The latest Heroes of the Storm patch is here, adding a new map to Ranked, giving multiple characters a nice little rebalance, making some quality-of-life changes. However, the wackiest thing to many onlookers is the fact the game's still being looked after at all.

Right up top on the patch notes, is the reveal that Haunted Mines is now part of Ranked play. A good one for anyone who enjoys all things spooky; the Grave Keeper is the announcer, which is always fun.

Lucio gets a new skin, called Ruby Chromestesia, and the music for the homescreen and startup has been updated. Then there's a slew of nerfs and buffs across the MOBA's roster.

Abathur's Locust Strain has had its health taken down from 350 down to 225, and the Locust's base damage has been reduced to 36 from 58. But on the flip side, Locusts now do a 100% bonus hit on non-Heroes, which will surely come in handy.

Further down the list, Diablo's Shadow Charge has been buffed to inflict 45 damage instead of 40, and their overpower is similarly powered up to do 80 instead of 73. These are just a few examples of what's a long list of changes from the team, and you'd think they'd give people pause, but the replies on Twitter are merely fascinated by the fact a new patch is out at all.

"Wasn't this game shut down?" one account asks. "When did this come back?" another says. "Not trying to be funny, but I honestly remember reading it was closed down," a third reply says.

What they're referring to, I imagine, is Blizzard deciding to stop making new additions to the MOBA back in 2022. However, support was always going to continue, and monthly updates have been happening ever since.

I'm not sure what it is about this one that's attracted all the attention, but if it encourages anyone to boot the game back up, then it's a good thing. Go give Haunted Mines a look, I bet it's fun!

Final Fantasy 14's Third Walk raid starts with FF11's most infamous boss being bodied in a cutscene because a raid designer wanted to show off the true strength of your first foe

Riot has finally unveiled League of Legends Classic, a return to what many seem to think was a kinder, more simple era of its world-spanning MOBA. Its announcement, with more details to come next month, has been met with curious optimism by much of the community, keen to see exactly which of LoL's many eras the Classic experience will attempt to recreate. But as someone who was there for most of those eras, I'm here to tell you this: you do not know what you are asking.

I started playing League of Legends at the end of Season 1, in the summer of 2011. Now, in my early 30s, that 15-year span means the part of my life that includes this game will soon be longer than the part of my life from which it was absent. And in that time, I've seen an awful lot that makes me keen to stay firmly in League of Legends' present rather than its past.

AP Master Yi. Garen with six Sunfire Capes. AP Sion with an on-click stun. The old Runes system. The old Summoner's Rift. Taric with an on-click stun. Old Urgot. Old Skarner. Old Ryze. The other old Ryze. Old Jungle. Old Dragon. AP Tristana. Launch Syndra. Launch Darius. Launch Zyra. Dodge chance (that you could pay to increase). AP Warwick. Gold generation attached to in-game items (but that you could also pay to increase). Lane assignments decided by who could shout the loudest in champ select. Dozens more design choices and misadventures lost to history but that certainly didn't make for a better game experience. Old League was a Wild West that was pulled into shape one frontier at a time.

Clearly, this era of League wasn't a complete disaster. The core experience was still good enough to turn it into one of the biggest games in the world, with an enormous esports scene and millions of monthly players, and it does still hold advantages over some aspects of the modern game. The item and rune systems, which have chased optimization in recent years, used to focus more on unique strategy than the current push for statistical dominance allows. A smaller roster allowed new characters to hold court; at 173 champions, the roster is now so stacked that the only way a new arrival can feel unique is to have ability tooltips that stretch into multiple paragraphs of explainer text.

In this older era, there were more ways to bend League of Legends to your will. A huge part of its early charm was that Wild West feel, which for my friends led to ridiculous strategies that we gave even more ridiculous names; 'Vastly Enhanced' used the lane-pushing power of Banner of Command and ZZ'Rot Portal in tandem to out-macro enemy teams; 'Heimer's Hairy Heroes' focused on pillaging the enemy jungle with a squad of animal characters all attempting to keep a solo Heimerdinger safe in the botlane. Elsewhere, the influencer scene was full of innovators pushing silly ideas because the game let them in a way it no longer does.

Modern League is not without its problems. Power and complexity creep run rampant, monetization has been pushed further and further, individual expression has been squashed. But for those faults, League of Legends is undeniably a better game than it used to be. Champions might be more complex, but they look and play better, with far more opportunity for counterplay than the age of on-click stuns and three-hit passives ever allowed. The entire game looks better, with the modern Summoner's Rift such a dramatic improvement over the original that I can scarcely believe what I used to play on. Arena and ARAM have been established as excellent additions that go a long way towards replacing the creativity stripped from the core experience. Onboarding still has a long way to go, but it's far better than it used to be, with gradual QoL improvements that help newcomers but don't hinder veterans. And that's to say nothing of a wider ecosystem that has been hugely improved by the arrival of adjacent experiences like Arcane and TFT.

Balance is better, game design more confident, player experience improved at almost every level. Riot's even worked hard to bring League of Legends' notoriously toxic community into line, and the amount of genuinely bad behavior I now see is vanishingly rare. Modern League is better than League Classic is likely to be at almost every turn. But the real issue that this vision of the past faces isn't even in the quality of the game – it's in the attitude of its players and the reality of the experience they're searching for.

An obvious comparison to League Classic is WoW Classic. Blizzard rewound the clock on World of Warcraft, and in doing so returned players to a version of the game's world that was otherwise lost to time. Both Azeroth's narrative and geography, and the promise the launch version offered of a new kind of MMO experience were things that could be recaptured and re-experienced. League of Legends is not that kind of game. Endlessly repeating, and driven in part by player skill but more importantly by an extraordinary amount of player data, it's shaped by overlays and stat websites that have optimized the games and its players in a way that I don't think League Classic can shake.

Nostalgia is a powerful draw. But when you discover that your favorite old champion is just a badly-designed version of their current form, and you're up against an AP Master Yi enhanced by modern players' ability and game knowledge, all while your teammates grief each other over who got dibs on playing midlane, you might find that this isn't quite the same kind of Classic experience that's breathed new life into other games.

One former World of Warcraft veteran has officially joined Riot Games on its long-awaited League of Legends MMO, which is clearly still trucking on in the background.

Brian Holinka took to Twitter yesterday with the news, announcing: "First official day at Riot Games working on the League of Legends MMO!" Per his LinkedIn page, he's now the MMO's principal game designer.

It's definitely safe to say that Holinka is experienced when it comes to MMOs. He spent almost 11 full years at Blizzard before leaving in 2023, in which time he served as World of Warcraft's lead PvP designer, before going on to become the lead combat designer, leading the "team responsible for all combat-related systems for World of Warcraft, including class design and player versus player content," as described on his LinkedIn.

After that, he joined Fantastic Pixel Castle as gameplay design director – a studio led by former League of Legends MMO lead Greg Street, who was making a whole new MMO codenamed Ghost. Sadly, however, the studio was shut down last year after parting ways with NetEase Games, and while Street noted at the time that "there is still a chance we can secure funding after that date," ultimately, "it will depend on how much of the team remains."

Now, though, Holinka has taken his talents to Riot. We still know incredibly little about the League of Legends MMO, which was announced back in 2020. With that said, only a couple of months ago, Riot co-founder Marc Merrill stated that the studio is "more committed to" the idea of making a great MMO "than ever" before, and bringing in new folks like Holinka certainly suggests that effort is being made.

Holinka isn't the only WoW veteran to join the team, either. Former World of Warcraft lead producer Raymond Bartos announced that he'd joined Riot's project at the start of the year as senior game producer, and in doing so, he reunited with Orlando Salvatore – once a lead software engineer at Blizzard, and now senior engineering manager on the LoL MMO. Needless to say, there's a strong team behind the upcoming game – let's just hope it won't be that much longer before we can actually see it in action.

For now, you can check out our list of the best MMOs to play today.

It looks like Riot might be adding public voice chat to League of Legends, and as a recovering jungler, I'd like to say publicly that I think that's a very bad idea.

I quit playing League of Legends years ago for my mental health. In my many years playing League of Legends and Dota 2, I've found MOBAs to be particularly toxic among online multiplayer games, and League to be especially toxic among MOBAs. I primarily jungled, but I also hopped between roles depending on team needs, and it seemed like no matter how well I was doing, the shit talking was out of control.

I remember seeing some of the most vile, unrestrained vitriol being spewed to and from all directions seemingly regardless of my team's progress, and junglers always got it the worst. They're the easiest and first to blame when things start going sideways in lanes.

I genuinely shudder to imagine what playing a game of League with public voice chat switched on would be like, but I bet it would be 45 minutes of increasingly frequent slurs being shouted directly into your ear drums by four middle-aged white men simultaneously. Basically, what I imagine the ninth circle of hell being like, minus the literal fire.

But it seems this may soon be a reality, as files have been unearthed on the public build environment (PBE) by SkinSpotlights on Twitter. These files seem to reference a reporting system that includes an option for "VOICE COMMS ABUSE", which I'm sure would be 100% effective, alongside apparent toggles for party and team-based voice chat.

League players have been able to use voice chat in parties for a while now, but if the above files indicate full-on public voice chat is coming, you'd be able to talk to, shout at, and be shouted at, by complete randoms should you have the misfortunate of having that option toggled on. Thankfully, it would almost certainly be an option you could turn on and off, but still, I can't imagine that would do anything but stoke the flames of an already dangerously toxic environment.

I honestly don't see a reason, or even much of a demand, for this sort of thing to be added to a game like League, but until it's confirmed to be true, I suppose there's no use getting all worked up ahead of time. I just worry about my fellow junglers, probably still taking mountains of shit from teammates who can't hold their lanes all these years later.

If you are going to play one, here are the best MOBAs in 2026.

Like the rest of the world, after Highguard was announced at The Game Awards last year I still barely knew what it was other than some sort of free-to-play, live service shooter, and I've not exactly been hurting for choice when it comes to those. Only after release, when Guides Editor Will Sawyer posted that it reminded him of Ratchet & Clank 3's underrated multiplayer mode did I finally lean forward, ready to hit the big 'download' button.

Like a lot of plays for the live service crown in recent years, Highguard is a blend of a frankly unreasonable number of genres. A little bit hero shooter, a little bit MOBA, an element of Counter-Strike with its match-winning bomb placing and defusing. Reinforcing and smashing walls even reminds me of Fortnite (though, thankfully, there's no free build). Even the sci-fi aesthetic is an odd mix, the sight of robed heroes on horses wielding assault rifles commonplace. It can make the initial hour spent in Highguard a bit overwhelming to be honest, despite a solid and brief tutorial.

When the go low, we go high (guard)

At the very least, the core goals of a Highguard match remain relatively simple: possess the Shieldbreaker, and raid the enemy base. Two teams of three begin on either end of a pretty large map in their base, and you need to battle towards and destroy the enemy base. To do this, each play has a Shieldbreaker spawn somewhere in the middle of the map, which needs to be escorted to the enemy base in order to blast a hole in their domed force field, within which bombs are placed across one of three points and potentially defused – League of Legends by way of Counter-Strike. Deplete the base's health enough and the match can end right there, or play is reset with loot and base damage carried over, and the rarity of goodies to find heightened.

Because yes, there's loot, too. Spread around the map are huge crystals that can be mined for resources and traded in at a few trader spots. Additionally, Apex Legends-style chests can be found containing weapons across a spectrum of rarity colors – plus saddles, amulets, helmets, and, of course, armor (which you need a few stacks of, as they shatter on death as you wait for respawn).

Which means each Highguard match is broken down into fairly distinct, fairly snappy phases. On paper, they all seem like they should work. You spend a bit of time focusing on getting better gear while staying ahead of the enemy squad. You fight over trying to score a Shieldbreaker touchdown on either side of the map. Then, you either attack or defend as a result of how the phases before went.

But Highguard is both too big and too small. The maps are so large that conflict is rare until you get that final phase. With so few enemy players, getting the Shieldbreaker to the enemy base can be extremely quick if the opposing team isn't super on it. On the flipside, when you do get a good push-and-pull going in this phase, battling it out as the Shieldbreaker is dropped and picked back up, Highguard will decide it's gone on for too long, and will skip straight to a siege, teleporting players across the map after a certain amount of lives are lost. It can feel jarring, and make the battle beforehand feel a bit arbitrary and pointless rather than clutch.

