Dev: Season 1 Reveal, Gameplay Preview & Ranked Resets

Hi everyone. Today we’re going to be talking about some changes coming to Ranked in 2025, and look back at our initial reasoning and clarification of some of the changes we made for Split 3 alongside some reflections on how they landed.

Ranked Resets

First and foremost, we heard your feedback around Ranked fatigue and the rate of resetting loud and clear. We know it felt like a constant grind, and made climbing feel less rewarding. Not to mention the fact that it led to higher levels of Ranked volatility which made the visible rank lobbies appear more imbalanced.

As a result, we’re making a couple changes in 2025. We’ll have one big reset at the start of the year without any additional resets after. We want your League climb to be enjoyable—not painful or daunting experiences when you need to focus on other aspects of life throughout the year.

We’ll also be changing the way you achieve Victorious skins. Previously, to earn the chroma-less version of Victorious skins, you had to achieve Gold with 80 SP, or grind out 1000 SP below Gold. In 2025 you’ll still be challenged to climb to get the corresponding chromas, but the requirement for the base skin will be to win 15 games of Ranked (solo/duo, flex, or a combination of the two) in each thematic Season. We want to reward you for your time in Ranked in each Season, as well as make the base Victorious skin more achievable.

And finally, for Apex players we’ll be soft-resetting MMR less aggressively. The current approach tends to lead to more early climb volatility. While this may make the climb to first Challenger a bit less exciting, we’re making this change based on your feedback that mixing Diamond, Master, Grandmaster, and Challenger players early in the reset led to a lot of frustration. While that variance won’t be completely gone, we expect instances of it to be much less extreme than in the past.

But this is just one of the changes we’re working on getting out with Season 1 next year. Here’s a few other improvements we’ve been working on and will continue to refine moving forward.

The Return to Ranked Experience

In Split 3 we made some changes to increase the decay rate of accounts where players had taken a long break (6+ months). So if you were away from the game for a while and were previously Plat, you might be placed in Silver. While it can be discouraging to see that significant of a drop, we needed to make getting back into League a smoother experience so you have time to shake off that rust.

We did this because most players returning to Ranked after a long break were performing poorly across the board—which doesn’t make for the best experience for someone trying to get back into League. These players often experienced high 30% to low 40% win rates upon returning to the game, which isn’t fun for them or their teammates.

While the amount of early Ranked stability was mostly the same, there were more of the higher ranks in lower-ranked games, which was a change from previous seasons and led to some increased perceptions of Ranked instability (why are there ex-Masters in my Diamond game, for example). For a good number of these decayed accounts, we believe they’re in the right places for their current skill level. As an example, ex-Diamonds playing in Emerald are averaging a 48% win rate and the ex-Masters playing in Diamond are averaging a 49% win rate. While some subset of these accounts were still active on alts (meaning the players skill hasn’t decayed per say), these cases are much harder to account for.

Alt Accounts

Each split, we apply a soft MMR reset to higher tiers to give you a more fair chance to reach the top of the ladder by making everyone start from roughly the same place. Incidentally, it also does a good job of purging the ladder of ranked manipulated accounts. While we currently monitor rank manipulation with decent success, there are a lot of new accounts each season that are boosted or manipulated that these resets help address.

We care a lot about the return experience for players coming back to Ranked, but we felt that the methods we implemented last split caused too much collateral damage to matchmaking quality, especially around Diamond+. To make this better, we’re looking at finding ways to apply these adjustments more selectively, or in cases where there’s a high-likelihood that the player has been active on an alt account, tailor the adjustments to reduce the chance of decaying that account.

Rank Inflation

We also heard questions around why some of you experienced dramatic drops in your ranks in Split 3. Part of this is most likely due to the fact that we made the higher-tier ranks more difficult to attain, similar to previous seasons. We hadn’t taken a deep dive into our skill distributions in a while which led to some moderate rank inflation over the past few years. This led to a few issues, such as overcrowding of Master tier in some regions, drift of skill between the same rank in one region vs another, and devaluing of the higher ranks like Diamond which are meant to be more exclusive.

A challenging aspect of balancing ranks in League is the variance of what it means to be a given rank across different regions. For example, a player in Emerald in one region may have a very different match experience than an Emerald player elsewhere. We see this inconsistency create confusion and debate in community posts discussing tier game quality and experience. Because of the rank inflation, in some regions (especially larger ones) Emerald match quality was lower than others. This was due to the wide variance of skills of players in Emerald as well as Emerald being the top-end insertion point for alt accounts that performed very well in placements.

There’s no optimal time to adjust for rank inflation, but it’s something important for us to address. While it wasn’t a large swing, it was still large enough to be noticeable, especially when some players are dropping up to 6 divisions in placements. We’re going to keep a much closer eye on this moving forward to ensure that we’re not unintentionally allowing ranks to drift over time, creating the need for actions like this again.

