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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

As well as the acclaim, the money, and the trophy, one of the best prizes available to the winner of League of Legends' annual World Championships is the ability to become immortalized in the game with a bespoke skin. For one of the 2023 winners, however, that dream became a nightmare - until now.

When T1 support player Keria took the title along with his team back in November, he was quickly disappointed to learn that he couldn't have the skin he wanted. Keria's favorite champion is Lux, but the rules state that you have to have played a character during the tournament in order for them to be eligible for a Worlds skin. In a classic example of suffering from success, T1's run through the tournament was so decisive that Keria didn't have a chance to play the character, so he wasn't able to pick her for his skin.

At the time, Keria said that he had "only thought about making a Lux skin," and that he wanted something "pretty." When Riot told him that he couldn't have that skin, but it could try and make his alternative good-looking, it was pretty clear he didn't believe them: "I just frowned."

Now, many months later, Riot is finally able to show off the skins it's cooked up for this year's World Champs. And while Keria's bespoke T1 Bard obviously isn't the character he was hoping for, there are a couple of details woven in that offer a nod to his real pick. Lux's portrait appears briefly in the animation of one of Bard's skills, but the real symbolism is in the skin's recall animation. That features a spectral version of Lux that Bard offers some comfort to, before the pair of them hold the Worlds trophy aloft together. It's not quite the skin he might have designed himself, admittedly, but it's probably the closest Keria could possibly get while abiding by Riot's rules.

Earlier this summer, Keria's teammate Faker got in some skin-themed hot water, as  players protested his $500 skin with a forced boycott, perma-banning Ahri to stop anyone using her new cosmetic.

The developer of MMO Pokemon competitor Temtem is ever-so-slightly quaking in its boots after realizing that its upcoming spin-off shares both a genre and name with an industry juggernaut.

In a tweet earlier this week, Temtem developer Crema posted a video about its upcoming spin-off, Temtem: Swarm. A Vampire Survivors-style roguelike, Swarm pits Tems against hordes of enemies, tasking you with lasting as long as you can amid its top-down, 'bullet-heaven' gameplay. 

Unfortunately for Crema, that real estate is a little crowded right now. "Put a finger down if one of the biggest companies in the industry with millions of players all over the world just announced that their survivor-like game mode is named exactly like your new, upcoming survivor game," the video below jokes. 

That company is League of Legends developer Riot Games, which recently unveiled Swarm, a top-down, 'bullet-heaven', Vampire Survivors-style roguelike that pits members of LoL's heroic Anima Squad against hordes of enemies. League of Legends: Swarm was teased several months ago, but has only just been officially named ahead of its release next month.

Adding to Crema's woes is the fact that that launch takes League of Legends: Swarm into 2024's third quarter, which is the same release window that Temtem: Swarm currently sits in. Temtem's spin-off could release as late as September and still hit that window, of course, and perhaps it will quietly slip back a bit to allow League of Legends fans to get their fix first.

It's worth pointing out two things here, of course; firstly, this is definitely delivered in jest, and secondly, the crossover between Temtem's creature collecting and League of Legends' MOBA audiences seems like it could be pretty slim. The timing is undeniably unfortunate, but Crema seems to be taking this coincidence pretty well.

If you're looking for even more permadeath action, check out our list of the best roguelike games.

League of Legends players are making good on their attempt to forcibly boycott a $500 cosmetic by banning the champion it's available for.

Signature Ahri is a particularly fancy skin, designed to commemorate League of Legends' all-time esports great Faker. Trouble is, the fanciest version costs $500, and players aren't happy about the potentially slippery slope that could set Riot sliding down. The concern is that if it's willing to charge this much now, it'll be happy doing this again in future, milking the community for ever-larger amounts of money.

Even as the skin was announced players were expressing plans to stop those who purchased it from being able to use it by deliberately banning Ahri from every game. Now that the skin has released (and key developer Andrei Van Roon has further stoked controversy by making it clear there are no plans to back down from this kind of drop), they've come good on that threat: Ahri's ban rate has rocketed, doubling almost overnight in certain regions.

It's unlikely that that spike holds for long - when you've only got five bans to use across your team, using one of them to spite players who might not even be in your game is a bit of a waste, and eventually Ahri's ban rate will probably return to normal. Still, it's amusing to see that the parts of the community expressing their concern did come good on their threat, even if reports suggest that the vast majority of these bans are coming from Western regions, rather than the Chinese and Korean markets that seem more likely to purchase the skin in the first place.

Elsewhere in the League of Legends ecosystem, Arcane is ending with Season 2 - but fans are already theorizing where it's heading next.