It's in the sieges themselves that Highguard feels best to me, cutting straight to the meat of what its firefights are about, forcing players into conflict in a much tighter space with clearer, closer objectives. With multiple generators to bomb (and a limited amount of lives used for attacking), there can be a real cat-and-mouse element. You'll maybe push towards one objective then switch to another to bamboozle defenders, chipping away at generator health over time as you and your team dynamically set up defensive points, decide to where to push, or fallback to regroup across each dense base (the design of which players decide at the start of a match).

Double your fun

It's in these moments I'm reminded of some of my favorite maps in my favorite shooters – particularly the iconic 2Fort from Team Fortress 2. After all, in that map, it's all in the name: two forts directly facing one another with a small no man's land multiple routes through it to infiltrate the opposing space. But, unlike Highguard, what sets the legendary 2Fort apart is how small and immediate it is by design – it's the complete opposite.

While in its best moments, Highguard evokes the 2Fort energy, by trying to go too large it loses the essence of what made the push-and-pull on that map so great, diluting it into phased either/or exchanges that take too long to actually occur, with a build-up that feels too inconsequential. Sure, maybe I'm reaching a bit too hard for my 2Fort beloved, a ghost of my past, but it's the closest I've felt to reliving battles on that Team Fortress 2 map in years.

Highguard's attack and defense base-sieging loop is essentially this same concept, similar to the likes of Counter-Strike, but spread out over a massive map, with too many phases that the game design itself doesn't seem particularly enthused about. I know to chase higher loot colors between skirmishes but I never really get a sense of escalating gear. After all, each Warden's Overwatch-champion-like mix of special attacks and ultimates remains static – no leveling up there.

After a few matches, I'm left a bit confused by Highguard's priorities, but confident in where it excels. It's all about the shieldbreaker sieges, where the overly large, all-too-empty scale of Highguard is pared down for a climax of action – but it's a battle to get there.

This nautical take on the boomer shooter is filled with 90s cartoon absurdity, and it's already one of my favorite games of the year after only playing an hour

Valve's Frankensteined MOBA shooter, Deadlock, just got maybe its biggest update so far.

The hero shooter hybrid has been in beta over on Steam for well over a year, but the developer is still steadily improving on all parts of the game, most recently with yesterday's 'Old Gods, New Blood' update that debuted six new heroes coming over the course of the next three weeks and much, much more.

Starting with the new playable characters – they're the highlight of every MOBA, no? – Valve has released key art revealing the werewolf-ish Silver, necromancer Graves, unicorn-horned performer Celeste, arms expert Venator, sword-wielding Apollo, and one creature I'm absolutely obsessed with, Rem, who's a mix between a rat and what looks like a lemur. Either way, just look at his teeny, tiny pyjamas.

Valve says that two new heroes will drop into the game every week, one on Mondays and one on Thursdays, starting January 26. Players' votes will determine who gets in first and you can earn more votes by simply playing, per the update's announcement page.

The other headlining feature of Old Gods, New Blood is a new self-proclaimed "fast-paced game mode" called Street Brawl, which is a quicker four-vs-four and best-of-five-rounds match where players shop from a more streamlined, random set of items between each round.

Valve's long list of changes is scarily extensive, though. So extensive they can't be contained in the confines of a GamesRadar+ post, so I'll quickly run through the biggest now, ready? New bosses, new troopers, new bases, and new items. Revamped postgame summaries and MVP scoring. Various UI improvements, such as visibility outlines, new damage numbers, visible kill streaks, and a random hero button. Several new options in the settings menu. Map updates with new underground tunnels for smaller characters like Rem, and so much more.

Former FPS pro Shroud says Valve's Deadlock is already "one of the best games ever made" and it's "just a matter of time" until people realize

Many League of Legends players around the world found themselves unshackled from Riot's hit MOBA recently when it became apparent they couldn't log in. Alas, the reprieve was temporary, and it turns out the reason for the outage stemmed from a classic accounting issue.

On Sunday, January 4, fans of the longstanding multiplayer game were left without access for a period of time. Servers around the world appeared to be down, prompting all sorts of speculation about what could be going on at Riot Games for something as big as League of Legends to suddenly go out like this.

Was it a holiday blunder? Sudden server demand? A DDOS attack? None of the above, it seems. The issue appears to have been caused by an overdue renewal, according to information uncovered through access to League's client information.

Riot Games let the SSL certificate lapse. SSL stands for 'Secure Sockets Layer' and the certificate essentially makes sure everything is appropriately protected in whatever you're accessing. If a site or game or anything else doesn't have this, it becomes functionally inaccessible as a way of protecting users.

Players used a roundabout method of getting into the game by resetting their clock, but that was just a temporary fix. You can find basic information on these certs relatively easily, just like people have done for League, uncovering that on January 7, 2016, Riot updated the SSL certificate through to January 4, 2026. Oh, how far away that must've seemed, and yet it arrived awfully quick.

I like to imagine there was an internal task and Google Calendar event set up to remind someone of this, but either they don't work there any more or the people who were pinged were on vacation. Either way, nothing happened until it was slightly too late. Now it's been renewed for 100 years.

Riot Games has yet to comment beyond a tweet from the League of Legends account confirming the outage. I'll see you back here in 2125 to check if Riot manages to remember to update the paperwork again. I bet the reminder is company-wide this time, too.

League of Legends is getting a new client, "entirely new visuals," and "a bit of new gameplay" in a massive 2027 update reportedly codenamed League Next.

Riot Games is gearing up for a massive League of Legends overhaul that'll revamp Summoner's Rift with "entirely new visuals," integrate a new client into the game itself so it doesn't open from a separate launcher, add new gameplay elements, and improve the new player experience.

"We're often asked if we're gonna make League of Legends 2 some day, and the answer to that has been and remains, no," says League executive producer Paul Bellezza in a video update confirming a Bloomberg report that was published shortly beforehand. "We've always been committed to constantly improving and updating League, from new game modes and champion updates, to balancing the game every other week, and so on."

There are, however, some "bigger updates" coming to League in 2027 that the developers aren't ready to fully reveal, but Bellezza and studio head Andrei van Roon go over the broad strokes in the below video.

"The majority of the League team" is now working on a "larger bundle of changes" coming to League in 2027, including a full overhaul of the map, "a bit of new gameplay," a brand new around-game client "that's fully integrated with the in-game experience rather than being a separate application, like today." There are also "some changes to runes and how you make some free game choices," and finally, Riot is "overhauling the new player experience, so that once we're done, it should be the best time ever to get your friends into League."

Van Roon admits there's "a bit more" to the big update than is being shared, and Bloomberg reports it's the game's biggest update in its 16-year history. It will reportedly also include reworked character models and UI and make backend improvements to make it easier to release updates, but those details have yet to be confirmed.

If you want to know where we ranked League of Legends on our list of the best MOBAs to play in 2025, you know where to click.

Well folks, it's been a long, long time without League of Legends' Winter map - specifically, the last time Summoner's Rift had its holiday duds on was 2018 - but it's finally coming back for 2025.

In a silly little reveal video, League executive producer Paul Bellezza teases out the big announcement while making a snow angel. He addresses the fact that it's been a long time since the last Snowdown event and attributed the long wait to tech issues, saying "our tech and tools need some work."

Then he goes on about how it's only Winter (technically fall right now) in the Northern hemisphere of the planet, whereas the Southern hemisphere is still soaking up the sun in Summer. And finally, he says, "Because you really asked for it, we're just gonna do it anyway. Winter map is coming back, everyone."

The details aren't entirely clear quite yet, but we know that the festive version of Summoner's Rift is coming in the 25.23 patch, which is scheduled to go live on November 19. In previous years, there would be all sorts of holiday-themed skins, limited-time events, and seasonal rewards in addition to the Winter map. In the video above, you can see the map will be decked out in the usual holiday trappings. You know, lights, snowmen, wrapped presents, candy canes, snow globes, three headed monsters, the usual.

If you want to know where we ranked League of Legends on our list of the best MOBAs to play in 2025, you know where to click.

Valve founder and boat-loving billionaire Gabe Newell might get flamed in Dota 2, but he reckons that's just the "enthusiasm" of those angry gamers coming through, so he still loves the game and its community, and somehow has the stamina to play it "every day."

Newell released a short message to kick off The International 2025, the MOBA's latest massive Dota 2 tournament. You can scrub back to the snippet in this English live stream, a bit over an hour in, if you want to watch it for yourself.

"Hi, I'm Gabe Newell," he begins. "14 years ago, we held the first International in Cologne, Germany. For me, that first International was awesome. It was awesome to see the skill of the players and the enthusiasm of the community. Before that first International, I really enjoyed the game. But after The International, I loved the game.

"It's not just the game I love, but the community," he continues. "Sure, people talk shit at me in chat, and about once a week people say, hey noob, uninstall the game and [censor blip]. But that's really about their enthusiasm, and the energy that they bring, and that's why, after all these years, I still play Dota every day. Now we're back in Germany once more to cheer and celebrate again. [In German] Oh man, this is going to be so much fun.

"To all the Dota fans who've been with us from day one, to those of you who've joined us along the way, and to any of you who are tuning in for the first time, welcome to The International."

Newell might be funneling a $9.5 billion fortune into boats larger than my house, and his daily routine might sound like something a content creator would invent to parody the rich, but there are a few great equalizers in this world. I get flamed in online games, so do you, and so does Gabe Newell. Personally, when I'm 62 years old, I hope to still have the dexterity and mental fortitude necessary to play a MOBA, but I hope to very much not be playing a MOBA.

Valve just gave Steam a much-needed glow-up, with a client update finally adding users' long-requested features like UI scaling and more: "Thank you, Lord Gaben."

Nearly a month after Deadlock developer Valve stated that another patch wouldn't be coming to its MOBA shooter "for some time" following fans' requests, six new heroes and more have been unveiled as part of a new update.

Valve reveals as much in a recent post on Steam, detailing the Deadlock update and what it brings to the limited-access game. "Six new heroes have been spotted on the streets of the Cursed Apple: Mina the vampire, Billy the demonic goat, Paige who can bring books to life, The Doorman who's always at your service, Victor the monster who can't be stopped, and Drifter who terrorizes the city," reads the dev's announcement.

Players with access to Deadlock won't be able to use all six heroes immediately, however. "Rather than enabling all these new heroes at once, we're trying a new approach where we'll be staggering their release, unlocking one every other day, with the first starting today. From there, you'll help decide which hero unlocks next by casting votes in the new pre-game lobby called 'The Hideout.'" This "Hideout" replaces Deadlock's starting zone.

"The Hideout replaces the existing Dashboard UI and is your personal area to play around in while waiting for a match," as Valve describes. "You can invite friends to your hideout, or join them in theirs. We hope it will be a fun place to spend time as well as provide future opportunities for personalization, achievements, and events."

The six characters and Hideout feature aren't the only changes coming to Deadlock, either. The game's map is also being revamped, with "various visual improvements and lighting changes" – and that's not all. Valve has "a lot more map improvements planned in upcoming updates" for the map, too.

Joining the patch is a visual overhaul to the hero selection screen, with new artistic updates to the characters themselves to boot. As for the new heroes, the first to drop is Mina, the vampire – a so-called "glass canon" with quick ranged attacks.

After Mina, the other new Deadlock heroes will be released on a strict schedule. A character is set to join the cast every two days – "on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday both this week and next" – with "balance adjustments" coming after.

Here are some of the other most exciting new games this year and beyond to keep an eye on.

League of Legends is far from immune from skin-based fan service, but things might have taken a step up after the concept of 'gooning' was discussed at a recent leadership conference.

During a recent stream, Steven 'Mortdog' Mortimer, gameplay director on strategy spin-off Teamfight Tactics, revealed a snippet from a recent leadership event he'd attended. "I shouldn't tell you this," he admitted, "but I'm going to tell you this and if Riot gets mad at me for it, that's fine."

"At the leadership thing I was at," he continues, "- and I'm not kidding - at one point on stage they were talking about how they didn't know what the word 'goon' meant, and then they started talking about what 'gooning' meant."

If you, like the sadly-unnamed figures on stage at Mortdog's leadership event, believe that a 'goon' still means a surly Batman villain or that a 'gooner' is a fanatical follower of Arsenal football club, then it's safe to say that the internet has moved on without you.

In recent years, the term has come to refer to a particularly intensive approach to self-pleasure, but can also be diluted to a sense of general horniness that's often used to describe particularly scantily clad fictional characters.

League of Legends has a dubiously large roster of attractive female characters, and it's no stranger to the occasional horny cosmetic (unlike Marvel Rivals, apparently). Many years ago, it put otherwise stalwart warrior Riven in a Playboy bunny costume (a move it's since attempted to retcon), but even new champion Yunara, who only arrived in-game last month, set hearts aflutter with her hot springs-themed launch skin.