Thanks for all your interest and engagement with Ranked. We’re looking forward to continuing to iterate on the system and make it a rewarding, fair and fun experience. Until next time!

The 2025 Season One gameplay changes will start hitting PBE today! Before they’re out, we wanted to talk you through the changes you’ll see coming to Summoner’s Rift. We’re eager to hear your feedback, so make sure to hop onto PBE to test these updates out and give us your feedback! If you’re looking for more information on what League changing to Seasons means, check out this dev blog for more details.

Housekeeping Note: Things will be in a pretty early state when you first see them, so expect changes to things like visuals, item names, effect names, stat values, and more as we continue to refine these items while they’re on PBE. Barring massive table-flips, this preview page won’t be updated after publishing. Fear not though, when the 25.S1.1 patch notes come out and the changes go live in January they’ll have all the final details as usual.

What Seasons Mean for Gameplay

One quick note before we jump into gameplay, we’re changing how often your rank will reset from once per split/season to once per year. We won’t go into all the details here, but if you’re interested you can check out this dev blog for more information.

In 2024 we tried out Splits and for the most part you can expect Seasons to build off of what we learned there, but you can expect a thicker layer of paint to come with each one (more on that later). League of Legends is a game that asks you to continually adapt—we add new content and constantly retune existing champions and items while you, the players, innovate and discover new strategies that we never could’ve imagined.

We want each new Season to continue to provide interesting gameplay that will give you an opportunity to prove your mastery of the game and help you become more immersed in each season’s thematic universe. We’re not planning to do things like temporary seasonal mechanics you see in other games, because we want each change we make to be good for League in the long-term. We’ll continue to deliver our largest changes of the year in January with Season 1, with additional content in Seasons 2 and 3.

Without further ado, let’s jump into the changes you can expect to see hit the Rift come 2025 Season 1!

Noxian Invasion of the Rift

The first thing you’ll notice when loading onto the Rift this year is that we’ve brought you to Noxus. As part of Seasons, we want to make sure the connection to the theme of each Season doesn’t end as soon as you hit the “Play” button. We want to take advantage of League’s deep well of stories and lore to carry the immersion into the Rift and League’s gameplay. We crafted these map visual updates with an emphasis on maintaining competitive integrity, so whether you’re at home or playing on the professional stage you can still expect a fair playing fields.

Noxus has taken over pretty much all aspects of the Rift: the minions, turrets, and even shopkeepers will now be repping Noxus in some way! Noxian War Turrets will blast minions and champions, sporting some new targeting animations similar to what you might have seen in the ARAM map update. The shopkeepers are dressed up in the snazzy garb of the Masquerade, and the minions look like they rolled right out of the Immortal Bastion itself.

We didn’t want to change the entire map to keep some sense of familiarity and push the differences in some of the biomes. For example, the blue buff and river zones retain their lush forest vibes, while the lanes, red buff areas, and bases are going to look more like what you might find around the outskirts of Noxus Prime. These updates will remain through Season 1, with another new journey coming in Season 2.

We’re sure a bunch of you are already thinking about what that means for later in the year (winter map when?), but unfortunately we don’t have any updates on if or when the winter map will make a return. For now, we hope you’ll enjoy the Noxian views instead.

Now that we’ve covered the fresh coat of Noxian paint coming to the Rift, let’s chat more about the gameplay changes themselves.

Atakhan

This Season, we are adding an entirely new Epic Monster to the Rift. Introducing Atakhan: an ancient demon of bloodshed and violence.

Atakhan spawns at 20:00, and can appear in the river close to either top or bottom lane. Which side he spawns on depends on which has seen more champion damage and kills by 14 minutes. At 14 minutes Atakhan’s pit will spawn with two permanent walls to carve out his territory and signaling where he’ll appear for players so you have plenty of time to plan your approach for fighting this ancient demon.

But this isn’t all there is to Atakhan. The amount of champion damage and kills done in the game so far will also affect which of the two forms the demon takes on. In a higher action game you’ll see Ruinous Atakhan. If you manage to take him down, your entire team will permanently be granted increased effects from all Epic monster rewards, and he’ll leave behind a field of Blood Roses for anyone nearby to collect.

What are Blood Roses? In addition to Atakhan, we’re adding a new plant to Summoner’s Rift. They act as a minor but permanent bonus you can take for your own team and deny the enemy team. They grant your entire team a small amount of XP and a permanent stacking Adaptive Force buff. Blood Roses can spawn before 20:00, and do so around areas where champions have died or around Atakhan’s spawn location, in addition to as a reward for killing Ruinous Atakhan.

But back to Atakhan’s other form. In a lower action game you’ll see Voracious Atakhan and if you manage to take him down your entire team will be granted a temporary, one-time rebirth buff, similar to Akshan’s Passive where you respawn in base, and a permanent increase to gold from champion takedowns which should help give teams that extra push to take that teamfight.

