League of Legends players are up in arms after an update to get rid of 'unnecessary complexity' makes it a struggle for new players to earn anything

League of Legends season 1 saw a bunch of new features and changes made, including a new thematic that revolves around Noxus, a change to ranked resets, and a more streamlined reward system. While the last change may seem like a smart idea, it's wound up causing more harm than good for some players.

"Over the years these systems have become needlessly complex, with an excessive number of currencies, unnecessary steps to craft and claim rewards, overlapping loot types, we could go on," developer Andrei Van Roon says in a dev update. "You've been given some key fragments that you then have to craft into a key that you pair with a chest, that you open up to get another key and a chest and some essence that you open up to get a skin shard then you pay for some orange essence or reroll to eventually get a random skin. That's sort of a level of unnecessary complexity going on."

Another problem with rewards in League of Legends was that everything was scattered throughout the client. It was needlessly hard to keep track of how to get rewards and where they ended up. So, to solve the issue of unorganised rewards, the developers decided to just put it all in one place: the battle pass.

"We're moving most of our scattered reward systems to the free track of those battle passes," Roon says. "So most rewards will now be in one place, with systems like Honor and Champion Mastery feeding into the pass. For example, having a higher Honor level will give a bonus to past experience earned.

"There will always be a battle pass active with both a free and a paid track, with the price the same as an Event Pass today. You'll get Pass rewards through the tracks, meaning we're removing the Event Tokens and Shop."

It seems that after this patch, it will take 882 hours to get a new hero for free。 from r/leagueoflegends

Unfortunately, streamlining rewards isn't the only consequence of these changes. Some players realised that this reliance on the battle pass now means level-up rewards are non-existent, making it harder for new players to unlock champions and skins.

"It seems that after this patch, it will take 882 hours to get a new hero for free," cpztpkqc says. "Right now, you can only get Blue Essence from the Battle Pass. After you grind through the first 50 levels, you need to play for 882 hours to unlock a single extra champion! Is League of Legends deliberately trying to shut out all newcomers?"

It used to be that players could get champion capsules after reaching a new level. Those provide champion shards and/or Blue Essence, which you could then use to unlock new champions. But you now have to get these entirely from the battle pass.

However, the battle pass will still provide some good incentives via free rewards for players to earn. "You can earn 12 skins per year with the free pass. Half of these skins will be themed to the season you unlock them in," Roon says. "We'll also be simplifying the loot and crafting system... Overall, we want the pass to be the core vessel for how you track and earn rewards. If you choose to buy the paid version, we also want it to be very clear what you're getting and how to make the most of it."

For the most part, players are angry on behalf of newcomers who won't have access to the 169 champions, and will now have to work even harder to unlock the roster. Or for casual players who don't want to invest a ton of time and money into League of Legends but still want to be rewarded for the effort they do put in.

"So, they have not only removed the weekly chests that kept the casual players that play very seldom in the game, [but also got] rid of the champion capsules once you level up, nerfing the pass and releasing deteriorated [skins] in terms of quality," one player says. "They really want to kill their own game by being anti-f2p."

League of Legends is 16 years old now, and has had a famously hard time when it comes to fostering new players. Last year, a senior Riot developer reported that the League of Legends playerbase is getting older: "Candidly, it's not the same situation it was 10 years ago."

Even after the success of Arcane, a report from Bloomberg suggested that Riot still couldn't retain the new players that it caught through the animated series. So making progression less rewarding may not be a step in the right direction for League of Legends, not if they want to encourage new players to withstand the onslaught of flaming from their angry teammates who, in my experience, zero in on newbs from miles away.