Unfortunately, Mortdog doesn't provide enough background about exactly who was up on stage to provide a full picture. In all likelihood, we're talking about someone from an internal Riot HR team, or even an outside consultant, but I do think it would be extremely funny if this were the conversational topic of Riot's CEO or one of its co-founders. Either way, apparently "the context was fine, and it was funny," but Mortdog does admit that "out of context, it was hilarious."

"We will for sure lose money": League of Legends developer is finally cracking down on account boosting after 15 years, even at the cost of the game's revenue - but perhaps that long-awaited Ahri skin will plug the gap.

League of Legends developer Riot Games expects to lose money over its decision to crack down on one of the game's most enduring community issues.

Earlier this week, Riot announced plans to tackle 'smurfing' - a practice in which experienced players create new accounts with the specific goal of curbstomping less skilled players. It's been an issue for as long as I've been playing LoL - around 15 years - and it's so ingrained in the ecosystem that many players thought Riot would never truly combat it.

That changed this week, when Riot confirmed it would be taking action against players it described as 'boosters' and 'hitchhikers'. The former are players who play on someone else's account to get it to a higher rank, and the latter are those who play alongside a player of a vastly different skill for the same aim.

It's an action that's long overdue, but also proving a little unpopular with those sections of the community that haven't always been playing fair. That's brought Riot's director of product management, Drew Levin, out swinging on Twitter. When asked by one account booster what he should do for money after the changes took effect, Levin simply replied with the McDonalds career page.

He's also, however, been very open about what this decision means for Riot's bottom line. Responding to the suggestion that alt accounts are a major part of the game's economy, he said that "we will for sure lose money and monthly actives from the choice to crack down on smurfing."

"For years, players said we would never do this because we’re too afraid to do the right thing for the game if it loses money. We believe in the game's future."

For years, those players have been proved right - League of Legends is on the approach towards its 20th anniversary, and it's wild that Riot has only just taken action over one of the game's biggest, most persistent issues. But at a time in any game's lifespan where revenue is no longer the guarantee that it was at its heyday, it's almost refreshing to see a senior development admitting that a change is being made for the game's health, rather than the health of its bottom line.

That said, Riot did recently sign a big sports gambling deal - that cash has to come from somewhere, I guess.

League of Legends developer Riot Games appears to have pulled an AI-generated anniversary video offline after backlash from fans.

The video, which was created to celebrate mobile port Wild Rift's third anniversary in China, was shared on social media last night. Featuring a mish-mash of mascot-tier champions - Jinx from Arcane, as well as Yasuo, Ezreal, K/DA's Seraphine, and recent arrival Aurora - the trailer sees the group take on a handful of shadowy monsters before taking to an arena stage.

Putting aside the fact that the trailer makes little sense - League of Legends already has several in-universe music groups, and the combat abilities its characters use seem to have little relevance to their in-game skills - it's also pretty ugly. Much of its runtime is given over to generic crowd shots, but the few close-ups of its champions are off-puttingly shiny, settling firmly in the uncanny valley.

The backlash from the community appears to have been swift, as the video has since been pulled from Weibo, where it was originally posted. The original post on Twitter described it as "diabolical," acknowledging not only how weird its characters seem, but also that "this is a slap in the face for every artist who has worked to bring the world of Runeterra to life through their art for the past 15 years."

Elsewhere, players asked how a video that looked so bad could make it through Riot's internal approval processes, or simply expressed their disbelief at its very existence. One genre of responses, however, cut to a problem that has plagued Riot for much of this year, asking "how can I even expect 'champion/skin quality' when the company just allows this?"

In the wake of massive backlash to changes to its free reward system at the start of the year, Riot has struggled with the response to some of its more expensive cosmetics in recent years. Players have proved deeply sceptical of both the spiralling prices of these add-ons, as well as their quality, noting in a few cases that animations and particle effects have been borrowed from other skins, even for some of Riot's most expensive offerings.

Elsewhere, the company has struggled to maintain interest in an esports scene that is really beginning to buckle in the West. 2025 has also been the year that Riot cancelled Hytale - the long-awaited Minecraft-style survival game that it was fulfilling publishing duties for. And that all comes off the back of multiple rounds of layoffs in 2024.

While League of Legends seems to be doing fine in general, the ecosystem around it does seem to be forcing Riot to look for easier wins that will generate more revenue from its biggest spenders. Perhaps this video was an attempt at that, but it's one that appears to have almost immediately backfired.

The League of Legends MMO gets its yearly mention, as Riot's co-founder offers another tiny hint as to its continued existence.

Deadlock players have been anticipating a patch sometime soon, but their hopes have been dashed by a developer message.

Valve's 'highly secretive' MOBA, Deadlock, has been going strong for over a year now. The devs have previously confirmed that updates will be spaced out in favour of bigger patches in the past, and for whatever reason, everyone had this week in mind. Looking over the Deadlock Subreddit, you'll see posts from users talking about how "the patch comes out tomorrow" and asking what they want to see in this week's patch.

However, in the official Deadlock Discord server (which was reposted to Reddit), a Valve developer known as "Yoshi" posted the message, which reads, "We are seeing the community get really hyped up for an imminent update, but we wanted to let you know the update won't be coming for some time still."

Yoshi adds, "The entire team is focused on the update, it has a lot of new content and we are very excited to get it out but it isn't ready yet. We know this will be disappointing news to some, we'll let you know when it's very close and are able to predict the date." So, it's probably best not to expect a surprise update to drop, as the fanbase was earlier this week.

However, Yoshi did promise some balance updates are coming to the game in "a few days" and hinted to a user in the Discord about who will be nerfed, "Starts with S ends in V and is 4 letters," so there is some good news in the fact Shiv is being nerfed soon.

Deadlock streamer accidentally unveils 10 new heroes on the way to Valve's MOBA, as well as updated character designs for multiple existing favorites.

Earlier this year, League of Legends developer Riot unveiled its latest minigame, a Balatro-style homage called The Demon's Hand, as part of a character update. I enjoyed it at the time, but bemoaned the fact that despite how accurate it felt, it would inevitably be consigned to the ether when Riot moved on, rendering it unplayable after just a few weeks in the client. But all of a sudden, it's back from the dead, along with several other similar projects.

Early this morning, League of Legends wiki stalwart Spideraxe said the community-run site was now able to house motion comics and minigames, meaning that players could now "experience them all indefinitely." The Demon's Hand was part of that initial rollout, along with Jinx Fixes Everything, which was added to the client late last year as part of Riot's in-game celebrations around Arcane Season 2.

Spideraxe said that some more recent projects, including the Battle of Koeshin event, are also on their way to the wiki. Whether older games will ever be included isn't totally clear just yet - asked about a visual novel from 2022, Spideraxe said, "We're going to see what we can do there for older metagames; they need a bit more work since they were made with different tech."

The good news there is that while those projects "might need some Riot help" to get running on the wiki, that help seems likely to be forthcoming. Spideraxe mentioned that Brian Cearns, Riot's director of content strategy, had previously offered support for this preservation project, suggesting that while things might be a bit janky (and "pretty memory intensive"), there's a good chance they'll work eventually.

Quite how far back the wiki will eventually go remains to be seen. But my personal highlight would be 2013's one-day-only April Fool's Day offering, Cho'gath Eats the World. Loosely styled on the Rampage game series, it's not been seen in more than a decade. Whether anyone can even find the code seems unlikely, but perhaps one day it'll find its way back to the land of the living.

At this rate, the only way I might ever get to play the LoL MMO is in the wiki.

League of Legends and Valorant developer Riot Games is reversing its longstanding rules on gambling sponsorships for its esports leagues, seemingly in a thinly veiled justification to bring in that sweet, sweet betting revenue.

Yesterday, an announcement from John Needham, esports lead across Riot's entire competitive portfolio, made Riot's position clear: "We're opening betting sponsorships in esports."

Sponsorships will be available for top-tier League of Legends and Valorant teams throughout the Americas and EMEA. Apparently, it's something that Riot's competitive partners have been asking for "for years," but the dev has resisted until now.

Needham goes on to explain why Riot has changed its mind. The really important bit, however, is this: the global betting market for League of Legends and Valorant in 2024 was $10.7 billion, but Riot isn't really getting any of it. Needham does note that the majority of all sports betting is unlicensed, but that doesn't really change the fact that Riot clearly has its eye on a pretty large bag of money.

The good news is that while Riot might be getting into bed with the gambling industry, which is becoming ever more prevalent in pretty much every major sporting competition in a way that's pretty sinister at best, it's doing so "responsibly."

Needham has a whole list of terms covering everything from the esports viewing experience to competitive integrity to vetting partners, all attempts to polish the hefty turd that Riot has just placed in front of its audience.

The response from the game's community has been swift and pretty unified. There are multiple reasons why players don't really want gambling in their League of Legends or Valorant events, ranging from sports betting's pervasiveness in traditional sports, concerns around the gambling addiction (and how little Riot seems to be addressing that aspect of this partnership in favor of focusing on the integrity of the competitions themselves), and the fact that the company doesn't exactly have the best track record with gambling.

Not only has Riot done very little to ever properly address the $10 billion market it says has been swirling around its games for years, it's also got its own murky past with gacha-based systems.

The past few years have seen an array of cosmetics make it into its games that can generally only be accessed by brute-forcing a significant amount of money through a luck-based system. Granted, you'd get a reward if you persevered beyond a certain threshold, but it's an issue that Riot has wrestled with its community over several times in recent years.

Honestly, as a player over the past few years, it's been a whole thing, but it's well summarized by one of the responses to Needham's esports betting post over on the game's official subreddit: "Riot hasn't handled gambling responsibly for nearly a decade now."

Last year, League of Legends players protested a $500 skin with a forced boycott, perma-banning Ahri to stop anyone using her new cosmetic.

League of Legends' hall of fame is getting its second-ever inductee - which presumably means that Riot is working out how to avoid repeating the controversy around last year's celebratory cosmetics.

After the talismanic Faker became the first arrival in the game's 'Hall of Legends' last year, Jian Zihao - better known as bot-laner Uzi - is following in his footsteps as the 2025 inductee. A giant of the domestic scene, Uzi's run of success in the hyper-competitive Chinese league was enormous, and while he may never have claimed the game's top prize, he's got several international tournament wins under his belt.

Uzi's presence within the game's community is such that the community assumed he'd be second behind Faker to arrive in the Hall of Fame. Now that that's proved to be correct, he'll be getting some rewards. Perhaps most impressive is the custom Mercedes Benz G-Class he's being gifted, but perhaps more important is the custom in-game cosmetic that will be created in his honor.

An entire in-game event was conjured to mark Faker's induction last year, and Riot is repeating that this year. In 2024, however, Faker's achievement was a little overshadowed by the fact that the full version of his honorific cosmetic cost around $450 worth of in-game currency. As Riot continues to grapple with the different expectations around in-game spending between its Eastern and Western communities, that particular announcement saw players discuss boycotts in protest over Faker's Ahri skin.

We don't yet know for sure which champions will be linked to Uzi's ascension to the Hall of Legends, but leaks suggest that they'll include Vayne - a character who Uzi personified in the trailer for the 2018 World Championship - and Kai'sa, a more recent arrival to the game who's likely to be helpful when it comes to selling skins.

We also don't know whether Riot is planning to roll out that controversial pricing again, but it's likely to find itself in a tricky spot. The past few years have seen an array of alternative monetization options, many of which have proved unpopular in some spaces but have provided new revenue streams from those willing to pay.

Riot's latest controversy saw it eventually walk back deeply unpopular changes to free loot, after claiming that it needed to encourage players to buy more if it was to continue to grow.

A whole bunch of new Deadlock heroes appear to have been inadvertently leaked by a streamer, giving us a first glimpse of 10 characters on their way to Valve's MOBA.

Highlighted on the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit, Deadlock streamer Deathy allegedly went live yesterday and accidentally displayed a greatly expanded MOBA roster than the one that's currently available to everyone else. Apparently, the streamer has since deleted the VOD after ending and restarting the stream, but viewers were still able to capture a screenshot from the moment it happened.

To be exact, 10 new heroes could be spotted on Deathy's screen: Boho, Bookworm, Doorman, Drifter, Frank, Priest, Punkgoat, Skyrunner, Swan, and Vampirebat. These all appear to be exclusive to the Hero Labs mode right now, which allows you to test heroes who are in early development. As it stands, for most players, there are only four Hero Lab characters at the moment – Fathom, Raven, Trapper, and Wrecker.

