Andrei "Meddler" van Roon and Paul "Pabro" Bellezza explain why the choice was made in a dev update, but it still hasn't gone over well with fans.

Meddler says Hexchests, which were part of a system that rewarded good plays and nice behavior with components you could use to unlock skins, were "A great player experience, but it was not sustainable for League in the long term."

Pabro adds, "Increasing the number of skins we can make each year was good for both the business and the player experience, but eventually we ran into meaningful diminishing returns."

So, the decision was made to remove Hextech chests entirely, meaning you have to spend money if you want new skins. This has been done to "ensure League remains a great, fully free-to-play game," but it's irritating nonetheless.

"Just wanted to mention how some of the best Rioters ever got tired of the company and left to make a superior game with a friendly monetization system and unique gameplay," writes one fan of Supervive in a quote tweet response to the dev update. "With league imploding, Supervive is worth your consideration! Give it a shot," writes another, sharing a video of a new Supervive patch that went live the day after League's dev update.

Supervive is a "MOBA battle royale meets hero shooter" that launched in November, 2024. However, despite this "play Supervive" campaign, its player count hasn't gone up by that much these past few days.

According to SteamDB, since February 7, where the concurrent player count was 2,921, it rose to a height of 3,875 on February 10. It's a respectable increase, but the game had just over 4,000 players on January 26.

The player count is fairly steady, consistently over 2,000, so if you do want to give it a go, you shouldn't have any trouble finding a match. It's a free-to-play early access game that you can download from Steam.

In the meantime, check out some of the best online games you can play right now.

"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.

League of Legends co-creator responds to report that Arcane was a "financial miss," says "people think we make things like Arcane to sell skins, when in reality we sell skins to make things like Arcane."

When it comes to unlocking new League of Legends champions, if you don't want to splash the cash on League's premium currency, RP (which can be used to quickly unlock the game's now almost 170-character roster), you can also spend Blue Essence – usually earned from leveling up, opening Champion Capsules, and completing missions. While it takes time, it ensures that even free-to-play players can get their hands on all the champions eventually. However, with the start of League of Legends' latest season, it's been suggested that it could now take around 882 hours after completing the Battle Pass to unlock a single one this way.

As explained by content creator Remus on YouTube, from now on, once you hit level 30, you'll no longer receive a Champion Capsule every level up, and on top of that, your first win of the day will no longer grant the 50 Blue Essence it once did, instead giving out Battle Pass XP. Speaking of the Battle Pass, in the current eight-week season, only three Champion Capsules are included, alongside 4,750 Blue Essence in the first 50 milestones. 

After completing the whole thing, four out of the five repeatable milestones will grant 50 Blue Essence each, which really isn't much. Thankfully, you still won't have to spend a penny to earn any of it, but for reference, champions cost you 7,800 Blue Essence on the week of their release. After dropping to 6,300 for their first two seasons, their price varies, but Riot previously claimed the "majority" are 4,800 each. With that in mind, you'll probably be able to get one new champion with this Battle Pass, unless you grind those repeatable milestones endlessly, which is probably where the supposed 882-hour figure comes from. Whether this is accurate is another matter, so I decided to do some of my own estimations. 

If we take a 4,800 Blue Essence champion, you'd have to level up 120 times after completing the Battle Pass to earn enough (that's accounting for the 24 repetitions of those same five milestones you'd need to do). As for how long that'd take, I deferred to GamesRadar+'s in-house LoL enjoyer Ali Jones, who reckons it takes him roughly between five and 10 hours of gameplay to earn one or two level ups. If we call that five hours per level up, that's 600 hours you can expect to spend after completing the battle pass. Obviously, there are various factors at play here, so that estimate is far from concrete, but all you need to know is that it's a lot. 

Thankfully, there is a glimmer of hope, as the head of League Studio, Andrei van Roon, states: "Unlocking new champions via Blue Essence wasn't meant to get harder. Digging in to understand whether something isn't functioning as intended now." With that in mind, it sounds like there could be more changes to come.

