Hey everyone, Pabro, Meddler, DashiJador, Riot Iksar, Phroxzon, and just a capybara here with a quick TL;DW of today’s Dev Update:

• In Season 3, we’re pulling together characters’ storylines from Noxus and Spirit Blossom—LeBlanc, Yunara, Atakhan, and Xin Zhao will all play a vital role.
• We’ll be celebrating 15 years of Worlds in China later this year.
• We’re returning to base Summoner’s Rift map—don’t worry, we have more new maps planned for later.

• Xin Zhao is getting a visual update to his base model and all skins.
• All Vaulted skins will be unvaulted for patches 25.17 and 25.18.
• Commando and Imperial Xin Zhao have gotten additional upgrades and will increase from 520 to 750 RP, but you can get them at the lower price until patch 25.17.
• He’s also getting a new Epic skin later in Act 1.
• Sylas and Mel will be getting Prestige skins in the Mythic Shop in Act 1 and Act 2, respectively.
• The 2024 Worlds Winner skins will be coming out in September.
• Jarvan IV and Zoe will be getting Prestige skins on the Battle Passes in Act 1 and Act 2, respectively.
• Exalted Viego will be delayed until next year so we can spend more time on him.
• Dearest Viktor Nation; Machine Herald Viktor will be released in patch 25.19. As an ode to your love for the machine man, all true Viktor lovers will get the skin for free as long as you had Mastery 5 or above on him as of August 4th.
• Battle Passes are being tweaked and will have 48 levels instead of 50—the amount of experience between levels stays the same, and none of the rewards are being removed.
• We’re adding some emotes and icons to the Mythic Shop that were previously only earnable by completing TFT Passes.

• Doom Bots is back in patch 25.17 with new bots, a new boss, a new difficulty, new curses, and new missions… and more doom, of course.
• Each patch there will be a unique challenge called “Trials of Doom” that will add a new, unique obstacle to overcome.
• Check out the dev blog to learn more about the changes.
• In order for League to be a healthy, thriving game we have to continue to improve the experience for not just all of you playing now, but for returning or new players.
• To that end, we’re adding WASD as a new, optional control scheme to League.
• WASD is coming to PBE in a few patches and we need your help to find every bug or weird interaction that exists.
• It’ll stay on PBE until it’s ready to roll out to non-Ranked queues and eventually to Ranked.
• WASD is totally optional, and we have some balance levers to pull so WASD and Point & Click are both competitively viable without either being a “better” way to play League.
• Learn more about WASD in the dev blog that’s out now.
• Patch 25.18 will introduce stricter actions against smurfing, specifically boosting (someone else playing on your account) and hitchhiking (a higher-skilled player using a fraudulent account to duo with a lower-skilled player).
• We’ll be taking action against both accounts in these situations—both the booster and boostee.
• We’re going to be doubling down on banning accounts that are being bought, sold, or shared—regardless of whether or not they’re used in Ranked smurfing.
• True Skill 2 testing began in North America in March (normal SR, ARAM), then expanded to all un-Ranked queues in Korea last month after fixes. Players are placed correctly within 5-10 games, 3-5 times faster than the current system.
• That said, we won’t be adding True Skill 2 to Ranked until we’ve done much more testing with it.
• Worlds will kick off with the 2025 Anthem on October 10th, which will honor and celebrate all of the legends of the sport from over the years.
• Games will kick off in Beijing on October 14th with Finals in Chengdu on November 9th.
• We’d especially love to get all of your takes on WASD as that hits PBE soon. We’re working on a number of things we think are really important for the long term future of League. WASD’s the first one up and the one’s that’s ready to talk about right now, we’ll share more about the other efforts in a bit.

League is a game of great depth and complexity. These factors make the game worth enjoying for thousands of hours and what makes it competitively interesting. And while we’ve been releasing updates to League consistently to improve its core experience now, we’ve also been working on longer-term projects focused on the future of League.

One of those projects is ready to share today: the option to play League with WASD controls. At this point, we’re ready to move from closed playtests to the moment where we want y’all to hop in and test it out with us.