Arcane, League of Legends' excellent anime spin-off, will end with Season 2 - but with news that Riot and animation studio Fortiche haven't finished telling stories in its universe, fans are already theorizing where future series might be set.

"Arcane is just the beginning of our larger storytelling journey and partnership with the wonderful animation studio that is Fortiche," Arcane co-creator Christian Linke told fans. "From the very beginning, since we started working on this project, we had a very specific ending in mind, which means the story of Arcane wraps up with this second season. But Arcane is just the first of many stories that we want to tell in Runeterra."

The League of Legends community has long since latched onto the other stories that could be told in a manner similar to Arcane. There's the Ruination, a tragic story of lost love that's the origin story for several champions and has already been adapted and expanded in both a game and a novel. There's the Demacian civil war, depicted in part in a musical trailer several years ago, or the conflict over the Freljord, a frozen waste home to both a trio of gods and three warring tribes, or the Fall of Icathia. 

Runeterra is a land rich in stories, but there are two that currently stand out as strong follow-ups for Fortiche. The first takes our attention to Targon, an isolated land a long way from the mean streets of Zaun, where civilization is built around the foothills of a mythical mountain. There, the religious groups of the Solari and Lunari fight over their respective worship of the Sun and Moon. Champions Leona and Diana are 'sun and moon canon lesbians' mentioned in the tweet below, with an angsty rivalry that feels like the perfect fit for Arcane's storytelling, but there are plenty of champions that would be an excellent tangential fit for the world.

An even more compelling theory, however, pertains to the Noxian invasion of Ionia. Noxus, a warmongering nation, is already working with the citizens of Piltover in the final episodes of Arcane's first season. In the recent trailer, we see the Enforcers come face to face with Singed, the scientist who appears briefly in season one and is a key part of one major season two characters' arc. In his official biography, Singed eventually finds his way toward working with Noxus - "who contracted the alchymist to help [...] break the bitter stalemate of the war in Ionia."

It would be a strong setup for a new series. Not only is the Ionia conflict one of League's oldest yet least well-told stories, but it would work as an ideal bridge for a new Fortiche project. Neither directly linked to Arcane nor so distant from it as to be entirely brand-new, it would offer an excellent next step into a story that could still involve a wide array of champions.

We've still got several months to wait for Arcane, so I imagine we're several years away from discovering what Riot and Fortiche are cooking up next. Nevertheless, there's a treasure trove of stories to pull from, so I'm excited to see what's to come.

Arcane fans are shocked to see Vi as a cop - but League of Legends players want you to know that's been her job for 12 years.

As hype for Arcane Season 2 starts to grow ahead of its release later this year, some fans are finding themselves shocked by the fate of one of its central characters.

After the first Arcane Season 2 poster drop focused on Vi and Jinx, a brief teaser snippet changed the focus slightly, onto Vi and Caitlyn. Accompanied by a handful of currently unknown characters, the duo step forward wielding their iconic weapons - Caitlyn's rifle and Vi's gauntlets. What's caught some series fans by surprise, however, is that both characters are now kitted out in Enforcer gear, placing them firmly within the ranks of Piltover's police force.

That's not gone down too well. Putting any potential negative feelings about the police as a whole to one side, some fans are flabbergasted as to how Vi - a character whose parents have spent a lifetime under the thumb of the Enforcers and have experienced their brutality first-hand - would eventually join the force. In Season 1, we come to know Caitlyn - a citizen of the upper class - as a member of the Enforcers, but we meet Vi through an almost entirely different lens.

That led several series fans to speculate about the narrative gymnastics that Arcane would be attempting in order to justify this apparent change. But for League of Legends fans, it came as no surprise at all - when Vi arrived in the game in 2012, it was literally in the role of 'The Piltover Enforcer'. In the game, Vi has never really existed as anything other than a crime fighter, and in contrast to Caitlyn's calmer, more calculated approach, Vi tends to opt for an approach that veers far closer to the 'brutality' type of policing.

League of Legends players wasted very little time telling those shocked by Vi's new appearance that a decade of storytelling backed up this version of their newly problematic fave. And while Arcane is canon to the LoL universe, that means it exists alongside what came before, rather than existing in its place. I still think that Riot and Arcane studio Fortiche will have some work on their hands to sell this transformation, but given the importance of the show's most popular ship to the story so far, perhaps that'll be simpler to pull off than we think.

Elsewhere, Arcane fans are speculating that Season 2 could feature a substantial time skip.

Some parts of the League of Legends community are up in arms over a new $500 skin bundle, but other parts are reportedly taking out loan agreements to afford it.