If so, it won't be the only alteration coming to League of Legends, as lead gameplay designer Matt Leung-Harrison has confirmed plans to "replace First Blood as a Feat." Feats of Strength is a first-to-two competition with three possible 'Feats' to accomplish – you can destroy the first turret, score first blood, or slay three epic monster camps – in order to receive the Blessing of Noxus bonus for a buff to your tier-2 boots (and make tier-3 boots available in the shop). 

In a new tweet, Leung-Harrison acknowledges that while Riot doesn't think snowballing (essentially, building momentum after gaining an advantage, to the point where you become basically unstoppable) is "much higher than the previous season, if at all," the "perception" is that it's higher now, partially thanks to "the visibility of the Feats reward." The team "wanted the Feats system to create more reward satisfaction, focus and tension around prioritizing early objectives," but know that "First Blood is causing too much friction for the satisfaction and clarity of gaining it."

Leung-Harrison explains: "As a result, we're going to change it either in 15.2 or 15.3. Candidly, we messed up here and it should have been changed pre-release, but we're going to own that mistake, learn from it and do better for next time."

All in all, it's not been smooth sailing so far for Welcome to Noxus: Act 1, but at least Riot seems to be aware of the main complaints. Here's hoping we get swift fixes, especially before new players commit to the ridiculous grind that can now be expected to unlock all of League's champions.

For more games like League of Legends, be sure to check out our picks for the best MOBAs and best PC games.

That comes from Valve dev 'Yoshi' on the official Deadlock Discord server, who explains that the schedule adjustments will "help improve our development process." They elaborate: "While it was very helpful for us in the beginning, we've found that our fixed two-week cycle has made it more difficult for us to iterate on certain types of changes internally, as well as sometimes not giving enough time for the changes themselves to settle externally before the next update came around."

Because of this, Valve is altering things so that "major patches will no longer be on a fixed schedule," which means they'll be "a little bit more spaced out," but when they do arrive, you can expect them to be "larger than before," so that's exciting. Don't worry, hotfixes will still be "released as needed," so players won't be left waiting forever for crucial fixes – the changes just seem to apply to the (previously) fortnightly updates.

With no more schedule to follow, it's hard to know at this point how often we can expect these major Deadlock updates to roll out, but Valve clearly still has plenty planned, as Yoshi adds: "We look forward to fleshing out the game in the new year."

While Deadlock was floating around in the ether for some time, it wasn't until August last year that Valve officially lifted the curtain on its Steam storefront page. Unfortunately, it didn't take long for cheaters to pose an issue, but developer Yoshi confirmed in September that Valve was "working on anti-cheat," at least. At the time of writing, we still don't know when Deadlock is going to escape its invite-only existence, or when its actual, full launch will be upon us, but based on Yoshi's recent statement, it sounds like things are expected to move even smoother behind the scenes thanks to this schedule change.

Risk of Rain co-creator led the design of one of Deadlock's new heroes, to the surprise of no one: "Viper is such a Hopoo character."

Arcane writer and producer Amanda Overton said as much in an interview with this site here (GamesRadar+), specifically calling out Mel Medarda as the most likely candidate thanks to her badass magical powers. "I think we were all, in the writers' room, thinking 'we're making something badass and unique here - hopefully, fingers crossed, they'll put her in the game.' I think that was always our hope that some of the characters in the show would go to the game and vice versa," she said.

No original Arcane characters have crossed back into Riot Games' MOBA just yet, but there's plenty of reason to believe that'll change soon. Mel's mother Ambessa just joined the fight recently, and leaks suggest that Mel herself won't be far behind - she might even be League of Legends' first new character of 2025, though Riot Games itself hasn't formally announced anything.