With Atakhan, we wanted to create an important gameplay objective that allows players to participate more in shaping the story unique to each game on Summoner’s Rift. Both team’s actions, their choices to fight or not, and where and when they do, will determine Atakhan’s location and form. Our goal is for this to ultimately bring more variation to each game of League in a way that will help it feel different than the last.

As a minor side note, in order to make room for Atakhan Rift Herald’s spawn time has been pushed back to 16:00 and Baron Nashor’s spawn time has been pushed back to 25:00. We don’t want games to last longer than they do today, and we’d make changes if we see that’s the case. Typically, teams aren’t taking Barons at 20 minutes when they spawn, so we think there’s room for another powerful mid-game objective that is more realistically claimable in Atakhan.

Feats of Strength

The next mechanic we’re introducing as we journey to Noxus are Feats of Strength. They’re a new system that’s replacing the gold rewards from First Blood and First Turret with the goal of rewarding early game advantages in a more interesting and deferred way than a simple bag of gold, but let’s get into how Feats work before we talk about why we made them.

Feats is a best-of-three system that encourages teams to take risks early on by contesting different objectives, aka Feats of Strength. They are as follows:

• First Blood
• First Tower
• First Three Epic Jungle Monsters (Drakes, Herald, any 3 Void Grubs)

Upon one team completing two of the three above Feats, they’ll have won the contest and will receive the blessing of Noxus buff. This buff will immediately grant a small bonus to any tier 2 boots belonging to players on the Feat winning team. This is retroactive, so if you already have tier 2 boots when you get Feats, they’ll get the bonus immediately. If you buy them later, they’ll also get the bonus, so don’t worry about changing up when you buy boots to get this buff. But that’s not all you get for winning!

After completing two legendary items, a player on the Feat winning team can spend gold to upgrade their boots to tier 3, which grants another small stat bonus and a unique effect depending on which boots you upgraded.

Here’s an example of what the boot upgrades look like using Plated Steelcaps:

• Free Tier 2 Boot Bonus: +5 Armor
• Tier 3 Upgrade: Costs 750 gold, but provides +5 Armor, +5 Movement Speed, and a new unique passive that, after taking physical damage from a champion, grants the owner a physical shield for 10% of their  maximum health for 5 seconds (with a 10 seconds cooldown).

Each pair of boots will come with their own unique upgrades, so this shoe store has something for everyone. Even Cassiopeia will get an upgrade for winning Feats (even if snakes can’t wear boots).

We added Feats to give players a fun, satisfying reward for getting an advantage in the early game that wasn’t just big chunks of gold that can provide very sharp swings in power. Since early game gold is very volatile and can vary in usefulness from providing a massive power spike to doing nothing at all based on item completion, Feats was made as a system to smooth out the power that is granted by winning the early game and turn what was previously just immediate gold rewards into a fun system that gives players more options later in the game if they play well early on.

Respawning Nexus Turrets

Next up we have a more straightforward change: Nexus Turret respawning. Just like inhibitors, Nexus Turrets will now respawn at full health a set amount of time after being destroyed. When they respawn they’ll have all the same properties, good as new!

Our goal with adding respawning Nexus Turrets was to help reduce the amount of games that feel hopeless just because you lost both of your turrets. It felt like you were delaying the inevitable when you needed to contest a game winning objective like Baron or Elder Dragon but not being able to leave base without a Shaco or Sion backdooring to win the game. Now, if you’re able to fend off backdoors for a period of time, you won’t have to babysit your Nexus any longer and can get back into the action.

Runes

We’re also taking the new Season as an opportunity to do housekeeping on a few Runes. Introducing Axiom Arcanist, Deep Ward, Sixth Sense, and Grisly Mementos.

Axiom Arcanist will buff your ultimate ability’s damage, healing, or shielding and refund you some cooldown on takedowns. It’ll be replacing Nullifying Orb and is intended to be a caster’s best friend. We wanted to add a rune that appealed to the caster fantasy that has a clearly defined user base that can compete with manaflow band for those who use it well as a more interesting choice for players as they load into their games.

Now for Deep Ward, Sixth Sense, and Grisly Mementos.

Deep Ward makes Stealth Wards that you place in the enemy jungle Deep, granting them +1 HP and last 30-45 seconds long (increased to +30-120 seconds for Yellow Trinket Stealth Wards). Beginning at level 11, Stealth Wards that you place in the river will also be considered Deep and grant the respective bonuses.

Sixth Sense automatically tracks a nearby enemy ward if you cannot already see / track it. If you’re a melee champion it will have a 300 second cooldown, with a 360 second cooldown for ranged users. Beginning at level 11 this rune will not only track the enemy ward, but it will also reveal it for 10 seconds giving you a chance to take it out.

Last up we have Grisly Mementos which grants an infinitely stacking 5 Trinket Ability Haste upon champion takedowns. In modes where this doesn’t make sense like ARAM the user will gain 3 Ultimate Ability Haste instead.