Deathy's roster also showed a few visual changes to certain existing heroes. Specifically, Abrams, Pocket, McGinnis, Dynamo, Ivy, Wraith, and Lady Geist all have updated character portraits, showing certain changes to their designs. McGinnis, for example, now has a red headband, and Ivy has a brown hat instead of a blue one.

Bizarrely, the new Skyrunner character also has the exact same portrait as Lash, so it's not clear what's going on there, but it seems like that's probably either a mistake or a placeholder.

Right now, Deadlock is only available to play via an invite-only alpha, but players who get access have been able to share the love and invite their Steam friends to play, too, making the MOBA relatively easy to get access to. That's perfectly illustrated by its whopping concurrent player peak of 171,490 last September (thanks, SteamDB).

However, the implication of Deathy's recent stream is that there's some kind of separate playtest to the one that everyone else can access, which a smaller amount of players have got access to.

It's not clear when Valve was planning on officially revealing these characters publicly, and whether plans will change now that they've been unveiled. Clearly though, there's a lot of stuff in development behind the scenes, which should hopefully be telling of some exciting times to come.

For more games like Deadlock, be sure to check out our picks for the best MOBA games you can play now.

Last week, League of Legends shadow-dropped The Demon's Hand, an in-universe twist on poker-roguelike phenomenon Balatro. Interwoven with a few touches of narrative that build on the tentative threads spun out from Arcane season 2, The Demon's Hand is a very good homage. But it's also indicative of the broader problem that Riot faces as its flagship game continues to age out of its heyday.

If you've played Balatro, The Demon's Hand will be instantly familiar. A standard deck of cards is adapted very slightly ('Command' cards replace Face cards; Sun, Moon, and Stars replace traditional suits), but different hands still add up in an attempt to beat various high scores. Riot's effort adds a more combative approach, turning 'blinds' into HP and allowing your opponents to hit back, blending Balatro's score attack gameplay with Slay the Spire's turn-based approach.

It's an effective twist, even if The Demon's Hand doesn't really offer the same deckbuilding depth as the games that have clearly shaped it. Given that it's an in-client, limited-time spin-off, I'm willing to wave away that criticism. But ironically, it's those same factors that give me cause for concern.

High Card

The Demon's Hand represents a substantial amount of work. Operating in-client, getting it working within Riot's aging infrastructure has clearly been a significant undertaking. Unique assets and animations have clearly taken plenty of time and effort to create. The ability to unpick and reinvent Balatro as effectively as this is impressive work in itself. And yet in a little over a month, The Demon's Hand will be wiped from the client, and we'll probably never see it again.

Riot's got form with this kind of thing. Over the years, myriad mini-games have appeared and then disappeared from League of Legends. Some of those were more direct twists on the game itself, such as battles against comically-difficult AI. But more recently there was Swarm, a bright and colorful twist on Vampire Survivors, starring one of LoL's various anime girl team-up squads as its cast. Swarm was great, particularly as a distraction if you wanted to play League of Legends but needed to recover from just having played League of Legends.

However, after serving its purpose – primarily as an advert for Riot's latest batch of anime girl skins – Swarm was disabled. And now, less than a year later, a timer sits above The Demon's Hand, telling me that it'll be gone in about 35 days' time.

The problem is this: League of Legends players want these alternative experiences, but Riot can't afford to let them have them. A player locked into Swarm, or The Demon's Hand, is a player not filling out the game's traditional competitive queues. That harms the health of the game generally, but more importantly it harms Riot's bottom line – a player not queuing up for a 'real' game is a player who doesn't need to buy the cosmetics that are the studio's bread and butter.

Riot's recent extremely public monetization controversy proved just how important those skins really are. The Demon's Hand exacerbates the issue by only letting you progress to its hardest difficulties by earning rare Sigils (the game's answer to Balatro's game-augmenting Jokers). Those Sigils can only be earned by playing League of Legends, feeding you back into the ecosystem if you dare to step outside it for too long, only for the whole thing to shut down in a month regardless of how much you earn.

The Demon's Hand and Swarm are only two symptoms of a broader problem. Alternate game modes have never been allowed to hang around for too long because of their impact on player counts, but it goes further. Riot has long since struggled to know what to do with games that it can't monetize in the long term, as the untimely death of indie publishing label Riot Forge proves. Valorant and Teamfight Tactics still live because they could immediately be money-makers that continued to swell Riot's bottom line even if they did take League players out of the queue. Even as Riot says it wants to invest in these smaller experiences, their limited life-spans means that no matter how good they might be, the knowledge of their eventual absence leaves a pretty sour taste.

Balatro's first big update is still on track for 2025, but it'll be "done when it's done, because it's got to be good before it's fast."

Arcane Season 2 gets perhaps its final hurrah, as animation studio Fortiche return to create a music video starring Jinx and Ekko.

This article contains spoilers for Arcane Season 2.

The video in question is for La Meillure Enemie, the song the pair dance to in the alternate universe Ekko inadvertently finds himself in, in which Zaun is thriving and Powder never became Jinx. That sequence became iconic, rocketing singers Stromae and Pomme to global stardom, thanks in no small part to its beautiful attention to detail.

Now, the musical pair has released its official music video, once again animated by Arcane animation studio Fortiche. Interspersed with shots from the show, it shows Ekko reuniting with Jinx, back in his own timeline. The latter's shorter hair dictates that this is after Jinx's suicide attempt after Vi frees her (and from which Ekko saves her), but the lack of body paint suggests it's before the show's climactic battle.

The video is light on details, but it's further vindication for those who have been shipping Jinx and Ekko for years, under the clever moniker of 'Timebomb'. Towards the end, a presumably-redeemed Jinx lifts herself up of the floor, before being embraced by Ekko, appearing to cement that relationship even more firmly than before.

Ultimately, it's all for very little - Jinx's fate varies depending on what fan theories you buy into, but it's certainly not a happily-ever-after ending. And with Arcane very firmly having ended with Season 2, this is likely to be all the Timebomb shippers will ever get.

Arcane season 1 teased Ekko's "boy savior" role in season 2's climactic moments – but actor Reed Shannon says he still "never saw it coming."

League of Legends now has an in-client roguelike game that players say feels a lot like indie hit Balatro. The problem is, if you want to see everything it has to offer, you'll need to play actual games of League of Legends to progress.

The Demon's Hand dropped last night, somehow managing to remain a complete surprise until it showed up in the client. I've not had the chance to play it yet, but Riot has helpfully outlined the basics - every round, you deal damage to your opponents based on the cumulative attack values of the cards you've put together, augmenting the game with powerful sigils. If that sounds a little bit like Balatro's Jokers, that's because it is.

Overall, players seem pretty impressed. Riot is generally quite good when it comes to in-client experiences like this, and for the relative gimmick it is, The Demon's Hand seems to mostly live up to its inspiration. Some somewhat gnarly performance issues seem to be the major concern, but perhaps the biggest issue is progression.

Story difficulty isn't too tricky, but if you really want to see everything that the game has to offer, you'll want to up the difficulty. Hard Mode and Demon Mode - presumably the equivalent of Balatro's tougher Antes - are unlocked by gathering eight or 16 'Rare' Sigils. The catch is that the only way to do that is by playing actual games of League of Legends, and while that's something I've been doing for far too long now, it's not a fate I'd wish upon casual Balatro-enjoyers.

What's worse is that finding those Sigils seems to be a matter of luck - some players say they've received none after multiple games, whereas others claim they've been gifted a handful after just a single Arena match. You can make it easier to find more Sigils by completing missions, but the RNG element seems to be a little harsh.

One of Riot's previous spin-offs was a Vampire Survivors-like, which is ironic since the roguelike's creator says he was lucky to dodge the waves of knockoffs.

League of Legends has been stepping in a lot of mud these past few months, but now Riot is acknowledging its mistakes and committing to walking back some of the game's most controversial changes.

In a new dev video update and accompanying blog post, League Studios' Andrei Van Roon and Paul Bellezza addresses several elephants in the room. "We know that some of you are frustrated—even questioning if Riot is still the company you’ve always known," reads the blog. "We aspire to put players first, and when our decisions don’t land the way we intended, it can damage your trust.

"Recently, we’ve made a number of changes that didn’t hit the mark for everyone. We’ve been listening to your feedback, and it’s clear that there are areas where we need to adjust."

Chiefly, Hextech Chests, which had been used as a way to get free stuff before being removed earlier in the year, are now coming back. Starting next week with Act 2, players will again be able to earn Hextech Chests by playing the game, but there will be a limit of 10 chests and keys per Act. Eight will be spread out through the free seasonal pass, while the other two will be earnable through the game's Honor system, which rewards and punishes players based on their in and out of-game behavior.

The nerfing of Honor rewards was another recent League change that really, really didn't go down well with players, and while Riot says it's "working on" the system, no specific changes were revealed today.

The introduction of the new Exalted skin tier in October, which locks the game's most premium skins behind a very expensive gacha system, is yet another recent change that sent League players reeling. One particular pain point is the upcoming Sahn Uzal Mordekaiser Exalted skin, which many players felt lacked in quality even compared to much more affordable skins. It's now being delayed so that Riot can "ensure it better delivers on its core fantasy."

Riot also says it's "taking more time to improve all future Exalted skins," which suggests there probably won't be a new one in every Act as originally planned.

Finally, Riot addressed the latest season's changes to the Blue Essence grind, which, you guessed it, people didn't like very much. Starting with Act 2, the Blue Essence cost will be lowered by 50% for all champions, making it a lot easier to unlock new champions for free.

Those are the big highlights, but some smaller changes in response to player feedback include the return of Your Shop in Patch 25.6 and the Blue Essence Emporium in Patch 25.7, and the tournament queue Clash going back to a monthly cadence. Finally, one of the non-Prestige skins on the paid seasonal pass will be replaced with 25 Mythic Essence.

While these changes aren't likely to entirely fix what's become a pretty messy situation, Riot hopes it's a good first step: "We’ll keep tracking how these changes feel, talking with all of you about how things are landing, and making adjustments. We’ve always built League along with all you, the community. Thank you for sticking with us and hearing us out, and we look forward to continuing to work with you to make sure League is the best game it can be."

Looking for something new to play? Be sure to check out our picks for the best MOBAs and best PC games.

After deciding to get rid of Hexchests, Riot is also reportedly removing Honor Orbs and Capsules from League of Legends and the decision has not gone down well.

Earlier this month, Riot devs explained their controversial decision to scrap Hextech chests that could reward you with free skins. The reasoning was simple: too many people were getting skins from these chests and not enough were buying them with cash instead, so Riot was worried about its long-term financials.

Removing Honor Orbs and Capsules is just another nail in the free skin coffin. These reward you with Champion Shards, Ward Skins, and Blue Essence, and the higher your Honor level is, the better the rewards.

I always liked the idea of League's honor system. It's widely known as one of the most toxic games around, so anything that encourages better behavior is worthwhile, but now all it'll get you is some battle pass XP. And the warm fuzzy feeling you get from being a good person, I guess.

Fans are, understandably, furious, and so are League content creators. In the replies to a picture of the supposed changes, some shared an image of the alleged United Healthcare CEO killer Luigi Mangione. Another player simply replied, "Shut it down brother."

One Twitter account posted a picture of Riot CEO Dylan Jadeja alongside a list of their achievements: "500+ employees laid off, Riot Forge killed, limited time only skins for FOMO, end of prime gaming capsules, end of level up capsules, decent mythic essence acquisition, hextech chests, introduction of predatory gacha, degradation of skin quality, nerfed battle pass, removal of honor orbs and capsules, degredation of clash events, removal of Your Shop. Makes you wonder why he has no social media, unlike the previous CEO’s before him."

YouTuber and streamer NickyBoi tweets, "I'm done making League of Legends videos, or anything content at all for a little while at least. I don't think it will be too long, hopefully no more than a few weeks or a month, but I need time away from all this."

YouTuber SkinSpotlights also tweets a picture of their subscribers steadily dropping since the Hextech Chests and this more recent news, showing a lot of people are done with the grind for skins entirely.

You should check out our list of the best online games if you want to hop off the League train and try something else out.

The League of Legends MMO has been cooking for over four years at this point, but Riot Games is seemingly still chasing the World of Warcraft train.

When asked about the unnamed project in an interview with Game File, Riot Games co-founder and chief product officer Marc Merrill said it's "probably the project I personally spend the most time on as well.”

