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Riot Games currently finds itself in hot water for purposely making it nearly impossible for players to grind and play their way through unlocking one of the newest champions for League of Legends.
Riot’s flagship title, League of Legends, isn’t the first game to introduce the freemium monetization model, but it was one of the titles that helped popularize it. Since its release, the free-to-play MOBA has allowed players to unlock playable characters, called champions, by either paying for them using the game’s premium currency, RP, or earning Blue Essence from completing missions, leveling up, and opening Champion Capsules.
Obviously, the fastest way to unlock one of the game’s nearly 170 champions is to pay for them using RP.
However, for years, free-to-play players have always had the option to play hundreds of hours to unlock all the champions. While players can still do this as of the game’s latest season, it will now take many times longer than before.
According to League of Legends content creator Remus, from now on, players who hit level 30 will no longer receive a Champion Capsule every time they level up. Riot has also since removed the 50 Blue Essence reward for your first win of the day in exchange for Battle Pass XP.
To make matters worse, completing the Battle Pass over the course of the game’s eight-week season and four out of the game’s five repeatable milestones will now only grant 50 Blue Essence each. This is only a fraction of the average cost of a new League of Legends champion at 4,800 each.
We can’t say exactly if Remus’ claims of a minimum 882-hour playtime to unlock a new League of Legends champion is accurate. But most agree that the estimate isn’t too far off.
The good news is that all the noise doesn’t seem to have fallen on deaf ears. Now that the discussion has gone viral, Riot has responded. League Studio head Andre van Roon recently addressed the concerns on X, saying, “Unlocking new champions via blue essence wasn’t meant to get harder. Digging in to understand whether something isn’t functioning as intended now.”
It’s unclear when changes are coming, but the phrasing suggests that Riot is looking into tweaking how the current system works. It better make haste, though. It can’t afford to waste the momentum the game is currently getting from new players who are only just discovering the decade-old MOBA title because of the critically acclaimed animated show Arcane, which recently enjoyed the successful premiere of its second season on Netflix.
