LoL is capped at lvl 30. With boost, it will take you 1 week instead of 2 to reach lvl30. It does have any in game effect. Furthermore, they are not an item that you are trained to use as a currency.

The South Park episode about freemium game is very good at explaining how the freemium market model is based on addiction.

> It does have any in game effect.

Right, xp/ip boosts are just hats. New characters you buy are just hats. No in game effect, LoL.

XP boost have no level after lvl 30, which is reached quickly, and is where the real game begins.

IP boost allows you to buy runes quickly, this happens outside the game. Runes have in-game effects, but the difference between T2 (which are extremely easy to buy without spending a dime) and T3 are minor.

I played LoL for years without spending a single penny in it, and I never were under the impression that the game was purposely made boring to force me to buy in-game items.

Freemiums game feels that way. At first, everyting is fun, and they even give you some 'free' currency to hook you on spending, and after a few hour, if you don't pay, the game becomes boring as fuck, because everything take hours.

Basically XP Boost is there for returning players. Experienced players who want to create alternate account or those who move to another server.

It is there for convenience sake but Riot certainly goes out of its way to make creating a viable alternate account rather inconvenient. Being F2P I guess they have to have diverse revenue sources.

All this talk about "cheat" or "increasing competitiveness" is just nonsense.

I may be wrong in stating that XP boosts do not affect competitiveness, but the main point still stands: You only get to advance twice as fast with your 300$ in LoL compared to CoC where you can just blow all of your 300$ in a single day, hour even. There are several orders of magnitude between the two "eventuals" here. Additionally, not having XP boosts in LoL does not block you from playing, which CoC does. And lastly, not buying boosts does not lock any content away from you.

Then again, you haven't discussed in good faith from the get go (which is funny, since I primarily game on pc), so I expect you don't actually want to grok these differences.