The massively multiplayer spin on the world's most famous MOBA was first announced in 2020 before going radio silent for many years. The last time we heard anything about the shadowy project was when Merrill himself said it had been "reset" because it felt like any old MMO just with a "Runeterra coat of paint" slapped on top.

With such a turbulent production, it's good to hear that Merrill still thinks it's worth pursuing. Asked why, he explained it's "because when you abstract to the feeling that I think many people who have historically loved MMOs sort of nostalgically look back and wish they could rediscover, I think that that is a very worthy experience to try to chase. And it's really hard to do," he said.

Merrill explained that making MMOs is so hard because developers need to do a lot at a "high level," while having a world people want to spend time in and an "incredible team" to make it all happen. Despite all the things that could go wrong and have gone wrong, though, Merrill still thinks "Riot's exactly the type of company that should go after those types of opportunities, if we’re trying to make it better for the player," especially since he believes "people want to run around the world of Runeterra."

The LoL MMO has "a lot of momentum" and "a great direction," despite going dark for its reset.

League of Legends fans are in unfashionable tatters after developer Riot recently decided to trap an in-demand, story-rich cosmetic behind its hugely unpopular gacha system.

"Death is simply another conquest," Riot writes in a recent announcement of its upcoming Sahn-Uzal Mordekaiser skin, which restores the unruly, lich tyrant to his ancient, human form. But I think what Riot really meant to say is "this skin can technically cost over $240."

Sahn-Uzal Mordekaiser is coming to League on March 5 as an Exalted skin in its Sanctum. In mortal language, that means the cosmetic is arriving as one of League's recently introduced, S-tier gacha rolls, which fans calculate could cost over $240 to actually acquire.

So League players, understandably, are upset. To their credit, they've been upset since 2023, when Riot made it so that a recolored Jhin skin could cost $200 in gacha pulls. But this Sahn-Uzal cosmetic feels more pointed, personal – players have been begging for it for years, just for the sake of League's story. But, now that the skin is finally scheduled to be released, they've given up on owning it.

"One of my all-time most wanted skins ever was Sahn-Uzal/pre-resurrection Mordekaiser," League streamer NickyBoi says on Twitter, "but all that hype is obliterated knowing it's stuck in a $200, FOMO gacha store. I should feel happy [right now], but I am just sad."

"[Riot] really saw a skin people have been asking about for years," agrees a Reddit poster, "and said, 'Bet, we're gonna do it, but only for the ones who have oodles of cash to burn.'"

As League of Legends players blast 800-hour grinds, Riot says this "wasn't meant to get harder" and "we messed up" on the whole First Blood thing too.

After the controversial decision to stop rewarding you with Hextech chests so you can unlock free League of Legends skins, fans of Supervive, a game made by ex-Riot devs, are telling people to play it instead.

Andrei "Meddler" van Roon and Paul "Pabro" Bellezza explain why the choice was made in a dev update, but it still hasn't gone over well with fans.

Meddler says Hexchests, which were part of a system that rewarded good plays and nice behavior with components you could use to unlock skins, were "A great player experience, but it was not sustainable for League in the long term."

Pabro adds, "Increasing the number of skins we can make each year was good for both the business and the player experience, but eventually we ran into meaningful diminishing returns."

So, the decision was made to remove Hextech chests entirely, meaning you have to spend money if you want new skins. This has been done to "ensure League remains a great, fully free-to-play game," but it's irritating nonetheless.

"Just wanted to mention how some of the best Rioters ever got tired of the company and left to make a superior game with a friendly monetization system and unique gameplay," writes one fan of Supervive in a quote tweet response to the dev update. "With league imploding, Supervive is worth your consideration! Give it a shot," writes another, sharing a video of a new Supervive patch that went live the day after League's dev update.

Supervive is a "MOBA battle royale meets hero shooter" that launched in November, 2024. However, despite this "play Supervive" campaign, its player count hasn't gone up by that much these past few days.

According to SteamDB, since February 7, where the concurrent player count was 2,921, it rose to a height of 3,875 on February 10. It's a respectable increase, but the game had just over 4,000 players on January 26.

The player count is fairly steady, consistently over 2,000, so if you do want to give it a go, you shouldn't have any trouble finding a match. It's a free-to-play early access game that you can download from Steam.

In the meantime, check out some of the best online games you can play right now.

League of Legends developer Riot has owned up to missteps in a recent update which made unlocking new characters a gargantuan, potentially 800-hour grind, admitting "we screwed up on this one" and promising reward improvements.

"We meaningfully screwed up on this one," a blog post from Meddler begins. "The numbers we shipped were pretty far off from what they should be for many of you. We’ll be putting out fixes for that during Patches 25.S1.2 and 25.S1.3."

The pain points highlighted here are Blue Essence and account XP, two resources that are essential to unlocking new stuff, especially playable characters. Riot says it intended for all players, especially new and casual players, to see a "meaningful increase" in Blue Essence payouts. Meddler says the dev also "didn't intend to change the number of games it takes to get access to Ranked" or the speed of leveling in general.

As you may have guessed, both of these things were, apparently inadvertently, chucked in the dumpster.

"For a lot of you, BE rates are significantly lower right now," Riot continues. "It also is meaningfully slower (up to 30%) to go from level 1 to 30 and to access Ranked. And, finally, we failed to communicate that the champion capsules from account level rewards after level 30 were being moved to the Pass when we talked about other changes in November."

How did this happen? It's a live service classic. A big part of the Essence problem is the result of changes evidently meant to help low-engagement players severely punishing more engaged players, especially those who are "incredibly efficient at finishing Pass Missions and completing Milestones." At worst, "super high" engagement players could see up to 71% lower Essence in a season.

"We missed the mark a lot for other players, especially those who play a lot," Riot summarizes.

To fix this, Riot says it will "significantly increase the free Pass earn rates," demonstrated by the table below.

"In short, we’re increasing the total BE from Milestones from 4750 to 9000, and we’re increasing repeatable Epilogue milestones from 50 to 750 BE," Meddler clarifies. Since players have already earned a chunk of Milestones in the ongoing Act 1 Pass, the dev is giving out 4,250 Blue Essence through an easy one-time mission coming in patch 25.S1.3 to retroactively compensate. Going forward, new Milestones will just pay out more.

"We’re also going to be changing the final Champion Capsule in the Pass to a Glorious Champion Capsule starting in the Act 2 Pass," the post adds. "When it comes to account XP, we’ll be increasing account XP earned by 40%. That should ensure that the average number of games to 30/Ranked access is close to or slightly quicker than where it was beforehand."

Riot closes with a look at how these problems really happened. When players ran the numbers and started kicking off, Riot checked its math and "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." A similar thing happened with XP: "We hadn’t accounted for the loss of FWotD, which meant drastically slowing the progression of accounts and therefore access to Ranked."

As it rolls out a make-good sum of Essence and updates reward and XP pacing, Riot says it 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." Hell hath no fury like a League player scorned.

The immediate response to these changes has been positive overall, but players were quick to question the post-pass reward track and again push for the return for free Hextech chests – another casualty of the new pass system. Riot's Twitter post on this news is an especially loud chorus of chest enthusiasts.

League of Legends co-creator responds to report that Arcane was a "financial miss," says "people think we make things like Arcane to sell skins, when in reality we sell skins to make things like Arcane."

The latest League of Legends season hasn't got off to a fantastic start, as fans have spotted an enormous change made to the amount of time it takes to unlock new champions for free, and the lead gameplay designer is already admitting "we messed up" with Feats of Strength's 'First Blood' Feat, too.

When it comes to unlocking new League of Legends champions, if you don't want to splash the cash on League's premium currency, RP (which can be used to quickly unlock the game's now almost 170-character roster), you can also spend Blue Essence – usually earned from leveling up, opening Champion Capsules, and completing missions. While it takes time, it ensures that even free-to-play players can get their hands on all the champions eventually. However, with the start of League of Legends' latest season, it's been suggested that it could now take around 882 hours after completing the Battle Pass to unlock a single one this way.

As explained by content creator Remus on YouTube, from now on, once you hit level 30, you'll no longer receive a Champion Capsule every level up, and on top of that, your first win of the day will no longer grant the 50 Blue Essence it once did, instead giving out Battle Pass XP. Speaking of the Battle Pass, in the current eight-week season, only three Champion Capsules are included, alongside 4,750 Blue Essence in the first 50 milestones. 

After completing the whole thing, four out of the five repeatable milestones will grant 50 Blue Essence each, which really isn't much. Thankfully, you still won't have to spend a penny to earn any of it, but for reference, champions cost you 7,800 Blue Essence on the week of their release. After dropping to 6,300 for their first two seasons, their price varies, but Riot previously claimed the "majority" are 4,800 each. With that in mind, you'll probably be able to get one new champion with this Battle Pass, unless you grind those repeatable milestones endlessly, which is probably where the supposed 882-hour figure comes from. Whether this is accurate is another matter, so I decided to do some of my own estimations. 

If we take a 4,800 Blue Essence champion, you'd have to level up 120 times after completing the Battle Pass to earn enough (that's accounting for the 24 repetitions of those same five milestones you'd need to do). As for how long that'd take, I deferred to GamesRadar+'s in-house LoL enjoyer Ali Jones, who reckons it takes him roughly between five and 10 hours of gameplay to earn one or two level ups. If we call that five hours per level up, that's 600 hours you can expect to spend after completing the battle pass. Obviously, there are various factors at play here, so that estimate is far from concrete, but all you need to know is that it's a lot. 

Thankfully, there is a glimmer of hope, as the head of League Studio, Andrei van Roon, states: "Unlocking new champions via Blue Essence wasn't meant to get harder. Digging in to understand whether something isn't functioning as intended now." With that in mind, it sounds like there could be more changes to come.

If so, it won't be the only alteration coming to League of Legends, as lead gameplay designer Matt Leung-Harrison has confirmed plans to "replace First Blood as a Feat." Feats of Strength is a first-to-two competition with three possible 'Feats' to accomplish – you can destroy the first turret, score first blood, or slay three epic monster camps – in order to receive the Blessing of Noxus bonus for a buff to your tier-2 boots (and make tier-3 boots available in the shop). 

In a new tweet, Leung-Harrison acknowledges that while Riot doesn't think snowballing (essentially, building momentum after gaining an advantage, to the point where you become basically unstoppable) is "much higher than the previous season, if at all," the "perception" is that it's higher now, partially thanks to "the visibility of the Feats reward." The team "wanted the Feats system to create more reward satisfaction, focus and tension around prioritizing early objectives," but know that "First Blood is causing too much friction for the satisfaction and clarity of gaining it."

Leung-Harrison explains: "As a result, we're going to change it either in 15.2 or 15.3. Candidly, we messed up here and it should have been changed pre-release, but we're going to own that mistake, learn from it and do better for next time."

All in all, it's not been smooth sailing so far for Welcome to Noxus: Act 1, but at least Riot seems to be aware of the main complaints. Here's hoping we get swift fixes, especially before new players commit to the ridiculous grind that can now be expected to unlock all of League's champions.

For more games like League of Legends, be sure to check out our picks for the best MOBAs and best PC games.

Valve's invite-only third-person hero shooter and MOBA mashup Deadlock may still be in the early development stages, but from this point on, players can expect its major patches to be less frequent as the team adjusts its update schedule. 

That comes from Valve dev 'Yoshi' on the official Deadlock Discord server, who explains that the schedule adjustments will "help improve our development process." They elaborate: "While it was very helpful for us in the beginning, we've found that our fixed two-week cycle has made it more difficult for us to iterate on certain types of changes internally, as well as sometimes not giving enough time for the changes themselves to settle externally before the next update came around."

Because of this, Valve is altering things so that "major patches will no longer be on a fixed schedule," which means they'll be "a little bit more spaced out," but when they do arrive, you can expect them to be "larger than before," so that's exciting. Don't worry, hotfixes will still be "released as needed," so players won't be left waiting forever for crucial fixes – the changes just seem to apply to the (previously) fortnightly updates.

With no more schedule to follow, it's hard to know at this point how often we can expect these major Deadlock updates to roll out, but Valve clearly still has plenty planned, as Yoshi adds: "We look forward to fleshing out the game in the new year."

While Deadlock was floating around in the ether for some time, it wasn't until August last year that Valve officially lifted the curtain on its Steam storefront page. Unfortunately, it didn't take long for cheaters to pose an issue, but developer Yoshi confirmed in September that Valve was "working on anti-cheat," at least. At the time of writing, we still don't know when Deadlock is going to escape its invite-only existence, or when its actual, full launch will be upon us, but based on Yoshi's recent statement, it sounds like things are expected to move even smoother behind the scenes thanks to this schedule change.

