After Initially Defending Slow Blue Essence Gains In League Of Legends, Riot Games Returns To Say "We Meaningfully Screwed Up"

This past November, Riot Games announced big changes coming to the way seasons work in League of Legends, and updates coming to the rewards systems in the MOBA. On paper, the team said moving many of the game's rewards into the free track of the battle pass and having most other things feed that battle pass made reward farming easier. However, the devs forgot to mention back in November that level up reward capsules after level 30 would be moved to the pass, too.

This had two knock-on effects. It took players longer to level up to unlock ranked play and it took WAY longer to farm up Blue Essence, one of the main currencies used to unlock content. One reddit post claimed that the new rates meant an "882 hour" grind to unlock a new champion for free. Initially, Riot staff joined in on the discussion to somewhat defend the rates and bat down the arguments that the new system was far inferior. Those initial replies were downvoted to hell and back and you can view them in images on PCGamer.

Fast forward and it turns out that Riot did, in fact, "meaningfully" screw up. From a new post on the official site, "TL;DR: We meaningfully screwed up on this one. 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."

After going back and running the math for 4 different types of players, Low, Medium, High, and Super High based on their predilection for playing Pass efficiency, it turns out that Blue Essences gains were slightly up (just under 7%) for low players, but every other category of player had huge decreases in gains, with Super High players getting rocked with over a 71% decrease.

The team says this was absolutely not intended and found the "mistake."

The culprit? Oh, you're going to love this one...

Apparently the First Win of the Day experience wasn't taken into account and that had an impact "both directly from that XP boost and the indirect faster access to Champion Capsules from account leveling. As for account XP, the problem is very similar—we hadn’t accounted for the loss of FWotD, which meant drastically slowing the progression of accounts and therefore access to Ranked."

Riot will be investigating how this slipped through the cracks and will be making modifications to the Blue Essence gains in the pass. "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."

However, these changes will come before the season's Act 2 release. Since Act 1 is already underway, the team will instead drop a one-time payment of 4250 Blue Essence through a one-time easily-completable Mission, which will go live by Patch 25.S1.3. You'll receive this whether you complete the pass or not.