Deep Ward, Sixth Sense, and Grisly Mementos will be replacing Eyeball Collector, Zombie Ward, Ghost Poro will the goal of creating more exciting vision tools for players to decide between instead of more generic runes that were kept relatively safe due to their power budget being tied up in bonus Adaptive Force.

While it isn’t a sweeping overhaul of the runes, like any time we touch this system we want rune selection to be an interesting part of the pre-game preparation phase that lets you specialize how you want to approach the match.

Teleport has gotten more powerful as player skill and knowledge have increased over time. It doesn’t have a clear weakness since the winning player in lane uses it to push their advantage and the losing player relies on it as a fallback, while both also benefit from the ability to move across the map within a few seconds.

In its current state, Teleport significantly stifles action in lanes through its low cost as a “reset” button, while we think more of its power should be in its later uses that provide map impact and benefit solo lane influence on the rest of the game.

To accomplish this, Teleport will no longer instantly blink the champion after its channel. Now, they will instead visually travel across the map, with Teleport moving slower and Unleashed Teleport moving much quicker. This new mechanic allows us to tune how effective Teleport is at returning to lane in a way that doesn’t feel as bad as nerfing its channel duration or range, while also ensuring it’s still appropriately powerful later on.

Now that early Teleport has a long travel time, we’re reintroducing its early capability to target wards and minions as there’s more time to react to an incoming teleport. In addition, Homeguards will now kick in from the beginning of the game, although in a weaker state before 14 minutes. This is intended to reduce the difference in time it takes between walking back to lane and teleporting so that early game pacing still feels reasonable whether one takes Teleport or not.

A 4 second blink didn’t give us much room to specifically target what we wanted to nerf about Teleport and this change should put it in a healthier spot while long-term setting us up to balance the game around it not being as impactful early. Ideally, laning should feel reasonable whether one takes the spell or not.

And that about wraps up our biggest changes coming to Season 1 next year! We hope you’re looking forward to testing them out, and make sure to check out the patch notes when they come out for all the details. See you on the Rift and good luck climbing!

Starting in patch 25.S1.1 (formerly patch 15.1) we’ll be introducing a new queue to League of Legends: Swiftplay.

What is Swiftplay?

Swiftplay will be a faster way to experience authentic Summoner’s Rift gameplay that’s focused on letting all 10 players experience their champion’s fantasy within a game of League with the same skill tests, but doesn’t punish early game disadvantages nearly as hard. This means making sure everyone gets a chance for their champions to lane, teamfight, scale and test their champion’s limits. Things like farming, snowballing, and objectives are still important, but these aspects alone won’t make or break your ability to contribute to your team’s success.

That isn’t to say that Swiftplay won’t be competitive–after all, it’s still a heads-up PvP experience with a winning team and a losing team–but we’re aiming to shift the emphasis from dominating your individual opponent and much more on developing your own champion. For those that have played our other games, you can think of this new queue as a Hyper Roll from TFT or Swiftplay from Valorant in that it will be a lower stakes way to experience the game.

Our goal with creating this new queue is to create a more accessible experience for players that are looking for a bit more of the traditional League experience than ARAM with a slightly less (but not zero) competitive mindset – players who want to play with friends, players who just want to chill in the evening after work, players who are just learning (or relearning) the ropes, and so on. Modes are great for some of these players, but for others, the action-strategy mix of Summoner’s Rift is the main attraction.

What’s Changing?

One of our primary goals in creating Swiftplay is to preserve the traditional Summoner’s Rift game flow (laning, teamfighting, contesting objectives, etc). The general approach we’ve taken is to change rules in relatively small but impactful ways, tuning them far enough to have an impact without invalidating the overall structure of Summoner’s Rift.

• Almost all sources of gold and experience give out increasingly more rewards as the game progresses. The beginning of the lane phase will have minimal changes, but things will accelerate pretty significantly from there.
• Players who have fallen way behind the curve will get more gold and experience from most sources, depending how far behind they’ve fallen. This won’t be enough to slingshot them into the lead (unless they make some great plays, of course), but it should mean they’re never out of the game.
• Players who are getting crushed will be worth much less gold. Farming the worst player on the enemy team on repeat will be a much less effective way to build a lead – if you’re behind, you’re a lot less of a liability for your team and should have chances to come back later. On the other hand, just dominating a single opponent through lane phase won’t be as rewarding in this queue.
• Most timing elements of the map have been accelerated. Turret Plating falls earlier, Baron spawns earlier, it only takes 3 Elemental Drakes to claim a Soul, Support and Jungle quest items complete sooner, and so on.
• All champions near a dying enemy minion get some gold. The last hitter still gets full value, while everyone else gets a fraction of that. Think how ARAM minions work.
• Supports get considerably more gold in Swiftplay than in traditional SR, so the price of their items have been increased with the added bonus of significantly more stats for each item so that they don’t cap out on items way sooner than everyone else.

