Riot Games says it “screwed up” recent changes to League of Legends, which were intended to simplify the game’s overly sophisticated reward systems but instead drastically slowed down leveling and unlocking recent champions. Studio head Andrei “Meddler” van Roon said in an interview update posted today that “the numbers we sent are significantly different from what many of you think they should be” and promised that corrections would be coming.
Changes, announced in November 2024 aimed to reduce the “unnecessary complexity” of League’s rewards system by moving most of it to the free in-game battle pass track. “Most rewards will now be available in one place, and systems like Honor and Champion Mastery will be included in the pass,” van Roon explained in a developer update. “For example, having a higher Honor level will provide a bonus to experience gained.
“There will always be an active Battle Pass covering both the free and paid tracks, with the same price as today’s Event Pass. You will receive rewards through the pass via tracks, which means we are removing event tokens and the store. “
As it turns out, they were right. Van Roon said in today’s update that Riot intended to ensure that rates for Blue Essence – the in-game currency used to unlock new content – were the same or slightly better for all players in the new system. This also did not mean a slowdown in leveling speed or an increase in the number of games required to access ranked play.
However, analysis of player behavior shows that exactly the same thing happened to most League of Legends players. The changes worked as intended for “low engagement” players, but the higher you go in terms of hours spent in the game, the worse it gets: “very high” engagement players saw their Blue Essence earning rate drop more than 71% below the new system.
This all happened, van Roon explained, because Riot got the numbers wrong. “We realized that we had not included the first win of the day experience in our BE income calculations – both directly from this XP boost and indirectly from faster access to Hero Capsules through account leveling,” he wrote. “For the XP account, the issue is very similar – we did not account for the loss of FWotD, which meant a drastic slowdown in account progression and therefore access to ranked play.”
To address this issue, Riot says it will “significantly raise” the rate at which Blue Essence is earned in the free Battle Pass track as part of the changes expected to roll out in Update 25.S1.2, as seen in the chart below:
Since the Act 1 Season Pass is active and some players have already achieved Blue Essence milestones, Riot will also introduce a “one-time, easy-to-complete mission” that will grant players 4,250 Blue Essence to offset what should have been granted by the Battle Pass. Account XP earning rates will also be increased by 40% to ensure that the number of games required to reach level 30, and therefore Ranked Access, will remain approximately the same as before the changes were made.
Reaction to the reception and upcoming patches seems to be generally positive, although there are quite a few players X and League of Legends subreddit they are calling for a return to the old reward system or at least the return of Hextech chests. However, there is still quite widespread dissatisfaction, and this will likely not change until the fixes are fully implemented and Riot can demonstrate that player rewards are in fact the same as in the previous system.
Van Roon said that beyond fixes, Riot will “be looking more closely at why this didn’t work initially and how we can prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.” We will keep you updated as we continue to look at these systems on any potential adjustments and apologize for our errors, both in terms of tuning the numbers and communicating what has/has not changed.