That's according to Twitter user Starlight, who runs an online third-party store allowing League of Legends and Genshin Impact players to purchase in-game currency at reduced prices thanks to regional conversion rates. Even with those lower prices, however, Starlight says that players are going to pretty extreme lengths to procure League of Legends' hyper-expensive new skin.

In a tweet yesterday, they asked "Can you guys stop taking out loans to buy the Ahri skin," referring to that $500 bundle. "I don't want to put you into debt," they continued. "Legit every second order is with a loan agreement." In subsequent tweets, they clarify that in some countries, such as the UK and Germany, it's possible to pay with loan agreements via Paypal, and pay the money back over 3-6 months.

At what appears to be 0% interest, that's not technically any more expensive than paying straight up, but it's still far from the most sensible financial choice. Given that you'll have to purchase four maximum-size bundles of currency for a total of £400 ($508), the skin in question - a Signature Ahri cosmetic intended to honor League of Legends' best-ever player, Faker - you're already setting yourself back a substantial amount to even afford the item. And given that some League of Legends fans are planning to permaban the champion to prevent anyone from using the skin, it seems like this might be an even more unwise investment than it first appears.

Faker might be the GOAT, but $500 still seems a bit steep.

When it comes to League of Legends, four-time world champion Faker is the best to ever do it. He's so good, in fact, that he's become the first player inducted into Riot Games' new Hall of Legends, meant to honor some of the greatest players LoL has ever produced. Alongside that honor, however, is a new commemorative skin so expensive that players are planning to permaban the champion it belongs to.

The Signature Immortalized Legend Collection is the most expensive offering in a range of three different bundles. As well as cosmetics for two of Faker's best known characters, it comes with several other, smaller bonuses, many of which are entirely exclusive to the bundle. If you want all of those bonuses, however, you'll be shelling out a total of 59,620 Riot Points - League of Legends' premium in-game currency.

To put that in perspective, most skins cost 1,350 RP, which you can amass through a total of around $16 in spending. To amass the nearly 60,000 points you need for this bundle, by contrast, you'll be buying four of the biggest bundles, setting you back $100 each, plus another $50 bundle to make up the rest. That's a total cost of $450, making this far and away the most microtransaction Riot has ever offered - last year, players were angered by a skin placed behind a $200 gacha system, and this more than doubles that price.

Unsurprisingly, the response has been pretty negative. There's obvious community reverence for Faker, but equally obvious frustration at Riot, with the game's official subreddit discussing the cost at length, and multiple high-profile esports figures speaking out.

Some players are even planning an in-game protest, a form of forced boycott of the skin. While no-one can stop anyone else from purchasing the cosmetic, they can attempt to stop them from using it. League of Legends' ranked matches utilize a pick-and-ban phase, and if your champion is banned before the start of a match, you have to use a different one. With that in mind, players are already planning a mass target-ban of Ahri from the skin's release date on June 12. If you can't play Faker's signature champion, you're not likely to have much luck trying to use the expensive new skin you bought for it.

Riot does have an unfortunate habit of testing the waters with this kind of thing before walking it back when players make their displeasure known. Whether that happens here remains to be seen, but I'll be fascinated to see if the developer tries this again with its next Hall of Famer.

I don't think this bodes very well for the LoL MMO I'm looking forward to either, and I'm already pretty worried about that one.

More than a decade after it launched, League of Legends has finally initiated a strict anti-cheat tool that the community has been asking for for years - full hardware bans.

Yesterday, Phillip Koskinas, head of anti-cheat at LoL and Valorant developer Riot Games, showed off a graph outlining League of Legends bans, showing a substantial uptick in punishments meted out since the start of the month. That uptick matches up with the rollout of Vanguard, a somewhat controversial anti-cheat tool that operates at 'Kernel level' on your machine, meaning that it can prevent disallowed software operating at the same time as the game.

Vanguard has not proved particularly popular, primarily because of its access to players' systems, and reports that it was damaging PCs. Riot has hit back against those claims, and seems to be standing by Vanguard - Koskinas' tweet seems evidence of strong support, and Riot's official Dev Team account quoted that initial post to provide a little more context behind that rise in bans.

The new software means that the League of Legends devs are now "starting to target more cheats that we weren't able to action on in the past." That explains the rising number of bans, but it also means that recent ban-waves "come with League's first ever Hardware ID bans, increasing the action weight against cheaters."

A Hardware ID ban is different to an account ban, in that it targets the identification tools of your system, effectively removing the ability to access the game from your current computer. In the past, prolific cheaters could have their accounts permanently banned, but could simply boot up new accounts, or even buy pre-levelled ones at relatively low cost. Now, their entire PC can be banned from the game, significantly increasing the price of starting over.