Exact numbers are still being fine tuned, and will continue to change as the queue rolls out on PBE and potentially right up to launch and even after. There are definitely going to be rough edges to Swiftplay when it goes live, but as we see what you all like we’ll be looking at your feedback and how games play out to iterate on and improve the mode over time which will also inform other decisions like how we balance this queue.

A last note is that we’re looking to make some small improvements to the get-in-game flow that Quickplay uses today which will be shared by Swiftplay. When Swiftplay launches, you’ll be able to select the same champion for both roles if the champion doesn’t have a massive pickrate in the queue (most likely for new champion releases / updates), since we do want to find you a match swiftly.

What does this mean for other queues?

For an initial trial beginning in 25.S1.1, we’re planning to replace Quickplay with Swiftplay in order to help maintain queue health (after all, no one likes to be stuck in a queue for a long time). So if you’ve been a Quickplay aficionado we’re hoping you’ll find a place in either normal SR draft or in Swiftplay.

We want to be clear that Swiftplay doesn’t reflect a change in our approach to traditional Summoner’s Rift. Our core rules have served League and our players well for many years, and we’re not making any changes to them. If you love Solo Queue right now, well, nothing is changing for you – we hope you’ll continue to queue up for traditional SR, and we’re not trying to get you to switch.

All regions will continue to have access to an unranked queue with the traditional ruleset for SR. When it goes live in 25.S1.1, Swiftplay will replace Quickplay in regions that already have another always-on unranked Summoner’s Rift queue:

• North America
• Latin America North
• Latin America South
• EU West
• EU Nordic & East
• Russia
• Brazil
• Turkey
• Taiwan
• Vietnam

Other regions will come later if we see the queue doing well in the initial regions above. We’ll be watching how you choose to engage with Swiftplay and looking closely at your feedback to determine if it’s something that has long-term potential!

That’s all we have on Swiftplay for now, but it’ll be hitting PBE when patch 25.S1.1 does on December 11, 2024 and LIVE when we kick off the new year. We’re looking forward to getting this new queue out to all of you and seeing your feedback, but until then we’ll see you on the Rift (and after that hopefully in a Swift)!

Hey folks, Pabro, Meddler, Riot Phroxzon, Riot Auberaun, 100pc nuggets, and Mackivor back with another TL;DW of today’s Dev Update:

• Viktor is receiving an update to his art, backstory, and a small update to his gameplay to better align game and show.
• Prototype Viktor is increasing from 520 RP to 750 RP.

• Next year we’ll have three Seasons, each with their own thematic.
• In each Season we’ll follow different champions across Runeterra.
• There will be an overarching narrative for 2025.
• There will be Seasonally-themed content including skins, gameplay updates, modes, mini-games, and champions.
• We’ll still have non-Seasonal content as well.

• Season One will take place in Noxus.
• Noxus is taking over the map in Season One.
• There is a new system called Feats of Strength, with new Noxus-themed boot upgrades.
• Nexus turrets will respawn.
• There are vision-related new runes in the Domination tree, and a new ult-focused rune called Axiom Arcanist.
• There are some updates to items.

• Atakhan, Bringer of Ruin is coming to League as a new neutral objective, spawning once at 20 minutes in one of two forms, providing unique buffs, terrain changes, and more.
• Check out the blog for more details.
• We are redoing the Pass system in League—removing Event Passes and Tokens and replacing them with Battle Passes.
• Battle Passes will always be active and will have a free and paid track.
• For more details, please check out the blog.
• We’re going to one single Ranked reset next year in January, with no resets after.
• There will still be 3 Victorious skins—one for each Season.
• We’re testing replacing Quickplay with Swiftplay in some regions.
• We’re exploring adding Multiplayer Practice Tool to League—it’ll be an experimental feature, so there may be some interesting bugs.

• Patches are being renamed to line up with Seasons. 15.1 will be 25.S1.1, and the first patch of Season 2 will be 25.S2.1, etc.

In today’s Dev Update we talked about how Seasons will look and what you should expect next year and beyond. In short, our goal for Seasons is to have thematic experiences that touch and influence how you experience League—from champion releases, game modes, (some) gameplay changes, to even events and the Battle Pass (formerly Event Pass, more on that below). We want to immerse you into the Seasonal thematic both in and around the game.

So today we want to dive a little deeper into some of the things you’ll see in January, mainly what Seasons are, how they’re structured, and how we streamlined some existing systems in League. We also have blogs that dive deeper into the Season One gameplay, Ranked, and Swiftplay.

Seasons

Over the years we’ve fleshed out the world and regions of Runeterra, as well as alternate universes like Star Guardian, High Noon, and Dark Star. We’ve tried to create moments to highlight and give you special experiences like summer events, or narrative drops around champions or skin releases. And now we want to take that experience further with Seasons.

In 2025, we’ll have three Seasons where we’ll follow champions across different regions of Runeterra. Each will have their own unique theme and narrative that will connect throughout 2025 and will be the anchor for the majority of the content that we put into the game. This includes things like gameplay, modes, skins, mini-games, and champions which will have a strong connection to the Season’s theme, delivered in two Acts per Season.