"We always knew that Mel would be a mage, and she would have this arc, and we also always knew what her powers would be," Overton continued, before explaining that the team thought it would be "very interesting to give someone a power that's like a mirroring power, because they can beat anyone... they could be up against the most powerful mage, and they could beat them. To me, that is infinitely interesting."

"It's also 'why not give it to a woman?' We're known for being motherly, we're known for being empathetic. And Mel was that character in the show. As much as she tried to have that hard shell around her, she always had that."

Arcane writer shares she wants to go with a new story in the League of Legends universe. 

Speaking in a recent interview with Gizmodo, Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill explains why the reset marked a positive turn for the new MMO. "The reset has dramatically increased the likelihood of success," says Merrill. "I fundamentally believe in the Ed Catmull [quote] where he said, 'You can give a great idea to a mediocre team, and they'll make it mediocre. You can give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they'll make it great.'"

He continues: "We must ensure we have great teams with great vision, perspective, and direction. And if that's not true, then our ability to make something worthy of the high expectations of our audience is pretty much zero. There's so much content in the world: social media content, incredible stuff all over streaming, tons of games available, and much of the world doesn’t need more mediocre stuff. It needs great things."

According to the lead, these are what Riot "needs to be focused on making" now. "That starts with people and team, direction and alignment around that particular strategy, and what must be true to deliver that. We're in the [fortunate] position because of the incredible games that we've created so far, this massive community that we have, and this incredible IP that we've been investing in building for 18 years, people want to run around the world of Runeterra."

Merrill goes on: "We do, too. We take the responsibility very seriously to deliver something great and worthy of our expectations - and everything happening, including that pivot and direction and reset, is oriented to be able to try to deliver on their expectations." The reset being a good thing for Riot isn't all that surprising, though. After all, just last month Merrill also revealed the MMO has "a lot of momentum" and "a great direction" despite resetting.

Riot Games cracks down on Valorant and League of Legends streamers who promote boosting, smurfing, and buying accounts

You might often skip through and tick off an online game's terms of service agreement to quickly get to the shooting and/or slashing as soon as possible, but buried within the fine print is a solid list of dos and don'ts. Cheats, like ones that automatically perfect your aim, are explicitly banned in most games, for example, and now, the studio behind Valorant and League of Legends has added a few more "don'ts" to the list that mostly affect content creators.

In its most recent blog post, Riot Games reiterates that stream sniping is not allowed. For anyone not in the know, stream sniping is where someone uses an opponent's livestream against them to, let's say, take note of enemy positions or unfairly spawn kill foes. It's hard to prove, so Riot is now in the "early testing phases" of creating a penalty system that'll soon let you report players who you think might be stream sniping.

Things get a little juicier as Riot Games turns its gaze to "content that promotes breaking our terms of service." It seems streamers and content creators have made a habit of accepting sponsorships from websites that are built around breaking the company's terms of service. Some websites might offer boosting services (hiring high-skilled players to play on your account), smurfing (playing on a different account to match with lower-skilled foes), and buying/selling accounts - all of which are against Riot's own rules. "If a creator is sponsored by a boosting website, promotes ways for players to buy and sell accounts, or otherwise does anything that encourages players to break our rules, we may suspend access to your Riot accounts," the company writes.

For now, you can check out the best MOBA games and best FPS games if you’re in the mood for something similar to either League of Legends of Valorant. 

This article contains spoilers for the finale of Arcane season 2.

Last year, Riot confirmed that Arcane is official League of Legends canon, pledging to gradually undo "inconsistencies that have woven their way into the storytelling and worldbuilding of Runeterra." To be fair, the finale of Arcane certainly offers up some of those inconsistencies with League of Legends. The fates of several characters that are alive and unharmed in the main game are a matter for some debate. Caitlyn's injuries have likely cut her sharpshooter career pretty short; Heimerdinger was vaporized in an alternate dimension at worst and teleported to a different pocket dimension at best; Jayce and Viktor were scattered throughout the timeline; while Jinx and Vander are MIA.