In this 14-year history of League of Legends, this is a step that Riot has never taken before. The most high-profile similarity was the 'indefinite' banning of streamer Tyler1, whose repeated disruptive behaviour at the time led to Riot arranging to ban any account that could be identified as belonging to him, before his eventual return to the game. Even then, however, Riot was unable to target the streamer's hardware, resorting to manually banning individual accounts.

Calls for hardware bans have grown over the years, particularly as the issues of botting and account selling have become more prevalent. Whether the hardware bans fix those issues in their entirety remains to be seen, but this is still a substantial step forward in Riot's attempts to take on cheaters.

Found yourself booted from your favorite game? Here are the best PC games you can play instead.

The lead of the League of Legends MMO has announced he's leaving developer Riot Games.

In a tweet posted on March 7, Greg Street confirmed that he has "decided to step down from [his] role at Riot Games," where he served as executive producer on the MMO project. 

Street went on to say that "a combo of personal and professional considerations led me down this path." A number of personal issues meant that Street said he wanted to "be closer to my surviving family." He also, however, said that "after nine years at Riot it feels like it's time for something new."

"I said from the beginning that building a League of Legends MMO worthy of you all was going to be a long journey. The MMO is in good hands and it's the right time to hand over the reigns for the next phase."

Street took on the role several years ago, having spent time at Riot after a career at Blizzard, and specifically World of Warcraft. For all the excitement around the project, however, he has also made clear that there are no guarantees that the game will ever come out, and that Riot could cancel the project if it doesn't deliver on expectations, having pointed out that nothing is certain in game development.

In a message after Street's departure, co-founder Marc Merrill confirmed that the game is "still in early development, but we have a direction that we're very excited about," and that "it will still be a VERY long road to get there."

Meet the lore expert mapping out the League of Legends MMO years before its developers.

Hackers who stole League of Legends source code are now auctioning it off for an eye-watering sum.

Last week, Riot Games revealed it was the target of a cyber attack which resulted in source code for League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics, being stolen. The hackers also managed to obtain the company's old anti-cheat software Packman.

As spotted by Twitter user PlayerIGN, the hackers are now auctioning off the League of Legends source code and the legacy anti-cheat system with bids starting at $1 million. An image of the forum post shows a 1000-page PDF file containing a directory listing for the 72.4 GB of stolen source code. While we don't know if this is, in fact, the stolen data, what's on offer certainly comes with a lofty asking price. 

Following the breach, Riot Games revealed that it was held to ransom, with the hackers threatening to leak the source code unless the company coughed up $10 million. Riot outright refused, leading the hackers to put the data up for auction.

While the incident has meant that Riot's had to hold off on releasing updates for its games, the company said there was no indication that player data or personal information was stolen. "Truthfully, any exposure of source code can increase the likelihood of new cheats emerging," said Riot. "Since the attack, we’ve been working to assess its impact on anticheat and to be prepared to deploy fixes as quickly as possible if needed."

It's not been an easy time for Riot Games; recently, the League of Legends dev issued an apology over a trailer so bad fans thought the game was dying.

Each year, League of Legends traditionally celebrates Valentine's Day with cupid-themed cosmetics, but this year it's put a bit of a spin on things. 2023's Heartbreaker skins feature Caitlyn and Vi - a ship popularised by the animated series Arcane - as close as they've come to a canonical relationship.

Drawing on high school TV tropes, Heartbreaker Caitlyn is the hard-working, butter-wouldn't-melt type, while Vi is the rebellious punk/goth archetype. There's a pretty intentional attempt at chemistry in their joint splash art (at the top of this article), but it's only once you take the skins in-game that the ship steps it up a notch.

When Vi channels her recall animation, she can be seen cracking open a high school locker, before delicately placing a heart-shaped note inside it. When Caitlyn channels her animation, that same locker shows up, and once Caitlyn notices the note, she quickly hides it, before clutching it to her heart.

The duo has long been professional crimefighting partners, but it wasn't until Arcane that CaitVi was firmly established as one of League of Legends' premier ships. While the relationship is never made official in the show, the pair's feelings for one another are made pretty clear - but even these new skins don't really confirm anything.

In the 'official' canon, Caitlyn and Vi are crimefighters in the troubled twin cities of Piltover and Zaun, not high school stereotypes. League of Legends' different skin lines are understood to exist in universes parallel to that central narrative. Caitlyn's other skins, for example, send her to an anime 'battle academy', turn her into a time-travelling hitman, or simply let her enjoy a pool party. 

But while this isn't the total confirmation that CaitVi fans have been looking for, it hasn't stopped them from expressing their… enthusiasm for the pairing online. The #CaitVi hashtag has roared to life since the skins were revealed, and some people are struggling to keep their cool.

