User blog comment:Palarus/A little skin rant/@comment-4131177-20130302125616/@comment-216.36.26.248-20130303051606

Riot Games has produced a good game and is following a much better path of the free to play model than many other studios, but that doesn't render it immune to criticism.

Palarus makes some very good points. Dismiss them if you'd like, but the design goal of the skins produced by Riot is to eliminate any possible competitive advantage of having a skin over not having it. The problem is that some skins are providing exactly that advantage. Whether you, personally, are able to identify isolated targets or discern Lucent Singularity from Light Binding does not mean others are able to do the same. Even then, in the chaos of a fresh team fight, being able to clearly and quickly identify the effects on the field is critical to success. This is actually one of the things highlighted by Riot's founding developers as one of their objectives, complete with examples from the original source material vs League of Legends to show increased visual clarity. If particle effects for certain skills on certain skills are inconsistently visible that is a problem.

Their competitive community is one of the few things holding League well above the other games in the same genre. If competing at the top level is going to require purchase of certain skins for certain champions, there will be bound to be some level of backlash. Whether that's a significant problem or not I can't say.