To WASD, or Not to WASD

For those of us who are already familiar with League’s control scheme, don’t worry, Point and Click controls aren’t going anywhere. Additionally, we’re working hard to ensure competitive balance between the options.

As long-time League players ourselves, we went into this project with a deep respect for the classic MOBA controls that helped us fall in love with the genre. We believe that offering WASD controls will provide a fresh yet familiar way to play for both new players and veterans of the Rift without changing what makes League, League.

We’ve seen that for new players, WASD is the most familiar control scheme for PC games today, and let’s be real, a lot of us instinctively put our fingers there when coming back to League after playing something else. By offering WASD as an alternate control scheme, we believe League will feel more intuitive to some players who come from other games. This means if you’re looking for a new way to play, new to League, or even inviting a friend to pick up League, it should be easier for everyone to jump in and get into what makes League awesome.

We want both control schemes to feel good across all roles and skill brackets. So to keep that reality, we’re taking things slow and will be rolling WASD controls out over several months so we can keep an eye on win rates across various skill levels, roles, and champions. And that’s where you come in.

We Want You

We’re sending WASD to PBE for an extended run (starting soon, and lasting multiple patches) so we can do even more playtesting before it goes to live servers. That said, we’ve played tons of games with WASD already, conducted Player Labs, and even brought WASD to MSI for pros to give feedback, but know that we still need more thoughts and direct experience from all of you.

 

To make sure we can catch any bugs, or unintended interactions, and address your feedback, we’ll be evaluating and adapting WASD to better suit how you play. After PBE, WASD will be slowly introduced into non-Ranked modes, then finally a full global release, including Ranked and pro play. At each step, we’ll pause to hear from you, refine features, and squash any bugs. We want to ensure there’s no clear advantage to either control scheme over the other before WASD gets anywhere near Ranked.

 

Our goal is to make sure you can choose whichever control scheme feels most comfortable, without your choice putting you at a disadvantage. One of the areas we’ll specifically be watching is how WASD affects the balance between moving and attacking, especially at high speeds. For instance, right now, it can be easier on WASD to kite than when using Point and Click. So, we’ll be extra focused on feedback in that area to ensure we make adjustments when needed to keep things equitable across both control schemes.

On All Maps, for All Champions

League is at its best when your teamwork, strategy, and mental resilience cumulates into a thrilling execution of your mechanics.  Getting the blind Lux ult snipe, threading minions with a Blitzcrank hook to grab a clueless opponent, these are the highs of League that need to feel great, natural and fun. We’ve made a lot of progress towards these goals already by working with high-skill playtesters and dedicated champion mains across a variety of modes, and are excited to tune it even more with your feedback.

 

WASD controls felt pretty good for most champs right out the gate, but there were definitely some specific areas that needed extra attention. To give you an idea, here are a few of the adjustments we’ve made so far based on playtester feedback:

• For channeled spells like Miss Fortune’s ult, we adjusted the code so held WASD keys won’t accidentally cancel abilities as soon as they begin.
• Ambessa’s passive needed some care to ensure you wouldn’t be forced to dash only the smallest possible distance.
• We added targeting options for Flash to help it feel more natural when flashing either in the direction your champion is moving, or when you suddenly need to go over a wall in the opposite direction.

There were also some pretty… interesting bugs, and we’ll share some of those in the future!

A peek at feedback from some of the early high rank playtest sessions.

Improving Accessibility For All

While working on WASD, we identified a few quality of life changes we could make to improve general accessibility in League. For example, we improved the UI to show more keybind hints for those of you who prefer combinations of keys beyond a single letter.

As some of you may have noticed. And used for nefarious purposes.

Some of these changes will be valuable no matter their preferred control scheme or history with League. These will be on PBE too, so let us know how little or much they make WASD feel good.

Updated Keybinding Options

In the past, some keybinding options were limited only to those brave enough to delve into their system files. If you’ve ever tried to bind a champ’s ability to left-click, then you might be familiar with the struggle!