In less polite news, one League of Legends pro challenged a streamer to an IRL cage match to decide which of them has to quit the game forever.

Riot Games is being held to ransom over League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics source code obtained through a recent cyber attack. 

In an update posted to Twitter, the developer explains that it has no plans to pay the demands of a ransom email received earlier today and that the team remains “confident that no player data or player personal information was compromised”. 

“Truthfully, any exposure of source code can increase the likelihood of new cheats emerging,” Riot says. “Since the attack, we’ve been working to assess its impact on anti-cheat and to be prepared to deploy fixes as quickly as possible if needed.”

Riot goes on to say that the hackers have obtained information on unreleased modes and experimental features, but warns that there’s “no guarantee” they’ll ever be fit to launch, as much as the developer hopes they will be one day. 

Moving forward, Riot’s security teams will continue working with consultants to evaluate and audit systems, with a further update to come. 

“We’re committed to transparency and will release a full report in the future detailing the attackers’ techniques, the areas where Riot’s security controls failed, and the steps we’re taking to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” the developer said.

“We’ve made a lot of progress since last week, and we believe we’ll have things repaired later in the week, which will allow us to remain on our regular patch cadence going forward. The League and TFT teams will update you soon on what this means for each game.”

Riot initially raised the alarm about the attack late last week, explaining that the social engineering attack would affect its ability to release content. 

Elsewhere, GTA Online is dealing with a security incident of its own, with a security-related update to come. 

A professional League of Legends player has challenged a streamer to a cage match, with the loser potentially set to quit the game forever.

Xie 'icon' Tian-Yu, who has played in China's League of Legends Pro League since 2015, had a recent disagreement with streamer Tian Huihui during a match in the game's Ranked Solo Queue, ending with icon issuing a challenge for Huihui to meet him in the Octagon.

That disagreement stemmed from icon's decision to play the character Brand, a fire mage, during a game in which he was matched alongside Huihui. icon took to the game's middle lane, a position typically reserved for magic-centric champions, but Brand's role has shifted over the years to that of support. As a result, the decision appears to have upset Huihui, who made his displeasure clear through the game's chat feature.

According to Sohu (translated via Google), the argument continued throughout the game until icon eventually challenged Huihui to an octagon cage fight. With his honour as a pro player reportedly besmirched, icon even bought Huihui a flight to Shanghai, where the fight is set to take place.

It's been hard to translate the terms from the Chinese DMs that icon and Huihui shared - even the form that the fight will take isn't clear, but a cage fight implies MMA. One thing, however, is more clear: the loser will have to "quit the network." It's not 100% certain what that means - China does boast a 'super server' on which its top League of Legends players compete, but it's also possible that "quit the network" means quitting LoL altogether.

The latter seems unlikely - icon is still under contract as a player, and to leave the game would be to turn his back on his entire career. Huihui, on the other hand, has suggested that if he were not to quit, he'd donate 1 million yuan (around $147,000) to charity, rather than give up his own livelihood. The match is set to take place on January 25, so we'll see who's forced to step down, and what action they take.

In a more wholesome move, a different League of Legends pro said he'd name his son after the character that made him world champion.

An unannounced League of Legends game appears to have leaked via the Korean game rating board.

As spotted by Gematsu, the listing is for a title called Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story, and a translated description confirms that the project is an action game featuring the League of Legends character Sylas. The only other information in the listing states that the game features "continuous battle scenes" against both human and non-human foes, but is suitable to players 12 years old and above, presumably suggesting that it's pretty light on the gore.

Mageseeker comes via Riot Forge, Riot's in-house game developer publishing smaller League of Legends experiences. So far, that's included turn-based RPG Ruined King and rhythm game Hextech Mayhem, which both launched in 2021. Also confirmed were the adventure game Song of Nunu, releasing this year, and action-platformer Convergence, which is still listed as "coming soon" on Steam.

While Convergence and Song of Nunu focus more on the isolated stories of specific characters, Mageseeker seems likely to follow in the footsteps of Ruined King, which expands one of League of Legends' most sprawling narratives, or Arcane, the animated series that tackled a broad array of characters from the same region.

Sylas fits within one of those broader narratives. The character was born with magic powers in the in-universe kingdom of Demacia, where such skills are outlawed. Imprisoned, Sylas manipulated Lux, a young noblewoman (hiding her own magical abilities) to break him free, whereupon he ignited a rebellion known as the Demacian Civil War. After that, he's hidden out in the frozen wastes in the far north of League of Legends' world, which is likely where we'll find him fighting those non-human foes.

There's no word on when we might see Mageseeker, but its presence within the ratings board suggests that it might not be very far away at all. 