Risk of Rain co-creator led the design of one of Deadlock's new heroes, to the surprise of no one: "Viper is such a Hopoo character."

One Arcane writer always hoped that an original character from the beloved animated series would make it into League of Legends, the massively popular game that acts as the show's source material. 

Arcane writer and producer Amanda Overton said as much in an interview with this site here (GamesRadar+), specifically calling out Mel Medarda as the most likely candidate thanks to her badass magical powers. "I think we were all, in the writers' room, thinking 'we're making something badass and unique here - hopefully, fingers crossed, they'll put her in the game.' I think that was always our hope that some of the characters in the show would go to the game and vice versa," she said.

No original Arcane characters have crossed back into Riot Games' MOBA just yet, but there's plenty of reason to believe that'll change soon. Mel's mother Ambessa just joined the fight recently, and leaks suggest that Mel herself won't be far behind - she might even be League of Legends' first new character of 2025, though Riot Games itself hasn't formally announced anything.

"We always knew that Mel would be a mage, and she would have this arc, and we also always knew what her powers would be," Overton continued, before explaining that the team thought it would be "very interesting to give someone a power that's like a mirroring power, because they can beat anyone... they could be up against the most powerful mage, and they could beat them. To me, that is infinitely interesting."

"It's also 'why not give it to a woman?' We're known for being motherly, we're known for being empathetic. And Mel was that character in the show. As much as she tried to have that hard shell around her, she always had that."

Arcane writer shares she wants to go with a new story in the League of Legends universe. 

The League of Legends MMO "reset" Riot Games unexpectedly revealed earlier this year has certainly had an impact on the mysterious title's production, but it hasn't been a negative one - in fact, it has apparently "dramatically increased the likelihood of success."

Speaking in a recent interview with Gizmodo, Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill explains why the reset marked a positive turn for the new MMO. "The reset has dramatically increased the likelihood of success," says Merrill. "I fundamentally believe in the Ed Catmull [quote] where he said, 'You can give a great idea to a mediocre team, and they'll make it mediocre. You can give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they'll make it great.'"

He continues: "We must ensure we have great teams with great vision, perspective, and direction. And if that's not true, then our ability to make something worthy of the high expectations of our audience is pretty much zero. There's so much content in the world: social media content, incredible stuff all over streaming, tons of games available, and much of the world doesn’t need more mediocre stuff. It needs great things."

According to the lead, these are what Riot "needs to be focused on making" now. "That starts with people and team, direction and alignment around that particular strategy, and what must be true to deliver that. We're in the [fortunate] position because of the incredible games that we've created so far, this massive community that we have, and this incredible IP that we've been investing in building for 18 years, people want to run around the world of Runeterra."

Merrill goes on: "We do, too. We take the responsibility very seriously to deliver something great and worthy of our expectations - and everything happening, including that pivot and direction and reset, is oriented to be able to try to deliver on their expectations." The reset being a good thing for Riot isn't all that surprising, though. After all, just last month Merrill also revealed the MMO has "a lot of momentum" and "a great direction" despite resetting.

Riot Games cracks down on Valorant and League of Legends streamers who promote boosting, smurfing, and buying accounts

Riot Games has updated its terms of service to further crack down on stream sniping, boosting, and smurfs (not the little blue people).

You might often skip through and tick off an online game's terms of service agreement to quickly get to the shooting and/or slashing as soon as possible, but buried within the fine print is a solid list of dos and don'ts. Cheats, like ones that automatically perfect your aim, are explicitly banned in most games, for example, and now, the studio behind Valorant and League of Legends has added a few more "don'ts" to the list that mostly affect content creators.

In its most recent blog post, Riot Games reiterates that stream sniping is not allowed. For anyone not in the know, stream sniping is where someone uses an opponent's livestream against them to, let's say, take note of enemy positions or unfairly spawn kill foes. It's hard to prove, so Riot is now in the "early testing phases" of creating a penalty system that'll soon let you report players who you think might be stream sniping.

Things get a little juicier as Riot Games turns its gaze to "content that promotes breaking our terms of service." It seems streamers and content creators have made a habit of accepting sponsorships from websites that are built around breaking the company's terms of service. Some websites might offer boosting services (hiring high-skilled players to play on your account), smurfing (playing on a different account to match with lower-skilled foes), and buying/selling accounts - all of which are against Riot's own rules. "If a creator is sponsored by a boosting website, promotes ways for players to buy and sell accounts, or otherwise does anything that encourages players to break our rules, we may suspend access to your Riot accounts," the company writes.

For now, you can check out the best MOBA games and best FPS games if you’re in the mood for something similar to either League of Legends of Valorant. 

I went into the final act of Arcane season 2 with a knot in my stomach. I'd waited three years for this finale, only for the first couple reaction posts I saw after the last episode dropped to be variations on the theme of 'what was that?' Having spoken to showrunner Christian Linke barely a day earlier about how difficult it can be to bring a show like this to a satisfying conclusion, I feared the worst. But when I actually watched the episodes myself, I loved them. And when I went back to see what those posts were all about, it turned out they hinged almost entirely on continuity concerns.

This article contains spoilers for the finale of Arcane season 2.

Last year, Riot confirmed that Arcane is official League of Legends canon, pledging to gradually undo "inconsistencies that have woven their way into the storytelling and worldbuilding of Runeterra." To be fair, the finale of Arcane certainly offers up some of those inconsistencies with League of Legends. The fates of several characters that are alive and unharmed in the main game are a matter for some debate. Caitlyn's injuries have likely cut her sharpshooter career pretty short; Heimerdinger was vaporized in an alternate dimension at worst and teleported to a different pocket dimension at best; Jayce and Viktor were scattered throughout the timeline; while Jinx and Vander are MIA.

Only Vi and Ekko remain definitively alive and unscathed, but perhaps the most egregious diversion from LoL canon belongs to Ambessa. Introduced to League of Legends just before Arcane season 2 aired, the character is already dead. As a Noxian, there's some speculation that her peoples' powerful attachment to various forms of necromancy could mean her story isn't over yet, but there's a sentiment among some sections of the community that her introduction to LoL was a waste of time – why would you want to play as a character that's already dead in the canon?

A rolling golem

It's not an opinion I agree with – Ambessa's backstory is already well fleshed-out, within and without the show. But root a little deeper into that feeling, and you'll find a whole ream of fans struggling to find their faves in the canon. Perhaps chief among them is Blitzcrank, a massive metal golem originally created to help with Zaun's toxic waste problem. In the official lore, the inert husk of one of these golems was uncovered by Viktor, who used Hextech to augment the automaton into an intelligent ally. In Arcane, that doesn't happen, and the result is that some players feel Blitzcrank has been written out of the canon. If his creator got atomized before he could ever put his great golem together, surely there's no way Blitzcrank can exist within that canon?

No-one else has been unwritten quite as egregiously as Blitzcrank, but there's a whole suite of characters that don't have a home within Arcane. Officially, the cities of Piltover and Zaun are home to 22 in-game characters, only ten of whom appear in the show. A couple more are the subjects of easter eggs or fan theories, but even some of the game's most totemic figures are missing. The least charitable reading of their absence – one that I've seen repeated multiple times since the final dropped – is that those characters have been written out of League of Legends canon. If they're not on-screen, living and breathing, the sentiment appears to be that they might as well not exist anymore. It's an argument I've got no time for.

When I started playing League of Legends, the titular league was essentially the United Nations, with judicial 'summoners' possessing its representatives so they could settle political grudge matches. Any in-game storytelling was handled not by beautiful animated shows or even by fancy trailers, but mostly by an in-universe newspaper. Since then, lore has been rebooted and rewritten multiple times, but I bring up these poorly-aged, long-since retconned narrative tools to highlight the fact that it's been a decade or more since the League of Legends was a physical entity that required each of its characters to occupy the same space and time. The modern game owes more to Super Smash Bros than international relations – characters are plucked from their continuities, their exact relationship to one another often reliant on nebulous timelines or overarching sentiments. Most of the time, the 'canon' version of a given character is replaced by one taken from a parallel universe. The in-game cosmetics of Jinx alone cast her as an anime girl, a Guardian of the Galaxy, an apocalypse fighter, a different anime girl, and a waitress in a cosplay cafe. 

The whimsy attached to some of that storytelling is a big reason why some of those characters didn't appear in Arcane. If Viktor had suddenly revealed that he'd been building a big sentient robot throughout act 2, it would have felt just as anachronistic as if Jinx had rocked up in her Star Guardian uniform at the end of episode 9 – or if Twitch, a gross, crossbow-wielding rat, or Seraphine, a glossy, Swift-style popstar, had shown up to defend Piltover. That's to say nothing of characters who are broadly understood to exist further up or down the timeline than these versions of Jinx and Vi, or to even touch on how a narrative that even its creator admits struggled with feeling rushed would deal with introductions to another dozen or more characters.

There are a whole bunch of ways to explain why certain characters were acknowledged and others not, why particular moments in their stories were highlighted, invented, or ignored. But at the end of all of it, the only real important answer to any question about why Arcane made certain decisions about League of Legends canon is 'because it made a good show'. As a 13-year veteran of the game, I've seen the lore chopped and changed more times than I could possibly count, and as the end of all that, I got to watch Arcane, an acclaimed, beloved, astonishingly beautiful series that has raised bars not just for video game adaptations, but for serialized, mature animation everywhere. To be presented with that multi-year, hundred million dollar investment, and to step away from it complaining that there weren't more easter eggs is the peak of banality, and it's a criticism I hope Riot and Fortiche don't spend a moment entertaining.

Now that it's all over, check out our Arcane season 2 review.

With the Arcane season 2 finale in the rearview mirror, Riot is taking influence from the show back to its source material with a fresh revamp for Viktor in League of Legends.

"Following the release of the second season of Arcane, a Visual and Gameplay Update (VGU) will be released for Viktor, which will arrive on PBE tomorrow," Riot explains in a press release. "The update will feature new art and an updated backstory for Viktor, better aligning him to the Viktor fans were shown in Arcane, but largely retain his core gameplay apart from a slight functional and thematic change to his ultimate, which will now get larger with every kill until the end of the ability’s duration."

The devs go into a bit more detail on what to expect in the video below - but those details, I should warn, come with a spoiler warning for the Arcane season 2 finale. Skip the video and stop reading now if you want to heed that warning.

"We're not pulling a Gangplank and disabling him because he's dead," League studio head Andrei 'Meddler' van Roon jokes. "Well hold on," executive producer Paul 'Pabro' Bellezza teases. "I think you're on to something with killing Gangplank and other characters." But it seems that's all just a joke. (For now, at least.)

The exact nature of the art and backstory changes remain to be seen, but Viktor has historically sported a very different look between show and game. You can see Riot's teaser for at least one of the new skins below.

Arcane hasn't gotten any League of Legends characters killed in-game, Gangplank-style, but this is the second character to get an Arcane-inspired revamp. Around the release of Arcane season 1 back in 2021, Caitlyn got an Art & Sustainability Update (ASU) that brought the in-game character much closer to her appearance in the show.

Arcane may be over, but a new League of Legends show is already a year into development.

Arcane season 2 has finished, and while you can check out our Arcane season 2 ending explained to get the full picture, I'm already wholly convinced that Riot has already shown off a new League of Legends champion in all their glory, and I can't wait to play as them.

This article contains spoilers for Arcane season 2.

In the course of Arcane season 2, Mel Medarda is captured by the Black Rose. She's able to escape their magical chains, however, thanks to her innate magical abilities - glowing gold, she bursts free of her thorny prison, before returning to Piltover with a series of spells at her disposal. Most relevant to the plot is a magical shield, which is able to withhold various weapons, even dispelling and reflecting a bullet at close range. Elsewhere, she's able to move enemies around, and make use of some bursts of damage too.

Mel's reveal is 100% champion material. She's got a full roster of spells that's perfect for a League of Legends character, she's got a series of visual effects that would be ideal for an ultimate ability, and her magical form even comes with her launch cosmetic ready-made. She fits snugly into the stories of several different characters, and you'll never convince me that she's not set-up to be the game's next champion.

Riot has stayed awfully quiet about its new arrivals this year. The last we heard about what was to come was in January, when the company introduced Smolder, who arrived on the Rift at the start of the year, and Aurora, who was teased ahead of her release in July. There was also a tease of the newest arrival, Mel's mother Ambessa Medarda, who was released just before the start of season 2, and a mention of a visual update that's almost certainly about to be made to Viktor. Beyond that, however, the only clue we have about anything to come in 2025 is from that January video, when we learned there was another champion in the works who "should be a familiar face to all of you." Perhaps that was Ambessa, but maybe it was Mel - Riot's silence is likely to have been an attempt to ensure Arcane didn't get spoiled because any clues could have given the story away.