 

As part of our input system overhaul, we’re making this much easier. You’ll be able to bind previously hidden actions like selecting units, interacting with Hexgates, and cancelling spells to any button you wish—including mouse buttons—directly from the in-game options menu.

This updated keybinding system will be available for those using WASD while it’s on PBE so we can make sure that all of the new control’s scheme’s features are ready before rolling them out to everyone.

Dynamic Locked Camera

Locked camera is a popular option for players new and experienced, reducing the number of things that you need to manage at once, but it significantly reduces in-game visibility.

 

So, we’re introducing a new “Dynamic Locked Camera” option that enhances the field of view by subtly shifting the camera as your mouse and champion move. Our goal is to make it easier for locked camera enjoyers to keep an eye out for incoming ganks and aim long-range abilities while still being able to focus on the action.

Last Hit Indicators

One last quality of life update that’s headed to PBE is the introduction of Last Hit Indicators for unranked queues. Last hitting is a foundational skill test that can make or break a lane, but for newer players learning the ropes it can be overwhelming while considering wave control, positioning, and trading on top of the precise mechanics of last hitting. Adding these visual indicators specifically for unranked queues will help support learning without affecting League’s competitive environments.

Even with last hit indicators, you may still find yourself occasionally missing cannon minions—something we’ve seen even among our high-skilled playtesters. The indicators are designed to help with consistency, but they only reflect permanent sources of damage. That means effects like basic attack damage and items such as Wit’s End are included, while dynamic sources like Sheen procs or Jax’s empowered autos will still rely on your own timing and game knowledge.

Looking Ahead

We’re excited to hear what you think once WASD hits the PBE. It’s the first of a number of long-term projects we’re working on to help shape League’s future, and it’s the one that’s ready to share right now. We’ve got more in the works, and we’ll share more about the others in a bit.

In the meantime, please give WASD a test drive. We’ll be keeping a close eye on feedback to make it a great experience for everyone. Let us know what you think!

League is a game that’s at its best and highest quality when both teams have a fair shot at winning, and we want to make that a reality when you load into each game.

That doesn’t happen when there are people out there who purposefully make games they’re in worse by griefing, inting, smurfing, or verbally abusing others—just to name a few.

To be extremely clear, this sort of behavior is not, and has never been, welcome in League, and if players are engaging in these sorts of things we will find them and we will restrict, suspend, and/or ban these accounts.

We know what you’re thinking, “I see these sorts of people in my games all the time, there’s no way you’ll ban them all.”

That’s a reasonable take. After all, these problems have plagued League and other competitive games since the beginning, but just because they’ve been around doesn’t mean we’re going to let it continue.

To recap what we’ve done so far this year, in patch 25.6 we started off issuing LP refunds for players that had a cheater in their games with the help of Vanguard, which was just one part of our ongoing efforts to get cheaters out of League. Then, in 25.9, we took a major step in keeping inters and griefers out of your games by improving our detection systems which resulted in 10x more players per day receiving bans for game-ruining behavior. But our work in this space is never truly done.

Throughout the remainder of 2025, we’re going to take big swings like we did against inting and griefing earlier this year and address some of the most common forms of game ruining behavior that YOU are seeing in League today.

Many of these are versions of what some people call smurfing, which occurs due to a variety of reasons, but almost always results in a terrible experience because nine people have one player much better than them making their game unfair and uncompetitive.

So over the course of the next couple weeks we’re going to be attacking some of the ways smurfs get into your games that you’ll see immediately:

• Boosting: Queuing up on an account that is not their own to inflate said account’s MMR.
• Hitchhiking: Queuing up with another account—typically a booster—in order to get carried to a much higher ranked division.
• Purchased and Botted Accounts: An explicit violation of our terms of service, any account not leveled and used by a single player falls under this category.

Boosting/Hitchhiking Detection and Punishment (Patch 25.18)

To make sure we’re all on the same page:

Boosting is a form of rank manipulation where a more skilled player (the booster) logs into another player’s account (the boostee) to play Ranked games, regardless of whether they give the account back to the boostee. This is explicitly against our Terms of Service: account sharing/selling is a hard no-go, and can result in immediate bans.