It's been a rough week for Riot Games, which recently published a League of Legends trailer so bad it made fans think the game was dying. 

The developers of League of Legends have apologised for a new trailer so bad that it convinced some community members that the game was dying.

In a message on Twitter last night, Riot Games addressed the backlash to this year's new season cinematic. Each year, as LoL's competitive mode gets its annual restart, Riot traditionally releases a trailer putting its characters front and centre. My personal favourite is 2019's 'Awaken':

This year, the video is The Brink of Infinity. By contrast to the battle scenes that have dominated the new year cinematics in recent years, this year's effort is a realistic flythrough of League of Legends' map, Summoner's Rift, with a voiceover from a child understood to be the in-game character Pantheon.

In contrast to previous years, the video is pretty unimpressive, with players on Reddit describing it as an Unreal Engine demo rather than a creative outpouring from one of the biggest games in the world. But beyond those individual complaints, some have highlighted broader concerns.

League of Legends had a fairly lacklustre year in 2022. Its traditional roster expansion fell from six champions to five, with only one major overhaul of an existing character. The preseason - often a period of significant change - was muted, with one of its biggest 'new' features the return of a neutral monster that had to be cut from the game last year. After Arcane in 2021, we've had no follow-up, and many players have noted that the flow of in-game lore and storytelling has dried up significantly.

This is all set against the backdrop of comments by Nicolo Laurent, CEO of developer Riot Games, announcing that the company's 2023 budget is the biggest it's ever been. That might be good news for just League of Legends fans, but for the sheer breadth of content the company is currently working on. Not long ago, Riot only produced League of Legends, but it now makes several other ongoing games; Valorant, Wild Rift, Legends of Runeterra, and Teamfight Tactics all have dedicated teams behind them. It's also making an MMO and a fighting game, developing a second series of Arcane, publishing indie games through Riot Forge, and likely has plenty more happening behind the scenes - all while attempting to overhaul several of its domestic and international esports scenes.

That hive of activity paired with what appears to be a dearth of content for its 'bread and butter' title had the community in what almost amounted to all-out panic. On Reddit, some joked about ways that Riot could fill the apparent hole in its budget, while others asked whether it was time to worry that the game was nearing its sunsetting period. Necrit, a YouTuber so well-known for his breakdown of the game's lore that he was actually immortalised within the LoL universe, published a video in response to Brink of Infinity titled "League is ACTUALLY Dying." 

Riot has taken note, publishing a thread that was nearly unprecedented in its transparency. While the company is relatively vocal regarding upcoming features, I don't remember seeing such direct communication about a community uproar. The developer told fans that "unprecedented circumstances" led to an "alternate approach" for the Season 2023 video and acknowledged that Brink of Infinity "has led to further speculation about our investment in League."

The thread goes on to say "we should have been more communicative, which might have helped with some of that feeling and speculation. We do believe that League has a bright future and we are investing in that." More details on that investment are said to be coming "in the next couple of days."

It'll be interesting to see how Riot attempts to change the narrative. In reality, League of Legends itself seems to me to be in pretty good shape, especially for a game approaching its 14th birthday in 2023. Less new content isn't great news, but the impact of the pandemic on production schedules is still being felt, with the huge number of AAA games coming out this year indicative of the logjam we've seen elsewhere in the industry over the past few years. League of Legends isn't dying, but it's clear Riot has some work to do to convince fans that it's still kicking.

One former League of Legends pro is naming his son after the character that made him world champ.

League of Legends developer Riot Games has confirmed that Yuumi, arguably the least-popular champion in the game's 162-strong roster, is getting reworked to address ongoing frustrations with her design.

Introduced in 2019, Yuumi's main selling point is her ability to latch onto another character and become permanently untargetable. Unless her companion died (and there was no other ally nearby to jump to), Yuumi's enemies couldn't touch her. The original intention behind that design choice was to provide an avenue for new League of Legends players to learn the game from a position of relative safety, but the Magical Cat has proved hugely impactful at all levels of expertise, right up to professional play.

Riot acknowledges that despite all its attempts to curb her power, Yuumi remains unstable in solo queue, and "one of the premier champions in the last two World Championships." The most recent competition, which concluded in November, saw several key figures in the competitive community break ranks, complaining that Yuumi - a member of the fragile, healing-based 'enchanter' category of champions - could output more damage than her teams' DPS champs, offered a huge amount of extra utility, and could do it all from a position of unparalleled safety, untouchable while latched onto an ally.

That Riot's deciding to rework Yuumi is a notable decision in itself. Firstly, most champions that get a full gameplay update have been around significantly longer than this one - Yuumi only arrived in 2019, but Udyr, who got a full visual and gameplay update earlier this year, first showed up in 2009. Secondly, another major factor in determining reworks is a lack of popularity, but Yuumi has consistently been a recurring pick. There's plenty of solid reasoning as to why this change is being made, but it's still outside Riot's traditional remit.

