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Riot unveils 2025 plans for ‘distinct, thematic seasons’ in latest League of Legends Dev Blog
Riot just dropped their latest dev blog and it covers a lot of updates on goodies we can expect in the coming months.
Distinct, Thematic Seasons
The main headline is their revealed plans for the seasons in 2025. While keeping the count at 3, Riot is now looking to implement a “distinct, thematic season” with the goal of creating better narratives as well as more of a feeling of progression. This also includes content updates to come.
Each season in 2025 onwards will include a champion that is a “core part of that season’s thematic. Riot has actually slowed down their champion output in 2024. In 2023, 4 champions were released: Milio, Naafiri, Briar, and Hwei. That number plummeted to 2 in 2024 with Smolder and Aurora, however, we still have a few months left in the year, so that may very well change.
With this latest news, Riot has all but confirmed that they will be standardizing their champion output to a minimum of 3 champions per year, moving forward. While this may be exciting, the climb each season will be all the more challenging with new champions to master and battle.
League Player Days
Riot has also revealed that they will be unveiling a new celebration of all things player-related from over the last 15 years. This will include 3 themed days to celebrate players, entitled Creative Day, Music Day, and Esports Day. Each day will include stories from players around the globe sharing what League of Legends means to them.
Each ‘Player Day’ will also include a skin:
- Cosplayer Neeko
- Esports Fan Trundle
- K/DA Gragas
Furthermore, to celebrate the anniversary, Sivir will also be receiving a skin: an Ann-Sivir-sary Skin (it was Riot’s idea of a joke, I swear!)
Social Impact
Between the 9th of October to the 28th, every purchase, a 100% of the proceeds will go to the Riot Games Social Impact Fund. Furthermore, Riot Games has pledged to match at a rate of 3 times to also go to their Social Impact Fund.
Catch Up With the Devs
THere will also be a small Dev Q & A on the 9th of October, to kick off Player Days, set for 2 pm Pacific Time. No major announcement is expected from this session.
Teemo Update
A long overdue update will be coming to Summoner’s Rift’s favorite little gremlin. Teemo will be receiving updates to his visuals, audio, animations, and splash art in Patch 14.20.
The following skins will also be raised in price to reflect the upgraded quality of the skins: Happy Elf, Recon, and Badger. Prices will be raised from 520RP to 750RP. Much like the Lee Sin update, players can purchase the skins before the patch goes live.
Teemo will also be receiving his very own theme song, set to come out next week.
League of Legends Matchmaking: Autofill Situation Resolved?
Riot Phroxzon quickly dropped by to update us as well on the recently completed successes of the matchmaking team. A bug earlier in the year that caused some accounts to enter a ‘negative LP state’ causing them to lose more than they gained even when the accounts were supposed to be climbing has now been resolved.
The main focus was on the autofill mechanic and how, especially in high elo, that can drastically affect the outcome of the match. After the changes in 14.17, a drop was reported in autofill discrepancy (where there were 2 or more players autofilled on a team) from 10-15% to less than 0.1%.
Riot has revealed that their next focus with regards to matchmaking will be on reducing the discrepancy where one team has an autofill and the other doesn’t.
In conjunction with that, they are currently testing a new system called ‘TrueSkill2’, a system designed to help better place new accounts as well as improve smurf detection.
Game Modes Updates: Swarm and Arena Will NOT be Permanent Fixtures
Overall the year was a success for game modes with both Arena and Swarm seeing incredible numbers and play hours from the players. Eduardo Cortejoso of the Modes team has revealed that Arena will not be permanent.
This is likely to the dismay of quite a number of players, of whom the gamemode has quickly found a fan following for the creative playstyle it encourages.
The reason for its non-return at this juncture, was revealed to be that despite the gamemode doing strong numbers on initial release, around the 2 month mark would always see a big dropoff in game hours and engagement, meaning that even with efforts to spice up Arena, it just doesn’t have the draw to keep players invested in long-term spurts.
Arena is set to return in the first half of next year with new Quality of Life changes, as well as more augments for players to experiment with.
Moreover, Swarm is also another gamemode Riot has no current intention to keep on as a permanent fixture. The popular gamemode took the community by storm just some months ago on its release and surpassed both the Star Guardian and Odyssey game modes in popularity. Riot did not completely rule out the return of Swarm, so fingers crossed, one day it’ll return.
ARAM was hinted at, that something ‘new and exciting’ could be expected to land by the end of the year.
Lastly, Ultimate Spellbook will be the next game mode to come into the rotation - expect it in the next path. Stay tuned for an in-depth guide from us on how to maximize your enjoyment of this gamemode!
For the latest League of Legends news, follow Strafe Esports. To follow everything on Worlds 2024, check out our full guide. Also, follow the Strafe YouTube channel for exclusive interviews with players and coaches.
Credit: Riot Games
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