Actually, I'm so convinced it's Mel that I even know what type of character she'll be. A character who's less physically able but defends herself with magical shields and disruptive abilities, and is shown fighting in close connection with Caitlyn, an in-game Marksman? Mel is an Enchanter Support, a long-running stalwart of the League of Legends roster that's gone largely underserved over the years. 2023 offered us Milio and 2022 introduced Renata Glasc, two anti-engage enchanters, but I'd argue you need to go back to 2019's Yuumi to find a reasonable Mel-equivalent (apologies, Senna and Seraphine fans), and back to 2012's Nami before that.

I might be more of a tank player nowadays, but I love an enchanter - Lulu remains one of my most-played champions, her shields and disruptive spells a quintessential example of the class. My needs have felt a little underserved in the past few years by a handful of releases that try to do very different things with what these characters do, but Mel seems as though they're back to that highly protective part of the archetype. Arcane might be over, but its characters are still making their impact on the world, and I can't wait.

I'm also quite the fan of a certain Zaunite loose cannon - so what happened to Jinx in Arcane season 2?

One of the most successful League of Legends rosters of all time is no more, after five-time world champions T1 announced the departure of one of their celebrated players.

T1, led by undisputed League of Legends GOAT Faker, has won the game's world championship five times. For those keeping score, that's four times more than any other team has managed, and as of the 2024 tournament, includes two sets of back-to-back wins. The run between 2023 and 2024 alone is one of the most impressive achievements in the scene by itself, with the roster of Faker, Zeus, Oner, Keria, and Gumayusi staying together to win those two titles. Sadly, however, there will be no three-peat, as T1 announced top laner Zeus' departure from the team earlier today.

While many of the team's players have already re-signed for the 2025 series, the team confirmed today that 'Zeus' Choi Woo-je's contract had ended. Even if all four of the other T1 members stick with the team, it remains the end of an era, as expressed emphatically by former LoL pro and major streamer Caedral, who described the newly undone team as the "greatest roster of all time."

That's a big claim, but it's one that probably does stand up. Even T1's dominant 2015/16 team wasn't an exact replica of its former self - 2015 top laner Marin was replaced in 2016 by Duke, while substitutes Easyhoon and Blank swapped into the mid-lane and jungle roles respectively (the former in 2015, the latter in 2016). Few players have ever won more than one major international title, and no team has ever run it back with the exact same roster to claim successive Worlds wins. While T1 already has precedent for winning back-to-back world titles with a new top laner, there's already a feeling within the community that this is the end of an era, whether or not the new team can improve on its already world-leading run.

Don't cry because it's over, cry because the Arcane season 2 release schedule means act 3 is almost here.

The response to one major character arc from the first act of Arcane's latest season is drawing mixed reactions, especially from fans who aren't up-to-date on their League of Legends lore, but the show's creators understand.

This article contains spoilers for Arcane Season 2.

As Riot began to tease the second season of its animated show, players began to notice that Vi - the long-imprisoned street rat who many saw as a symbol of the show's undercity - appeared to have joined the Enforcers, an oppressive police force. Unfortunately for those newer fans, League of Legends players had limited sympathy - after all, both Vi and Caitlyn have been positioned as law enforcement since their inception a decade before Arcane ever existed.

With the first three episodes of Arcane now released as part of the Arcane Season 2 release schedule, Vi wrestles repeatedly with her new role. Caitlyn, on the other hand, does not - driven by grief, she not only begins to lose herself in pursuit of Jinx, but is willing to aid Ambessa in placing Piltover under martial law. It's a rapid descent towards brutality for a character who largely appeared as a voice of reason in Season 1, and that's proving difficult for the community to wrap itself around at this early point in the season.

That difficulty is something that co-creator Christian Linke shares. Speaking to GamesRadar+, Linke - who helped create both Vi and Caitlyn more than ten years ago alongside Arcane's other showrunner, Alex Yee - admits that "there's a global perspective" to the characters' roles as cops "that is difficult for me to take into consideration."

"I live in Los Angeles now," Linke explains. "It is commonly understood that there is a lot of fucked up behavior by American police. I was born and raised in Germany, where there's a very different perception and understanding in society of law enforcement. The trust in the institution is much more shaken in America. There's something about that where there's just different perspectives on what that even means and how people see that." 

For Yee, there's a feeling that "I don't really feel like I can blame people" for having strong feelings about these character arcs. "There are things that have happened with characters that I didn't have a hand in, but I do feel like I'm on the team of people that did that," he explains. "So I don't necessarily feel like we were handed something that we had to live with per se. A lot of it felt like it was just sort of following through on a thing we started."

Arcane season 2 returns to League of Legends' hottest ship, but the Netflix show's co-creator says getting the CaitVi pairing right was "scary": "We knew they were stepping into this s***storm."

Arcane Season 2 is the final chapter in the story of Jinx, Vi, and Caitlyn's adventures on Netflix, but the show's co-creators have shared their favorite stories from the League of Legends universe, which could inspire future spin-offs.

Speaking to showrunners Christian Linke and Alex Yee ahead of the first drop in the Arcane Season 2 release schedule, I asked which stories in the broader League of Legends universe were their favorites. With Arcane set to end with Season 2, Linke has already revealed that there are other stories in the franchise the pair hopes to tell one day. While neither was ready to confirm their plans for a new show, they did have some narrative highlights to share.

"There's a lot," Linke admits. "We both played the game for a long, long time, and you have different kinds of characters and regions." While claiming that "there's too many to say 'this is gonna be the next one', Linke does point to Noxus, the warmongering nation that Arcane character Ambessa Medarda hails from. The Noxians are name-dropped in Arcane many times, but Linke points to their conflicts with two other in-universe nations - Demacia and Ionia - which dominated much of League of Legends' earliest storytelling. 

"I think Demacia/Noxus is dope," Linke says, "I think the Noxus Ionia invasion is really interesting," noting a fan-theory that's already convinced me about the direction a new series might go. He also loves Bilgewater, a pirate haven that's already been explored in detail in spin-off game Ruined King: "I feel like I'm ready for another pirate story," he says. He also notes that his own favorite in-game character is Heimerdinger, who hails from the whimsical land of Bandle City.

As for Yee, he points to the Freljord, a harsh frozen tundra with a story dominated by three warring tribes. That story has also been told elsewhere, in Riot Games' crossover with Marvel Comics, in a series that focuses on long-time character Ashe, the peace-seeking leader of one of those tribes.

Neither creator, however, is giving anything away about any actual future projects. Linke, in fact, says this period - with Season 2 on its way out the door and no future projects confirmed - "is the time for us to really explore, to see what kind of stories we can develop, and see what's possible. It's still pretty open."

Arcane season 2 first reactions say the Netflix show has "upped the ante in every way imaginable."

The LoL MMO "is making a lot of momentum" after its reboot, according to Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill.

Speaking to Marc 'Caedrel' Lamont during the League of Legends Worlds Finals on Saturday (via PCGamesN), Merrill was asked if could provide any kind of update on the LoL MMO. In response, he said that Riot is "working hard on it," and that "it's the project I've spent, personally, the most amount of time on."

"I really think the team has a great direction now and is making a lot of momentum," Merrill continued. That's good news for a project that's had a rocky couple of years. First announced nearly four years ago because Riot thought it would probably leak anyway, the project lost its lead developer - former Blizzard developer Greg Street - in March 2023. A year after that, we got our most recent update on the game, which Riot told us was being "reset," and "going dark" for a long time. 

A touch of optimism remained even in that message, but it remains hard to get any sense of what Riot's internal workings on the project look like - not least because, prior to his departure, Street told fans that the company would have no qualms about cancelling the LoL MMO if it wasn't "good enough."

Merrill notes the "expectations" that he knows fans have for the project, and says that Riot is "going to try not to disappoint," but it doesn't seem like we're likely to get anything more concrete than that for some time yet.

Last year, I said I was starting to get really worried about my most-anticipated MMO - and I'm still not feeling much better about it.

Risk of Rain creator Duncan "Hopoo" Drummond may have only joined Valve to work on Deadlock just under two months ago, but his fingerprints are already well and truly on the MOBA thanks to two new heroes.

Over on the game's dedicated Discord, Drummond confirms that, yes, he was the lead on Viper and Magician. Fans already had a hunch thanks to the former more than the latter having some strong Risk of Rain vibes, and even now continue to talk about the shared DNA.

"Viper playing with the slide mechanic reminded me a lot of Hopoo Games' work from Survivors of the Void and beyond, so this makes total sense," one fan says. "The majority of newer Risk of Rain characters have been designed around exploring some core game mechanics like crits, healing, temporary items, etc. Even Gearbox is following the trend with False Son playing off of health-boosting items.

"It's such a simple yet clever way to create new character concepts, and it doesn’t surprise me in the least that they’re carrying that philosophy over to their work on Deadlock."

Another, more simply, says: "Viper is such a Hopoo character."

Currently in Deadlock's Hero Labs, Viper is a slithery assassin who can jump high-priority targets thanks to their strong ability to slide on in. The Magician, not to be forgotten, is more about confusing foes through their dirty ol' magic tricks. Mind you, as both of these characters are on the Hero Labs, they are likely subject to change. Regardless, we're sure the good ol' Risk of Rain DNA will remain.

Deadlock does what Valve didn't get around to with Counter-Strike, turning the hero shooter's cheaters into frogs.

League of Legends has a new playable character, and this one is so ridiculously strong that the entire community is cowering in fear - up to and including pro-level players.

Ambessa is an interesting addition to League of Legends' roster, as she's the first new character to have started life outside the game. Ambessa features in the first season of Arcane as the mother of Piltover elite Mel Medarda, but with the release of Arcane Season 2 next month, will step onto Summoner's Rift as a full-fledged League of Legends character. While spin-off strategy game Teamfight Tactics has played host to a number of outside influences, most relevant among them Arcane Season 1's Silco, none of those have been included in the main game before now.

As a leader from the war-mongering empire of Noxus, Ambessa is an able and aggressive fighter, wielding twin chain-axe weapons, and using hefty armor to limit incoming enemy damage. If that makes her sound like a tank, you'd be wrong - Ambessa seems like a quintessential example of what League of Legends refers to as a 'Juggernaut'. This character archetype can give and take plenty of punishment, but is supposed to be held back by limited mobility - if you can stay out of a Juggernaut's reach, you'll quickly alleviate any threat they pose.

I say supposed to be held back, but that's not really the case here. Ambessa's passive ability grants her a dash after every active ability cast. In an efficient combo that leads to the kind of stickiness that ensures that once Ambessa is close to you, she'll be very hard to remove. It's not an entirely new tool - marksman character Kalista has a little hop she uses after every single attack, but that's a better fit for her glass cannon-style character class. On a warrior like Ambessa, this is pretty terrifying.

The reactions of the community are diverse. Some players are pointing out the complexity of Ambessa's skills compared to those of older champions - while the new arrival gains mobility, attack range, attack damage, and resource replenishment from just her passive, a character like Nasus only gets flat life steal from his version of the same skill. Others have noted that this could be the end of the game's 14-year-long mobility creep arc - with a dash on every angle ability, "you can't creep mobility any higher," even if some players in the comments on that post are prepared to view that as a challenge. My favorite reaction genre, however, is that of players who have simply given up. That includes former European champion Andrei 'Odoamne' Pascu, who simply tweeted, "Honestly, what the fuck at this point" in response to a rundown of Ambessa's abilities.

I've been around for a lot of League of Legends champion releases by this point, and so I know how this goes - streamer ioki probably said it best in their acknowledgment that "she's getting nerfed 10 times on release guaranteed." Ambessa will release astonishingly powerful due more to the number of tools in her kit than the numbers behind that kit, and as such, Riot will have little choice but to reduce those numbers over and over again until she's no longer viable. That's a fate that's befallen plenty of new arrivals and will befall many more before League of Legends is done, yet Ambessa still feels like a step beyond what we've seen before. Given that this comes so hot on the heels of another Arcane fumble - the $250 skin gacha system unveiled just after Riot laid off a bunch of cosmetic designers - it's perhaps not the best community marketing the studio could have come up with for the upcoming second series.

Arcane Season 2 isn't the end of Riot's animation push, and fans are already theorizing where in the League of Legends universe we're heading next.