There's no word on exactly how Yuumi will look once the rework comes through, but her ability to remain attached to allies is mentioned as an "essential" part of her kit. Increased counterplay is a major focus, as is her ability to grow in power as the game progresses.

One League of Legends pro is naming his son after the character that made him World Champion.

League of Legends developer Riot Games and Nerf have teamed up for a Jinx-themed blaster that'll eat your whole entire wallet with its giant movable jaws.

Fishbones is one of League of Legends hero Jinx's signature weapons, and it's now a real-life Nerf blaster measuring 35" in length and packing an 18-dart capacity drum. You can stuff six clusters of three darts inside the blaster's massive jaws, or you can proudly display your ridiculous League of Legends Jinx blaster with the included stand. To be frank, at $169, this seems more like a collector's item than something you'll want to be running around outside with. Hasbro notes that "everything comes in premium packaging that’s also designed for display."

However, if you do decide to show up everyone at your next Nerf battle, Hasbro recommends people bring face protection. After all, this pump-action blaster fires off three foam darts in a single shot, and if you've ever toyed around with the more premium Nerf product lines, you'll know these things can pack a serious punch. Although, since the in-game weapon is a rocket launcher, there might've been some missed potential in having the Nerf gun simply be compatible with normal-sized foam darts. Why not one giant Nerf dart that explodes with confetti when fired?

You can pre-order the League of Legends Jinx Nerf blaster through Hasbro's official website now, although orders aren't expected to ship until December 2023.

In case you missed it, Riot recently said it'll cancel the upcoming League of Legends MMO if it isn't "good enough."

The executive producer of the League of Legends MMO says that Riot will cancel the game if it's not good enough.

In an interview with Kanon, Greg 'Ghostcrawler' Street spoke about the MMOs like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14, suggesting that a major aspect of their success comes down to the budget its developers have to execute on their ideas. Asked whether he was happy with the amount of money Riot had given his project, Street said that "one of the nice things about Riot is that we're not going to run out of money."

With the global success of League of Legends bankrolling the company, Street says he's not facing "a publisher that's like 'you gotta ship by Christmas or we're cancelled'." Instead, he has to contend with quality - "Riot will cancel this game if the game isn't good enough. They're not gonna cancel the game because it gets too expensive."

To clarify that statement, Street says that "those go hand-in-hand. You can make a very expensive, bad game - and then I would get fired. We could make a less expensive game that still really captures hearts and minds, but it's not a blank cheque." Rather than invest in the costs of the LoL MMO, Riot could take that money and make a new game, or "double down on Valorant." To make his own case for more money, Street would have to consider Riot's perception of the project - "'How does the game look, what are playtesters saying, how are we doing about hitting our milestones?'"

"In the very simplest sense, you can think of it as 'you get some money, if you spend it well they're gonna give you more. If you don't spend it well, you're probably not. And in our case rather than shipping a bad game it would just get shitcanned."

This isn't the first time Street has spoken bluntly about the fate of the League of Legends MMO. Back in April, he pointed out that nothing is certain in games development, and that there's always a chance that the game won't ever ship. He's also spoken about the game's very early reveal, telling fans that the team expected the project to leak, and Riot decided it was better to get the news out itself. While development is said to be going well, it's likely to be several years before Riot begins showing off its MMO - if indeed it ever sees the light of day.

Meet the lore expert mapping out the League of Legends MMO years before its developers.

There are few rivalries in competitive League of Legends more hotly felt than the one between EU and NA. Of the game's four major regions, China and Korea have been the dominant forces for years, with Europe and America trash-talking about who gets to claim third place (I might be biased, but when it comes to international success, the winner is EU, no contest).

Last night saw the beginning of League of Legends' 2022 world championships (starring Lil Nas X). That old rivalry reared its head quickly, with the second game at the tournament pitting Europe's fourth seed, Fnatic, taking on NA's third seed, Evil Geniuses.

The game was a stomp. North America was ahead for a brief window right at the start of the game, but the rest of the match was, to quote one of its commentators, "a beatdown." Add in the fact that Fnatic was playing remotely and with a last-minute substitute due to COVID complications, and it was a terrible start for North America.

And that lousy start didn't seem to sit well with the moderators of the game's subreddit. At six million members, it's one of the biggest online forums for League of Legends out there, but in the wake of that first game, players began to notice that the page had been made private, allowing only "approved members" to take part in discussions.