Only Vi and Ekko remain definitively alive and unscathed, but perhaps the most egregious diversion from LoL canon belongs to Ambessa. Introduced to League of Legends just before Arcane season 2 aired, the character is already dead. As a Noxian, there's some speculation that her peoples' powerful attachment to various forms of necromancy could mean her story isn't over yet, but there's a sentiment among some sections of the community that her introduction to LoL was a waste of time – why would you want to play as a character that's already dead in the canon?

A rolling golem

It's not an opinion I agree with – Ambessa's backstory is already well fleshed-out, within and without the show. But root a little deeper into that feeling, and you'll find a whole ream of fans struggling to find their faves in the canon. Perhaps chief among them is Blitzcrank, a massive metal golem originally created to help with Zaun's toxic waste problem. In the official lore, the inert husk of one of these golems was uncovered by Viktor, who used Hextech to augment the automaton into an intelligent ally. In Arcane, that doesn't happen, and the result is that some players feel Blitzcrank has been written out of the canon. If his creator got atomized before he could ever put his great golem together, surely there's no way Blitzcrank can exist within that canon?

No-one else has been unwritten quite as egregiously as Blitzcrank, but there's a whole suite of characters that don't have a home within Arcane. Officially, the cities of Piltover and Zaun are home to 22 in-game characters, only ten of whom appear in the show. A couple more are the subjects of easter eggs or fan theories, but even some of the game's most totemic figures are missing. The least charitable reading of their absence – one that I've seen repeated multiple times since the final dropped – is that those characters have been written out of League of Legends canon. If they're not on-screen, living and breathing, the sentiment appears to be that they might as well not exist anymore. It's an argument I've got no time for.

When I started playing League of Legends, the titular league was essentially the United Nations, with judicial 'summoners' possessing its representatives so they could settle political grudge matches. Any in-game storytelling was handled not by beautiful animated shows or even by fancy trailers, but mostly by an in-universe newspaper. Since then, lore has been rebooted and rewritten multiple times, but I bring up these poorly-aged, long-since retconned narrative tools to highlight the fact that it's been a decade or more since the League of Legends was a physical entity that required each of its characters to occupy the same space and time. The modern game owes more to Super Smash Bros than international relations – characters are plucked from their continuities, their exact relationship to one another often reliant on nebulous timelines or overarching sentiments. Most of the time, the 'canon' version of a given character is replaced by one taken from a parallel universe. The in-game cosmetics of Jinx alone cast her as an anime girl, a Guardian of the Galaxy, an apocalypse fighter, a different anime girl, and a waitress in a cosplay cafe. 

The whimsy attached to some of that storytelling is a big reason why some of those characters didn't appear in Arcane. If Viktor had suddenly revealed that he'd been building a big sentient robot throughout act 2, it would have felt just as anachronistic as if Jinx had rocked up in her Star Guardian uniform at the end of episode 9 – or if Twitch, a gross, crossbow-wielding rat, or Seraphine, a glossy, Swift-style popstar, had shown up to defend Piltover. That's to say nothing of characters who are broadly understood to exist further up or down the timeline than these versions of Jinx and Vi, or to even touch on how a narrative that even its creator admits struggled with feeling rushed would deal with introductions to another dozen or more characters.

There are a whole bunch of ways to explain why certain characters were acknowledged and others not, why particular moments in their stories were highlighted, invented, or ignored. But at the end of all of it, the only real important answer to any question about why Arcane made certain decisions about League of Legends canon is 'because it made a good show'. As a 13-year veteran of the game, I've seen the lore chopped and changed more times than I could possibly count, and as the end of all that, I got to watch Arcane, an acclaimed, beloved, astonishingly beautiful series that has raised bars not just for video game adaptations, but for serialized, mature animation everywhere. To be presented with that multi-year, hundred million dollar investment, and to step away from it complaining that there weren't more easter eggs is the peak of banality, and it's a criticism I hope Riot and Fortiche don't spend a moment entertaining.