We’ll still do things like the Lunar Revel event, moments like April Fools, and release skinlines that aren’t tied into the current Seasonal thematic, but the majority of our content will be connected to the theme of that Season. Ultimately, our goal is to show and immerse you into different parts of Runeterra from the moment you open the client to the moment you see a Victory screen and everything in between.

The first thing you should notice next year is that the client has received a facelift to streamline your experience and highlight the seasonal theme. We want to remove noise and clutter, all while bringing the Season’s thematic to the forefront of (almost) everything next year. Small disclaimer though that these changes to the client are just visual.

The updated home page, called the Activity Center.

Because each Season will be the focus of content going into League, we wanted the client to reflect that as well. So now the landing page will focus entirely on the Season, League, and things you can do in it. Beyond putting the thematic in the forefront, you can also follow your progression throughout the Season—from the story’s progress itself to the Battle Pass. And, as the Season progresses, so too will its page in the Activity Center..

 

You can also track time-limited events like Lunar Revel, new champion releases, your Ranked journey, mini-games, and more from the side-bar in the Activity Center.

 

The Info Hub.

To keep the landing page focused on League activities we moved news and information about League into a new place called the Info Hub. Every time a new patch drops the Info Hub will show up over the Activity Center to show a rotating list of what’s new: cinematics, new skins, new champions, esports news, Dev Updates, and more. (And if you’re also a TFT player, you can toggle to the TFT version of the Info Hub on the top left). It’ll only pop up once per patch when you first log in, but if you ever want to go back to look at it again, you can always pull it back up from the Activity Center.

Battle Passes & Rewards

Seasons also gave us the perfect opportunity to take a better look at some of League’s core rewards systems and see what we could level up or clean up, as over League’s history we may have made one too many rewards systems. We also wanted to make sure the Battle Pass was a strong extension of that season’s theme, tailored to the overall moment.

Over the years some of our systems have become needlessly complex, with excess currencies, or unnecessary steps to craft or claim rewards, overlapping reward types, and so on. Needing three key fragments to make a key to unlock a chest to get a random skin shard, which you then need three of to get a random skin, or orange essence to convert the shard into the skin is just… a convoluted experience We still like some of the agency you get in crafting and choosing to get a randomized reward, but it should be something you opt into rather than be required to receive a reward.

To make League more consistently rewarding to play, we’re introducing a new Battle Pass system starting next year. There will always be a Pass active and will now last four patches instead of the current two. This extended duration gives you more time to unlock rewards while requiring about the same amount of gameplay per week to do so. This change will allow for steady progress without feeling pressured by event schedules.

Battle Passes will be the core vessel for how you track and earn rewards going forward. We want it to be  a focused, singular area where you can find all of the rewards clearly presented—and make it easy to understand how to earn them.

Everyone will have access to the free pass, which grants various rewards, including a Seasonal skin. And, if you choose to buy the paid version, we want to ensure the differences of what you are getting are very clear.

We want the new Battle Pass to mirror the Seasonal thematic experience. (Disclaimer: These are examples, we don’t want to spoil the first Battle Pass just yet. Arcane Singed is available from the Arcane mini-game.)

Objectives & Battle Pass Experience (BXP)

You’ll gain passive experience on your Battle Pass as you play, but if you really want to progress on your pass fast there will also be missions to get through it faster.

You’ll be able to track all of your missions in a new Objectives tab so you can track your progress for all of them in one spot. You can also see the rewards clearly on the screen—sometimes it’ll be something other than just pass experience.

We’re also increasing the number of missions that are available at any given time. You’ll now have dailies, weeklies, Act-long missions, events, Mastery missions, and more. Because there are more missions available with more variety, we’re also making it so most missions have a singular objective (some of which are themed).You won’t need to complete every mission to finish your pass, and can choose where you want to focus your time and energy—if you’re able to do your daily mission every day, you don’t need to go too far into other missions. If you’re unable to play every day, that’s fine too, as the passive experience for playing games, Act-long missions, and infinite Mastery Milestone missions will cover you.

We want to give you more creativity when it comes to completing passes, so it should become less of a “play X number of games” grind and more of a varied experience. That said, it should still take the same gameplay investment to complete a pass than it does today because now everything adds pass exp, even though the pass is double the length.

In addition to all of these changes, you’ll also be able to view a snapshot of your Battle Pass progression from anywhere in the client.

Pass Rewards

All right, let’s talk about rewards. We’re removing the Event Shop and Tokens, and now you’ll unlock all your pass rewards directly on the track (we know, revolutionary, right?). The Battle Pass will have a free and paid version (which you can purchase for the same bundle prices as an Event Pass today), each with unique skins: Every free pass will have one unique Seasonal skin, and every paid pass will also have  three more unique Seasonal skins and the Seasonal Prestige skin (5 unique skins total). There are a bunch of other rewards, which we’ll get into down below.