Earlier this week, League of Legends developer Riot Games announced a wave of layoffs, notably impacting skin designers including the person behind the controversial near-$500 Ahri, and it's now confirmed that the studio is introducing a whole new gacha system to sell even more expensive skins. 

Although the number of affected developers wasn't initially confirmed, Riot later revealed in a statement to Eurogamer that 27 people on the League of Legends team have been affected, as well as five people in publishing roles. As previously mentioned, these include Ben Rosado, who designed the Ahri skin that was part of the Signature Immortalized Legend Collection bundle to celebrate four-time world champion player, Faker. This bundle set purchasers back a whopping $450 in RP (in-game currency), and while the exact number of sales isn't known, despite the fact that some planned to boycott the character, plenty ended up buying it.

Rosado isn't the only skin designer affected, as Tereza 'Teya' Rozumkova, a character artist behind 23 different skins including Star Guardian Akali and Mythmaker Irelia, was also impacted after four and a half years at the studio. It's a shocking loss of talent, and even more surprising when you consider Riot's claims that the layoffs weren't about saving money, but "making sure we have the right expertise so that League continues to be great for another 15 years and beyond." 

Just to make matters worse, the reveal of this new gacha system came just one day after the layoffs were announced.

The gacha system ties into the introduction of a new, potentially very expensive tier of skins – Exalted skins. Riot has explained that they'll be obtainable using a new currency called Ancient Sparks, which can be bought for 400 RP each. Using one will give you the low, low chance (0.5%, to be exact) of pulling "S-tier content" such as the shiny new Arcane Fractured Jinx skin – the first of this new tier. There's mercifully a pity system so that you'll be given a guaranteed S-rank pull after 80 attempts, but that's going to cost 32,000 RP – a ludicrous amount of currency that, if you're spending the absolute minimum amount of real money you can on bundles, will cost you $240. It might not be the $450 Ahri bundle, but it's still a very considered purchase if you end up having to go all-in. 

Needless to say, the reaction to this series of events hasn't been positive, with some calling it "disgusting," and others saying that they're "not spending another penny on this game." Riot admits that "there’s been a lot of focus on luxury goods this year," but claims that "we're also exploring new technologies, features, and content types (even outside of skins) that are meant for a broader audience, which we’ll be able to share more on later this year."

5 days after reports of 650 more Microsoft gaming layoffs, the company announces plans to pay out even more money to shareholders.

Supervive, the first game from new studio Theorycraft, seems just about ready to blow up. The atomic-bright hero shooter MOBA is currently sliding up Steam Next Fest charts and dominating Twitch. 

"The team has poured their hearts and souls into making the game as good as it can be for Steam Next Fest," CEO Joe Tung — who was previously executive vice president of League of Legends at Riot — said in a statement posted to Discord. Theorycraft's work seems to be paying off. At the time of writing, Supervive is the Next Fest demo with the second most daily active players, right under Delta Force. 

Supervive offers "a wild, open-ended combat sandbox," according to its Steam description, with multiple game modes, various flame-wielding hunters, and seemingly a metric ton of blinding lasers. Its development team includes many former staffers from games like LoL and Valorant, and so, even in its demo form, Supervive has the same high-intensity sheen as any AAA battle royale. 

That could be why, while Theorycraft held play sessions with streamers like loltyler1 this week, Supervive gathered nearly as many Twitch viewers as League of Legends — though its viewership has since dropped down to a more organic 18,000. 

In any case, Supervive seems to be in a strong position to rival the games its experienced developers used to work on. It does not yet have a release date, but its demo is live for 24 hours a day through the end of Next Fest. 

The single-player breakout of Steam Next Fest so far is an open-world crime-fighting game that looks like the exact opposite of GTA.

League of Legends and Valorant studio Riot Games has been hit with another round of layoffs, impacting an unknown number of developers.

In an update shared to Twitter, Riot co-founder and chief product officer Marc Merrill shared "some important updates" about League of Legends. Chiefly, there have been some "changes to our teams and how we work to make sure we can keep improving the League experience now and for the long-term. Merrill stresses that Riot isn't "slowing down work" on League and that it's actually "investing heavily in solving today's challenges faster while also building for the future."

That's an interesting way of saying Riot is laying off "some roles".

"This isn't about reducing headcount to save money—it's about making sure we have the right expertise so that League continues to be great for another 15 years and beyond," Merrill said. "While team effectiveness is more important than team size, the League team will eventually be even larger than it is today as we develop the next phase of League."

Riot developers impacted by the layoffs will be offered a severance package that comes with six months' pay, an annual bonus, health coverage, job placement assistance, "and more."

It hasn't been a year since Riot's last wave of layoffs. In January, the company killed about 500 jobs, 11% of its workforce at the time, and announced plans to effectively shutter its experimental Forge indie label after the release of Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story.

Former Blizzard president says the "gaming downturn" is "a little bit overstated" and companies just wanted to "cut back" after the pandemic.

Despite viral rumors to the contrary, the studio behind League of Legends and Valorant isn't cooking up a game that's anything like Deadlock.

Riot Games' communications manager, Joe Hixson, has debunked a viral post claiming the studio was making "a new hero shooter to compete with Deadlock" alongside tech conglomerate Tencent. 

"I see lots of crazy rumors, but this is extra fake," Hixson tweets today. As Hixson also notes, the screenshot in the post below might look very similar to headlines published on news sites like this one, but the headline only exists online on one 4Chan board. The 'article' also has a publication date of March 2024, predating Valve's first private playtest in May.

"Tencent doesn't fund our [development] like this," Hixson adds. "That's not how this works… that's not how any of this works." 

Riot Games is seemingly hammering away on something in silence, though whatever it has in production apparently doesn't resemble Valve's newest hero shooter MOBA all too much. "There's a lot cooking in [research and development], but nothing like Deadlock," Hixson concludes.

Deadlock itself has had a mysterious road to announcement. Valve quietly released a series of invite-only playtests earlier this year with a polite, legally non-binding request to players not to share any details about the game. Obviously, screenshots and footage describing the game as a Frankensteined mix of Overwatch and Dota popped up within weeks, and Deadlock soon attracted tens of thousands of players even before Valve officially lifted the lid on the project.

But Deadlock hasn't even launched yet, and thus, is probably too young to inspire competitors in the first place, despite early players being smitten with it. A former Overwatch pro called Deadlock "the future of gaming." And it doesn't hurt that Valve added anti-cheat features to Deadlock that it never got around to with Team Fortress 2.

The Risk of Rain developers joined Valve less than a month ago, and one of the legendary roguelike’s creators is already working on Deadlock. 

Deadlock's latest update has nerfed everyone's favorite gargoyle-turned-vigilante Ivy, but Valve is looking on the bright side. The hero may be weaker than they once were, but that can only mean less competition when picking them in the future, right?

Not long after the new patch dropped, one fan took to the game's Discord to share their disbelief, only to be met with a rather optimistic Valve employee. "Think of it as a buff, more chance for you to pick the hero."

So what's the damage? As per Deadlock Intel, it mainly concerns the gargoyle's 'Kadzu' bomb, which summons a raft of vines that damages and slows enemies who get caught up in them. You're still getting all that goodness, though damage has been reined in, and the vertical radius is now fixed to a two-meter pancake shape. Additionally, Ivy's Air Drop explosion now respects line of sight, which isn't out of step with changes we've seen elsewhere in Deadlock for heroes like Haze and Pocket.

Elsewhere in the patch, you've got some meaty changes to another hero called Mirage. His bullet radius has been reduced to six from eight, so it won't be quite as easy to land your shots as it once was. His Tornado ability has also been reined in alongside Djinn's Mark.

Finally, there are more general updates, like reductions to respawn times, zipline boost cooldowns, and more.

We'll need to wait and see if the update affects Ivy's popularity, though fans seem pretty on board with the changes Valve has made so far. This is probably because their kit is still really strong, but also, perhaps, because they may have an easier time picking them.

YouTuber figures out how to run Valve's Deadlock on PS4, and it's completely worthless: "I'm scared to even move the mouse"

Earlier this month, the devs behind the legendary Risk of Rain - one of the best roguelikes of all time - announced that they're going to work at Valve. Now, we know that at least one of them is working on the company's new hero shooter Deadlock, and he's already directly responding to bug reports from players online.

Duncan "Hopoo" Drummond popped up in the official Deadlock Discord yesterday to introduce himself to players. In no time at all, he was already fielding reports and balance feedback. That Discord is only accessible to Deadlock players, but Drummond's sudden appearance made enough of a stir to quickly make the rounds on places like Reddit.

Drummond co-created Risk of Rain alongside Paul Morse when they were both students, and eventually his online handle 'Hopoo' would become the name of development studio Hopoo Games. The studio grew slightly over the years, bringing in new folks for Risk of Rain 2 in particular, but Drummond remains credited as programmer, artist, co-designer, and co-producer on that original game, and is similarly credited in its sequel.

Back on September 2, Hopoo Games announced that "Duncan and Paul, alongside many other talented members at Hopoo Games, will now be working on game development" at Valve. That meant the effective shutdown of the studio - "sleep tight, Hopoo Games," as they put it - and the end of production on their own unannounced game. What we didn't know, however, is exactly what role the devs would be taking on at Valve. That mystery has now been cleared up for Drummond at least. 

Deadlock does what Valve didn't get around to with Counter-Strike, turning the hero shooter's cheaters into frogs.

A new Deadlock update has arrived, and its approach to anti-cheat measures is one-of-a-kind - the shooter will now let players choose to turn any cheater into a literal frog.

Thanks to its "anti-cheat detection system," Deadlock leaves every cheater's fate in opposing players' hands. If someone dares to cheat, opponents will be given two options - they can either instantly ban the guilty player, or they can opt for something far funnier. They can turn them into a frog for the remainder of the match. Right now, Valve says the system is just "set to conservative detection levels."

The team is still working on "a v2 anti-cheat system that is more extensive," but fans love it already - as do Valve veterans themselves. Speaking in a post on Deadlock's unique anti-cheat measures, former Counter-Strike: Global Offensive developer Burton Johnsey reveals that the company's older iconic shooter almost featured a similar system. "Holy crap, they finally built codename 'FU Surprise Mode'?!"

He continues: "When I worked on VAC, Rich and I designed this for CS but the cheater was a chicken." That's right, CS stans - the community could've had anti-cheat chickens. While it probably won't happen in Counter-Strike 2, Deadlock at least has frogs. They aren't the only thing to come to Valve's hero shooter with its recent update, either - new hero Mirage has arrived as have various smaller changes.

Former Overwatch pro blasts Deadlock as "dogs**t" during a particularly bad game, only to have a huge change of heart later that day: "The future of gaming"

Former Overwatch pro xQc had an interesting set of reactions to Valve's new hero shooter Deadlock, going from blasting the game as "dogshit" to describing it as "the future of gaming."

In a clip from his stream (via Deadlock Intel), xQC - who played on the Dallas Fuel Overwatch League team and also represented Canada in the game's world cup - is having a very bad game. With his team down more than 40,000 souls (Deadlock's combined currency and XP marker), the streamer finds himself taking huge damage from his opponent and offering almost nothing back in return.

"The game is dogshit," xQc complains after he finds himself almost one-shot by an enemy player, despite his teammate's suggestion that they're enjoying the game more as they learn to play it better. Seemingly not too long after that, however, the streamer changed his mind pretty significantly.

In another clip, shared on the same day, he tells a friend "you should play this game, man. This game is actually the future of gaming. This game is actually fun. Deadlock, this shit goes hard." That friend seems a little confused by this sudden change of heart, suggesting that xQc had previously claimed that Deadlock would be "dead on arrival," but the streamer swiftly changes the subject rather than investigate those claims further.

As a long-time League of Legends player, I can see what's happened here. There aren't many genres of game where you can be starved out as hard as you can in a MOBA - fall too far behind, and it does often feel like you're not able to do anything except wait for your opponents to potentially make a mistake. In xQc's defense, those are the LoL games where I complain loudest about how I'm never playing again, but there's no one to hold me to those claims when I inevitably run it back a few minutes later.

The sentiment around Deadlock does seem to be pretty positive in the esports community - in August, former FPS pro Shroud said the game was "going to easily take over," while a number of players say they're planning to leave the content creation spaces for their current games in order to pursue Deadlock. With Valve's reputation for shooters and its experience with esports, however, maybe that's not too much of a surprise.

As cheating in Deadlock rears its head, Valve goes, yeah, maybe anti-cheat for its new hero shooter is a good idea.