Now that it's all over, check out our Arcane season 2 review.

"Following the release of the second season of Arcane, a Visual and Gameplay Update (VGU) will be released for Viktor, which will arrive on PBE tomorrow," Riot explains in a press release. "The update will feature new art and an updated backstory for Viktor, better aligning him to the Viktor fans were shown in Arcane, but largely retain his core gameplay apart from a slight functional and thematic change to his ultimate, which will now get larger with every kill until the end of the ability’s duration."

The devs go into a bit more detail on what to expect in the video below - but those details, I should warn, come with a spoiler warning for the Arcane season 2 finale. Skip the video and stop reading now if you want to heed that warning.

"We're not pulling a Gangplank and disabling him because he's dead," League studio head Andrei 'Meddler' van Roon jokes. "Well hold on," executive producer Paul 'Pabro' Bellezza teases. "I think you're on to something with killing Gangplank and other characters." But it seems that's all just a joke. (For now, at least.)

The exact nature of the art and backstory changes remain to be seen, but Viktor has historically sported a very different look between show and game. You can see Riot's teaser for at least one of the new skins below.

Arcane hasn't gotten any League of Legends characters killed in-game, Gangplank-style, but this is the second character to get an Arcane-inspired revamp. Around the release of Arcane season 1 back in 2021, Caitlyn got an Art & Sustainability Update (ASU) that brought the in-game character much closer to her appearance in the show.

Arcane may be over, but a new League of Legends show is already a year into development.

This article contains spoilers for Arcane season 2.

In the course of Arcane season 2, Mel Medarda is captured by the Black Rose. She's able to escape their magical chains, however, thanks to her innate magical abilities - glowing gold, she bursts free of her thorny prison, before returning to Piltover with a series of spells at her disposal. Most relevant to the plot is a magical shield, which is able to withhold various weapons, even dispelling and reflecting a bullet at close range. Elsewhere, she's able to move enemies around, and make use of some bursts of damage too.

Mel's reveal is 100% champion material. She's got a full roster of spells that's perfect for a League of Legends character, she's got a series of visual effects that would be ideal for an ultimate ability, and her magical form even comes with her launch cosmetic ready-made. She fits snugly into the stories of several different characters, and you'll never convince me that she's not set-up to be the game's next champion.

Riot has stayed awfully quiet about its new arrivals this year. The last we heard about what was to come was in January, when the company introduced Smolder, who arrived on the Rift at the start of the year, and Aurora, who was teased ahead of her release in July. There was also a tease of the newest arrival, Mel's mother Ambessa Medarda, who was released just before the start of season 2, and a mention of a visual update that's almost certainly about to be made to Viktor. Beyond that, however, the only clue we have about anything to come in 2025 is from that January video, when we learned there was another champion in the works who "should be a familiar face to all of you." Perhaps that was Ambessa, but maybe it was Mel - Riot's silence is likely to have been an attempt to ensure Arcane didn't get spoiled because any clues could have given the story away.

Actually, I'm so convinced it's Mel that I even know what type of character she'll be. A character who's less physically able but defends herself with magical shields and disruptive abilities, and is shown fighting in close connection with Caitlyn, an in-game Marksman? Mel is an Enchanter Support, a long-running stalwart of the League of Legends roster that's gone largely underserved over the years. 2023 offered us Milio and 2022 introduced Renata Glasc, two anti-engage enchanters, but I'd argue you need to go back to 2019's Yuumi to find a reasonable Mel-equivalent (apologies, Senna and Seraphine fans), and back to 2012's Nami before that.

I might be more of a tank player nowadays, but I love an enchanter - Lulu remains one of my most-played champions, her shields and disruptive spells a quintessential example of the class. My needs have felt a little underserved in the past few years by a handful of releases that try to do very different things with what these characters do, but Mel seems as though they're back to that highly protective part of the archetype. Arcane might be over, but its characters are still making their impact on the world, and I can't wait.

