Riot Games says it "screwed up" recent changes to League of Legends that were intended to simplify the game's overly complex reward systems, but instead dramatically slowed level advancement and new hero unlocks. Head of studio Andrei "Meddler" van Roon said in an update posted today that "the numbers we shipped were pretty far off from what they should be for many of you," and promised that fixes are incoming.
The changes, announced in November 2024, were intended to reduce the "unnecessary complexity" of League's reward system by moving most of it to the free track of the game's battle passes. "Most rewards will now be in one place, with systems like Honor and Champion Mastery feeding into the pass," van Roon explained in a dev update. "For example, having a higher Honor level will give a bonus to past experience earned.
"There will always be a battle pass active with both a free and a paid track, with the price the same as an Event Pass today. You'll get Pass rewards through the tracks, meaning we're removing the Event Tokens and Shop."
But the elimination of the previously-existing level-up rewards had the knock-on effect of making it much harder to unlock new champions and skins, particularly for new players: One redditor estimated it would likely take more than a year for a new League of Legends player to be able to play ranked matches, because players need to be level 30 and own at least 20 champions to be eligible, and it would take that long to achieve those requirements. "This really feels like a bug to me [rather] than being intentional," they wrote.
As it turns out, they were correct. Van Roon said in today's update that Riot intended to ensure the earn rates for Blue Essence—an in-game currency used to unlock new content—were the same or slightly better for all players under the new system. It also didn't mean to slow the speed of leveling or increase the number of games required to access ranked play.
But an analysis of player behaviour reveals that this is exactly what happened for the majority of the League of Legends player base. The changes worked out as intended for "low engaging players," but the higher up you go in terms of hours played, the worse it gets: "Super high" engagement players have seen their Blue Essence earn rate cut by more than 71% under the new system.
All of this happened, van Roon explained, because Riot biffed the numbers. "We realized that we didn't factor in the First Win of the Day experience into our calculations for BE income—both directly from that XP boost and the indirect faster access to Champion Capsules from account leveling," he wrote. "As for account XP, the problem is very similar—we hadn't accounted for the loss of FWotD, which meant drastically slowing the progression of accounts and therefore access to Ranked."
To address the issue, Riot says it will "significantly increase" the Blue Essence earn rates on the free battle pass track in changes expected to go live in patch 25.S1.2, as seen in the chart below:
Because the Act 1 season pass is live and some players have already passed the Blue Essence milestones, Riot will also roll out a "one-time easily completable mission" that will grant players 4,250 Blue Essence, to make up for what should have been granted through the battle pass. Account XP earn rates will also be increased by 40% to ensure the number of games required to reach level 30, and thus ranked access, will be roughly where it was before the changes were made.
The reaction to the admission and incoming fixes seems generally positive, although quite a few players on X and the League of Legends subreddit are calling for a reversion to the old rewards system, or at the very least the return of Hextech Chests. But there's still pretty widespread discontent to be seen, and that likely won't change until the fixes are fully rolled out and Riot demonstrates that player rewards are effectively the same as they were under the previous system.
Beyond the fixes, van Roon said Riot will "be digging more into exactly why this slipped through to begin with, and how we can prevent similar issues from arising in the future. We'll keep you updated as we continue to look into these systems on any potential adjustments, and we apologize for our misses here on both the numbers tuning and comms around what was/wasn't changing."
