 they cost to purchase can net you items that are worth $30. By not having a way to revert these purchases, those 100 players have been able to acquire a massive amount of free stuff that took the rest of us years or hundreds to thousands of dollars to unlock.

What Can Riot Do?

We know that reverting the purchases for this 14-minute window would entail hundreds to thousands of transactions, but should Riot be forced to do that? People are clamoring for Riot to revert these purchases and vowing to never spend more real money on League of Legends (something I find hard to believe).

Are those calling for action truly mad or are they just mad that they didn’t get to take advantage of this bug like those lucky 100? I know I would have taken advantage of the bug if I had known about it early enough.

How should Riot solve this current problem? Revert all purchases and unlocks on January 10 for the accounts in question or just revert all purchases for that 14-minute window? Fire the QA team in charge of this? Give the rest of the community compensation for their mistake? Simply do nothing more and move onto the next project they have?

It will likely be the last option, but let us know how you think Riot should have handled this situation.