I'm also quite the fan of a certain Zaunite loose cannon - so what happened to Jinx in Arcane season 2?

T1, led by undisputed League of Legends GOAT Faker, has won the game's world championship five times. For those keeping score, that's four times more than any other team has managed, and as of the 2024 tournament, includes two sets of back-to-back wins. The run between 2023 and 2024 alone is one of the most impressive achievements in the scene by itself, with the roster of Faker, Zeus, Oner, Keria, and Gumayusi staying together to win those two titles. Sadly, however, there will be no three-peat, as T1 announced top laner Zeus' departure from the team earlier today.

While many of the team's players have already re-signed for the 2025 series, the team confirmed today that 'Zeus' Choi Woo-je's contract had ended. Even if all four of the other T1 members stick with the team, it remains the end of an era, as expressed emphatically by former LoL pro and major streamer Caedral, who described the newly undone team as the "greatest roster of all time."

That's a big claim, but it's one that probably does stand up. Even T1's dominant 2015/16 team wasn't an exact replica of its former self - 2015 top laner Marin was replaced in 2016 by Duke, while substitutes Easyhoon and Blank swapped into the mid-lane and jungle roles respectively (the former in 2015, the latter in 2016). Few players have ever won more than one major international title, and no team has ever run it back with the exact same roster to claim successive Worlds wins. While T1 already has precedent for winning back-to-back world titles with a new top laner, there's already a feeling within the community that this is the end of an era, whether or not the new team can improve on its already world-leading run.

Don't cry because it's over, cry because the Arcane season 2 release schedule means act 3 is almost here.

This article contains spoilers for Arcane Season 2.

As Riot began to tease the second season of its animated show, players began to notice that Vi - the long-imprisoned street rat who many saw as a symbol of the show's undercity - appeared to have joined the Enforcers, an oppressive police force. Unfortunately for those newer fans, League of Legends players had limited sympathy - after all, both Vi and Caitlyn have been positioned as law enforcement since their inception a decade before Arcane ever existed.

With the first three episodes of Arcane now released as part of the Arcane Season 2 release schedule, Vi wrestles repeatedly with her new role. Caitlyn, on the other hand, does not - driven by grief, she not only begins to lose herself in pursuit of Jinx, but is willing to aid Ambessa in placing Piltover under martial law. It's a rapid descent towards brutality for a character who largely appeared as a voice of reason in Season 1, and that's proving difficult for the community to wrap itself around at this early point in the season.

That difficulty is something that co-creator Christian Linke shares. Speaking to GamesRadar+, Linke - who helped create both Vi and Caitlyn more than ten years ago alongside Arcane's other showrunner, Alex Yee - admits that "there's a global perspective" to the characters' roles as cops "that is difficult for me to take into consideration."

"I live in Los Angeles now," Linke explains. "It is commonly understood that there is a lot of fucked up behavior by American police. I was born and raised in Germany, where there's a very different perception and understanding in society of law enforcement. The trust in the institution is much more shaken in America. There's something about that where there's just different perspectives on what that even means and how people see that." 

For Yee, there's a feeling that "I don't really feel like I can blame people" for having strong feelings about these character arcs. "There are things that have happened with characters that I didn't have a hand in, but I do feel like I'm on the team of people that did that," he explains. "So I don't necessarily feel like we were handed something that we had to live with per se. A lot of it felt like it was just sort of following through on a thing we started."

Arcane season 2 returns to League of Legends' hottest ship, but the Netflix show's co-creator says getting the CaitVi pairing right was "scary": "We knew they were stepping into this s***storm."

Speaking to showrunners Christian Linke and Alex Yee ahead of the first drop in the Arcane Season 2 release schedule, I asked which stories in the broader League of Legends universe were their favorites. With Arcane set to end with Season 2, Linke has already revealed that there are other stories in the franchise the pair hopes to tell one day. While neither was ready to confirm their plans for a new show, they did have some narrative highlights to share.