Paid Pass Options

• 1650 RP – Battle Pass
• 2650 RP – Battle Pass, 10 Pass Levels, Champion receiving the Prestige, Prestige Emote
• 3650 RP – All of the above, 25 Mythic Essence, Prestige Chroma

There will be 50 levels that you can unlock on the Battle Pass, with a variety of rewards including skins, titles, borders, emotes, icons, loot orbs, banners, and more! There will also be repeatable levels beyond the 50 for Blue Essence and Orange Essence.

Free Pass

There’s always been a “free pass” track for Event Passes, but they’ve never felt all that great, and if you didn’t buy the pass, you typically ignored it. We wanted to fix that: If you never spend a dollar in League, but are spending your time, it should feel rewarding.

On average, fully free-to-play players earn about nine skins a year (including the three Victorious skins each split and crafting). So when looking at rewards to include in the Battle Pass, we wanted to at least hit that number for the year. Next year you can earn 12 skins from the free pass (15 if you include the three Victorious skins) just by playing League. But, as we said earlier, we want to simplify the system, so we will be rewarding you with straight-up skins. No more skin shards.

You’ll be able to get skin shards through purchasing or obtaining Hextech Chests and Event Loot moving forward. The shards you have now aren’t going anywhere—they’ll be in your inventory.

You can get more free skins a year next year when this change takes place. We’re just taking the shards and rerolling out of that free experience.

You can earn two free skins per Act from the free pass just for playing. The first skin in the pass will be a unique, Seasonally-themed skin for hitting pass level 20. It’ll be obtainable by everyone while that Battle Pass is active, but will never hit the reroll pool. The second skin will be a random 975 RP or lower skin for hitting level 45 on the pass. If you already own all the 975 skins then it’ll give you a random 975 skin permanent in your inventory that you can either dust or reroll.

The full list of the rewards for the free Battle Pass should look like this:

• One thematic Earnable Skin Permanent
• One random 975 RP or lower Skin
• One Title
• Two Emotes
• Two Mystery Emotes
• Three Icons
• Two Mystery Icons
• Four Champion Capsules
• 4750 Blue Essence (plus infinite repeating levels at the end of the track)

Paid Pass

If you choose to upgrade to the paid pass, you’ll be able to obtain the Seasonal Prestige skin as the capstone reward (read: the final non-repeatable reward). We’ve heard your feedback that one of the more frustrating experiences was having just not enough Event Tokens to unlock the Prestige skin at the end of the event (or wanting some borders and other goodies as well). We believe that by  adding the skin as well as borders to the pass will give the pass more value, but will also make getting the rewards you want less frustrating.

In addition, you’ll also unlock a bunch of other rewards including more skins, Ancient Sparks for the Sanctum, banners, and more:

• Everything from the Free Pass
• Three Ancient Sparks
• One Prestige Skin
• Three Reward Skins
• Three Borders
• Seven Loot Orbs
• One Banner
• One Ward Skin
• Two Emotes
• Two Icons
• 1000 Orange Essence (Plus an infinitely repeatable 25 OE every 5 levels after 50)

We’re also making another small adjustment to Prestige skins moving forward. Historically Prestige skins have always been based on a non-Prestige version of the skin. But from now on there will only be the Prestige version. This wasn’t a decision we made lightly, but we think that focusing entirely on the Prestige version without a non-Prestige base will let us make the Prestige skin a lot more “prestigious” and will lead to higher quality Prestige skins.

We’re also permanently adding the ability to purchase levels in case you’re not able to complete the pass for whatever reason. And, like the current Battle Passes, it will store your progress in the paid track even if you didn’t purchase it at the start of the Season.

Other Rewards Systems

As we were working on the Battle Pass rewards, we also cleaned up redundant things in the store and  eliminated some confusion with a few other systems.

Honor and the Honor Shop

As it currently stands, the Honor system is more of a checkbox that you hit at the end of the Ranked season for a free skin (or some sparkly VFX on your back animation), and we want this system to be more. We want League to be a place that fosters a healthy environment by promoting and rewarding positivity, and punishing disruptive behavior. So we’re making some changes to the Honor system to reflect this.

Earlier this year we shared some of the work in this space, and starting with the launch of Seasons we’ll be introducing some of our next steps. Moving forward your Honor level will be tied directly to how you are rewarded in League. A positive Honor level will grant you increased pass experience that will increase as your Honor level does. Your Honor level will also define your social experience in League going forwards, with high Honor players earning more social privileges than their counterparts. This starts with your access to social capabilities, from All Chat and post-game chat to pinging and emote frequency, and more.

Because we’re making Honor tie directly into the Battle Pass system, we’re also removing the Honor Shop and Honor Tokens. With Honor gating your social experience and determining your rewards, we want it to feel like an integral part of your League experience. Keeping Honor and the rest of Store and Season Rewards separate is contrary to that goal. So we’re integrating Honor more deeply into the League ecosystem while deprecating the isolated space that is the Honor Store. We don’t think that making Honor a checkpoint at the end of the Ranked season led to a positive outcome, and we’ve admittedly kind of trolled for years by not offering anything in the Honor Shop that’s actually worth getting. So we’re removing it entirely.