Hitchhiking (aka bussing) is where a player queues up with another player (typically a cheater/booster, but not always) as a service in order to “climb” and artificially inflate their own MMR/rank.

Both of these create an awful experience for other players in the game trying to climb honestly, and take away from the competitive League experience we want. So it’s important that we crack down on players who do this and punish them appropriately.

Back in Patch 25.13 we added a new “Rank Manipulation” report category so you can let us know when you believe someone is boosting, hitchhiking, deranking, etc. All of your reports were instrumental in helping us gather a bunch of data to improve our detection, and as of patch 25.18 we’ve begun to take action to penalize these accounts and you’ll be informed when we act on your reports and get LP refunded.

Vanguard has also helped us make massive strides in detecting when accounts are shared, sold, or botted, which typically correlates to boosting or hitchhiking. Thanks to this, we’re making progress in improving our detection models which we’ll be rolling out in patch 25.18 to even further crack down and prevent this behavior from happening in your games.

One grey area worth clarifying: if you make alt accounts yourself, and for your use alone, you’ll be safe (as long as you don’t deliberately derank it). That said, we’re working on how to better place these accounts’ skill levels accurately to avoid having these sorts of accounts get into lower skilled players’ games.

We’ll keep working to prevent this sort of thing from happening, and if you see it happening in your games make sure to report them so we can keep your games fair.

Looking Forward

We know the above changes won’t cover all the ways smurfs can get into game, but by the end of the year, we’ll have more ways to address people that make alt accounts to avoid penalties (typically through burner accounts) and people that grief pros, content creators, and influencers.

Another longer-term project we’re working on that will also help reduce smurfing is True Skill 2 (TS2) with its increased MMR detection accuracy. We started testing it in North America in March in normal SR and ARAM. We then fixed some issues and expanded testing to all un-Ranked queues in Korea last month. We’re now seeing high skill players place in the correctly skilled games in around 5 games, which is about 3 times faster than our current system. We know League’s matchmaking is super important to you and it’s important to us that we meet those expectations, and we know we have more work to do to get there. We’ll keep you posted once we have any more updates on TS2.

Expect to hear more from us in the next Dev Update in October when we’ll be ready to roll out the above changes. And also let us know if there are any spaces you feel like we could improve or explore.

As always, thanks for playing, see you on the Rift, and keep those reports coming so we can keep everyone’s games fun and fair.

Hey gamers, the robot uprising has begun and they’re kicking things off by bringing back Doom Bots for patch 25.17! But this time it’s even… Doomier. They want a rematch and this time they’ve gotten stronger!

Doom Bots is a PvE gamemode pitting you and four other teammates against Veigar and his army of overpowered, busted-as-heck bots. Your goal is to survive against the bots for 15 minutes, then take on Veigar while protecting your Nexus!

When we rolled out our new bot tech last year a lot of you asked us what it would be like to play Doom Bots with these upgraded bots, and it got us thinking… So the revival of Doom Bots is thanks to you.

Without further ado, let’s get into what’s new.

Badder Bots, Doom-Boss Fights, New Curses… Oh My!

Of course the real stars of the show are the Doom Bots themselves! We’re always making investments into how we “make” League, and our upgrades last year to bots unlocked our ability to iterate quickly to find fun and interesting ideas. This meant we could add a new “Doom Bots” layer on top of them instead of building an entirely new one… And on this layer we put a bunch of silly nonsense and accidentally created a bot that was so evil he kept crashing our early playtests. Of course: Wukong, The Monkey King of Doom!

Wukong’s Q is larger and more powerful, hitting multiple enemies in a single strike. His E will create more clones based on its rank, and when he ults, there are even more clones! Start thinking about your wave clear options, because if he gets his combo off you’ll be looking at SEVEN spinning Wukongs powered by Veigar’s evil. And of course, he’s doing all this with buffed stats.

But honestly… we want some surprises when it comes to the bots. One more? Okay, okay… One for the long-suffering supports. Nami, the Tidecaller of Doom will be looking out for her fellow Doom Bots. Nami’s bubble splits in three when it lands, so practice dodging! Her E is now an AOE that will affect more allies per rank, and her ult… well, we think the name fits even better now.