The change was only temporary, and at the time of writing, the subreddit has been restored to its former state, but the moderation team's actions haven't gone unnoticed. In particular, dozens of comments citing the impact of Fnatic's substitute have been purged from the official post-match thread, as have those that called out the mods for locking the sub.

While EU fans are likely riding high right now (both of the region's representatives went undefeated on their first day at the tournament), there's still a long way to go. Worlds is a month-long spectacle, and even if Europe is currently coming out on top of this bitter inter-region rivalry, fans probably won't be laughing quite so hard when the likes of Korea and China start getting involved.

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A YouTuber is publicly mapping out the League of Legends MMO - potentially years before its developers.

Necrit is well known in the League of Legends community as one of the greatest experts of the game's labyrinthine lore. In fact, his expertise was deemed so impressive that he eventually earned himself a spot in that lore, with a voice acting role in last year's Ruined King: A League of Legends story. In that game, Necrit played an expository assistant - also named Necrit - who had unwillingly served alongside the game's villains.

Traditionally, Necrit's video's discuss the stories behind new characters or in-game events, but recently their attention has turned to the upcoming League of Legends MMO. And while Riot has been keeping deliberately quiet about its mysterious project, Necrit has been outlining the form it's likely to take in exhaustive detail.

In one video, Necrit explains how 'the World of Riot's MMO is already done'. There, they discuss that while gameplay and social features are key to an MMO's success, the third pillar of that success is an expansive, believable world. Fortunately for Riot, that world has been in place for years, and - as Necrit points out - is perfect for adapting into an evolving multiplayer title. The video below maps out each of the major regions, outlining the conflicts - and quest lines - at their hearts, and how the League of Legends MMO could expand its world over many years by expanding from place to place rather than dropping all at once.

That video garnered a lot of attention from MMO fans, with Riot's world drawing praise from the likes of veteran World of Warcraft personality Asmongold. In a recent follow-up, Necrit took a deeper look at the people who populated those regions, breaking down the races and classes likely to be available based on the characters that populate Riot's world – Final Fantasy 14 fans who play a Lalafell will likely find plenty to like about Yordles.

Necrit's videos are no guarantee of what Riot will eventually produce, but the YouTuber's knowledge of the world and straightforward breakdown of its intricacies that their speculation isn’t just some clumsy wishlist. It's an analysis of the groundwork that Riot has been laying for years, even if the developer itself isn't ready to publicly commit to those ideas. The League of Legends MMO is still a long way away, but when we eventually get to see it, don't be surprised to see more than a few of these ideas crop up.

The League of Legends MMO was revealed super early because Riot thought "it would likely leak anyway."

One of the biggest villains in League of Legends lore is getting a new skin that turns back the clock on his evil deeds.

Last night, some of the new skins heading to League of Legends' next patch appeared on the testing server. Among those was a skin named 'King Viego', a cosmetic for the sword-wielding champion introduced to the game last year. While the character, also known as the Ruined King, traditionally sports a shock of white hair, a ghostly crown, and a distinct bad-guy demeanour, the new skin offers a very different look.

In his new skin, Virgo wears a very real crown, as well as a kingly garb and a notable soft-boi expression. Down on one knee, he looks tenderly up at a woman in front of him whose hand he's holding. That woman is Isolde, Virgo's in-lore wife, whose death is responsible not only for his transformation from anime hero to anime villain, but into one of the biggest threats facing League of Legends lore. 

Hundreds of years before the current state of LoL's confusing narrative, Viego was king of the Blessed Isles, a beautiful and peaceful region of the game's world. After his wife took ill, however, he desperately sought a cure for her ailment, but Isolde eventually succumbed to her sickness. In one last attempt, Viego plunged her body into a sacred, healing pool at the heart of his kingdom. 

That one action immediately destroyed and corrupted the Blessed Isles, turning them into the corrupted and ghostly Shadow Isles, a region that remains a blight on Riot's entire world. It also transformed Viego into his undead state, but did nothing to sate his attempts to bring his wife back to him. In undeath, he continues to seek Isolde even at the expense of the rest of the world, and his efforts are a key pillar of Riot's storytelling. As well as an in-game lore event called The Ruination, Viego's efforts have surfaced in the wider League of Legends franchise in the standalone game The Ruined King, and in an upcoming book also called Ruination.

A single skin is unlikely to prove Viego's redemption. In fact, it's almost certainly tied into that novel, which releases next month. Nevertheless, it's an interesting choice, as Riot rarely opts for cosmetics that hark directly to characters' backstories or evolving narratives. In fact, other than those cosmetics released specifically for the Ruination event, some of the most recent such skins date all the way back to 2015.

One former League of Legends pro is naming his son after the character that made him world champion.