That said, at the end of this season we will be releasing Three Honors Shen, who will automatically be granted to all Honor level 5 players early next year.

In the first patch of the year we’ll be adding ALL Honor skins to the Honor Shop in case you have any leftover Tokens. And later in Season One we’ll be officially closing the Honor Shop and converting all leftover Honor Tokens to 1050 Orange Essence per Token (enough to upgrade an Epic Skin Shard from your inventory). After the Honor Shop closes, the existing Honor skins will become a one-time unlock for hitting Honor level 5 in the future.

Some of these changes won’t immediately be available in Season 1, such as the passive bonus to pass experience and the access to social features. You can expect that to be coming later next year in 2025. We’ll share the specifics of those closer to when they’re coming to the game next year.

Hextech and Masterwork Chests

A perfect example of where we wanted to exercise our new philosophy for rewards was within the Hextech and Masterwork Chest space—specifically confusion and decluttering. Masterwork Chests were often purchased for one of two reasons: Either for wanting to obtain Mythic Essence, or there wasn’t an event active but someone wanted the Orb equivalent in them. In 2025 you’ll be able to more consistently obtain Mythic Essence through the Sanctum, and since there’ll always be a pass active, Orbs will always be available. So Masterwork Chests are redundant and will no longer be for sale.
As for what happens to existing Masterwork Chests we’ll be rolling out changes in two phases:

Phase 1: Masterwork Chests will no longer be sold in the Store starting in patch 25.S1.1 on January 6, 2025. At this time, we also will be moving away from using them as rewards in other systems such as Battle Passes and Ranked Rewards.

Phase 2: The Masterwork Milestone track will be deactivated at the end of Season 1 Act 1 in patch 25.S1.5 on March 5, 2025. When they’re deactivated, all earned rewards on the track will be autoclaimed as well. Please note that you only progress the track by opening Masterwork chests, so any unopened chests will not count towards your progress.

After Phase 2, any remaining Masterwork Chests in your inventory will remain unopened. You can still purchase or acquire Hextech Keys to open your chests in the future and receive rewards from the chests.

Hextech Chests will still be available and will be the lowest cost way to obtain skin shards.

Champion Mastery Rewards

The rewards experience for Champ Mastery has felt disconnected from League. It’s another thing to track and follow, without a great reason for that added complexity. Another problem that we also wanted to solve in this space is that not every way of playing League is rewarded in equitable ways. If you’re an ARAM player, you’re just rewarded less because so many of our systems like Mastery are built around Summoner’s Rift. This wasn’t intentional, but it’s something we want to fix.

Instead, in 2025 we’re incorporating Champion Mastery into the Battle Pass to improve the experience of playing ARAM and its contributions to the pass, re-enforce the pass as a central rewards experience, and make mastery itself bolster your progression. You’ll no longer receive chests from Mastery, but instead be rewarded in Pass Experience, bringing Champion Mastery into the fold for Battle Pass progression.

You’ll still obtain Mastery levels and points like normal, just now you’ll see Champion Mastery missions appear in your new objective modal that we showed above. You’ll have an always active mission for completing a Mastery milestone for what is equivalent to a daily objective in pass exp, and a few others for completing various sets of Mastery ranging up to large amounts of pass exp (essentially multiple levels).

There will be three main missions, and two “bonus” missions each Season:

Mission 1: Complete a Mastery milestone on any champion (infinite mission)

Mission 2: Complete Mastery milestone 4 on any champion (once per Season)

Mission 3: Complete 12 milestones in your Mastery Set (once per Season)

Bonus Mission 1: Complete 24 milestones in your Mastery Set (once per Season)

Bonus Mission 2: Complete 40 milestones in your Mastery Set (once per Season)

Event, Showcase, and Mythic Variant Capsules

Let’s be honest. These systems were super-confusing—at points we literally had three capsules up at the same time.

So, in 2025 we’re moving Mythic Variants into The Sanctum as their own tiered reward you can roll for with Ancient Sparks; capsules are going away. This also means Mythic Variants will have their own bad luck protection that carries over to future Mythic Variants, guaranteed at 40 attempts. Showcase capsules are going away entirely because they weren’t very popular, felt out of place, and don’t fit into the new Seasonal Battle Pass system. So, moving forward Event Orbs will be the sole “capsule,” or “orb” in 2025 and beyond.

We know that these are a ton of changes, but we’re really excited for what Seasons unlocks for League and the overall experience we’re driving to create in 2025. From how it’s expressed in gameplay, to the new Battle Pass, and the client theming, we feel like it’ll create a cohesive, thematic, and exciting version of League. We hope you enjoy it and we’ll see you next year in Season One.