All that’s to say… good luck!

We Took the Tiny Evil and Made It… Beeg

When we started work on resurrecting Doom Bots, one area where we felt there was big room for improvement was the boss. Teemo was spectacular, and we loved the tone he brought to the mode, but we felt we could do more than sending him back down mid lane to destroy your base. Literally he just walked. That was his mechanic.

Swarm taught us a TON about making bosses for League, so we really wanted to apply that knowledge here. As we explored options and ideas for improved mechanics, only one choice came anywhere close. Enter the evilest option that exists in our roster… Veigar!

With Veigar we had two main goals: make the first half matter, and involve the Doom Bots in the finale. On making the first half matter, after you’ve spent 15 minutes duking it out with the Bots, we don’t want you to just forget about them. So now when Veigar comes down, the bots will come after your remaining structures, then during the fight Veigar won’t attack your Nexus until all your inhibitors are destroyed. If you do well in the first half, you’ll gain an edge in the second!

For bringing the bots into the finale, while you’re working as a team to dodge into safe zones and stop Veigar, we thought it made sense to play into Veigar’s lore a little bit here. Because Veigar was captured and tortured by Mordekaiser, we thought it made sense to tie it together and, well, give Morde’s abilities to Veigar. So watch out, he might send one—or all of you—into the Death Realm to fight his Doom Bots!

Trials of Doom

Some of the feedback we received around Doom Bots way back in the day was that you wanted more difficulty, so we took this point into account and are introducing an entirely new feature called “Trials of Doom.” Each patch, there will be a unique Trial that’ll rotate until the last patch of Doom Bots’ run (where all three will be available). We don’t want to spoil all the Trials just yet, but here’s a preview of the first one.

The first Trial turns the difficulty up, but also gives all the Doom Bots Veigar’s passive, so with each successful spell hit, they gain Adaptive Force. Veigar’s Curses also won’t turn off like they normally do, so they’ll stack across the 15 minutes, turning the Rift into a real bullet hell.

We’ve given you some buffs to make it fair…ish, in this one everyone gets a huge amount of bonus item haste. Each Trial will also add a special Prismatic item to the shop. In the first Trial, try and outstack Veigar and his Doom Bots with your own Demon King’s Crown.

If you beat all three Trials, there’s a title in it for you. But be warned: Trials of Doom aren’t for the faint of heart. Get a team together, plan your strat, and try them out!

Missions and Curses

Curses are a core element of Doom Bots, and we didn’t want to change much here. We realized though that the best Curses are mean, even sometimes painful. But if there’s a way to use them against the Doom Bots—to escape certain death, or even turn the tables—Curses become a lot more fun to try and play around. So we added a few new Curses with that philosophy. So when you’re being polymorphed, or shrunk down to yordle size, think about how you could turn that into an advantage!

Aside from all of that we felt something was missing. Defending against the Doom Bots was fun, and so was dodging Curses, but we wanted something a bit different. We were looking for things to break up the defense—to give you all a bit of hope amid all the Doom!

We ended up creating Missions. Two moments in the game where Veigar sets a challenge for his opponents, offering a small amount of power if players can overcome the goal he’s set for them. Again, we drew from Swarm here, thinking about what had worked for Yuumi’s Quests, and then finding distinct Doom Bots versions.

You might be asked to out-damage the Doom Bots in a test of strength, or to take down a giant Ziggs before he destroys all your buildings. Do these things and you’ll take home a random Dragon Soul, and a nice chunk of gold to get you the items you’ll need to fight Veigar himself. But be warned: if you fail, Veigar will punish you, or reward his faithful Doom Bots!

Good Luck!

We had a ton of fun making Doom Bots again and we’re excited for you all to try it after all these years. A lot of us are really big fans of the original, so to see the passionate requests over the years for it to come back really fueled us to go beyond just “bringing it back.”

We hope you enjoy it and we’re looking forward to hearing what you think when it goes live in a few weeks! Thanks for reading our words!