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League of Legends developer Riot has owned up to missteps in a recent update which made unlocking new characters a gargantuan, potentially 800-hour grind, admitting "we screwed up on this one" and promising reward improvements.
"We meaningfully screwed up on this one," a blog post from Meddler begins. "The numbers we shipped were pretty far off from what they should be for many of you. We’ll be putting out fixes for that during Patches 25.S1.2 and 25.S1.3."
The pain points highlighted here are Blue Essence and account XP, two resources that are essential to unlocking new stuff, especially playable characters. Riot says it intended for all players, especially new and casual players, to see a "meaningful increase" in Blue Essence payouts. Meddler says the dev also "didn't intend to change the number of games it takes to get access to Ranked" or the speed of leveling in general.
As you may have guessed, both of these things were, apparently inadvertently, chucked in the dumpster.
"For a lot of you, BE rates are significantly lower right now," Riot continues. "It also is meaningfully slower (up to 30%) to go from level 1 to 30 and to access Ranked. And, finally, we failed to communicate that the champion capsules from account level rewards after level 30 were being moved to the Pass when we talked about other changes in November."
How did this happen? It's a live service classic. A big part of the Essence problem is the result of changes evidently meant to help low-engagement players severely punishing more engaged players, especially those who are "incredibly efficient at finishing Pass Missions and completing Milestones." At worst, "super high" engagement players could see up to 71% lower Essence in a season.
"We missed the mark a lot for other players, especially those who play a lot," Riot summarizes.
To fix this, Riot says it will "significantly increase the free Pass earn rates," demonstrated by the table below.
"In short, we’re increasing the total BE from Milestones from 4750 to 9000, and we’re increasing repeatable Epilogue milestones from 50 to 750 BE," Meddler clarifies. Since players have already earned a chunk of Milestones in the ongoing Act 1 Pass, the dev is giving out 4,250 Blue Essence through an easy one-time mission coming in patch 25.S1.3 to retroactively compensate. Going forward, new Milestones will just pay out more.
"We’re also going to be changing the final Champion Capsule in the Pass to a Glorious Champion Capsule starting in the Act 2 Pass," the post adds. "When it comes to account XP, we’ll be increasing account XP earned by 40%. That should ensure that the average number of games to 30/Ranked access is close to or slightly quicker than where it was beforehand."
Riot closes with a look at how these problems really happened. When players ran the numbers and started kicking off, Riot checked its math and "realized that we didn’t factor in the First Win of the Day experience into our calculations for BE income – both directly from that XP boost and the indirect faster access to Champion Capsules from account leveling." A similar thing happened with XP: "We hadn’t accounted for the loss of FWotD, which meant drastically slowing the progression of accounts and therefore access to Ranked."
As it rolls out a make-good sum of Essence and updates reward and XP pacing, Riot says it will be "digging more into exactly why this slipped through to begin with, and how we can prevent similar issues from arising in the future." Hell hath no fury like a League player scorned.
The immediate response to these changes has been positive overall, but players were quick to question the post-pass reward track and again push for the return for free Hextech chests – another casualty of the new pass system. Riot's Twitter post on this news is an especially loud chorus of chest enthusiasts.