"There's a lot," Linke admits. "We both played the game for a long, long time, and you have different kinds of characters and regions." While claiming that "there's too many to say 'this is gonna be the next one', Linke does point to Noxus, the warmongering nation that Arcane character Ambessa Medarda hails from. The Noxians are name-dropped in Arcane many times, but Linke points to their conflicts with two other in-universe nations - Demacia and Ionia - which dominated much of League of Legends' earliest storytelling. 

"I think Demacia/Noxus is dope," Linke says, "I think the Noxus Ionia invasion is really interesting," noting a fan-theory that's already convinced me about the direction a new series might go. He also loves Bilgewater, a pirate haven that's already been explored in detail in spin-off game Ruined King: "I feel like I'm ready for another pirate story," he says. He also notes that his own favorite in-game character is Heimerdinger, who hails from the whimsical land of Bandle City.

As for Yee, he points to the Freljord, a harsh frozen tundra with a story dominated by three warring tribes. That story has also been told elsewhere, in Riot Games' crossover with Marvel Comics, in a series that focuses on long-time character Ashe, the peace-seeking leader of one of those tribes.

Neither creator, however, is giving anything away about any actual future projects. Linke, in fact, says this period - with Season 2 on its way out the door and no future projects confirmed - "is the time for us to really explore, to see what kind of stories we can develop, and see what's possible. It's still pretty open."

Arcane season 2 first reactions say the Netflix show has "upped the ante in every way imaginable."

Speaking to Marc 'Caedrel' Lamont during the League of Legends Worlds Finals on Saturday (via PCGamesN), Merrill was asked if could provide any kind of update on the LoL MMO. In response, he said that Riot is "working hard on it," and that "it's the project I've spent, personally, the most amount of time on."

"I really think the team has a great direction now and is making a lot of momentum," Merrill continued. That's good news for a project that's had a rocky couple of years. First announced nearly four years ago because Riot thought it would probably leak anyway, the project lost its lead developer - former Blizzard developer Greg Street - in March 2023. A year after that, we got our most recent update on the game, which Riot told us was being "reset," and "going dark" for a long time. 

A touch of optimism remained even in that message, but it remains hard to get any sense of what Riot's internal workings on the project look like - not least because, prior to his departure, Street told fans that the company would have no qualms about cancelling the LoL MMO if it wasn't "good enough."

Merrill notes the "expectations" that he knows fans have for the project, and says that Riot is "going to try not to disappoint," but it doesn't seem like we're likely to get anything more concrete than that for some time yet.

Last year, I said I was starting to get really worried about my most-anticipated MMO - and I'm still not feeling much better about it.

Over on the game's dedicated Discord, Drummond confirms that, yes, he was the lead on Viper and Magician. Fans already had a hunch thanks to the former more than the latter having some strong Risk of Rain vibes, and even now continue to talk about the shared DNA.

"Viper playing with the slide mechanic reminded me a lot of Hopoo Games' work from Survivors of the Void and beyond, so this makes total sense," one fan says. "The majority of newer Risk of Rain characters have been designed around exploring some core game mechanics like crits, healing, temporary items, etc. Even Gearbox is following the trend with False Son playing off of health-boosting items.

"It's such a simple yet clever way to create new character concepts, and it doesn’t surprise me in the least that they’re carrying that philosophy over to their work on Deadlock."

Another, more simply, says: "Viper is such a Hopoo character."

Currently in Deadlock's Hero Labs, Viper is a slithery assassin who can jump high-priority targets thanks to their strong ability to slide on in. The Magician, not to be forgotten, is more about confusing foes through their dirty ol' magic tricks. Mind you, as both of these characters are on the Hero Labs, they are likely subject to change. Regardless, we're sure the good ol' Risk of Rain DNA will remain.

Deadlock does what Valve didn't get around to with Counter-Strike, turning the hero shooter's cheaters into frogs.

Ambessa is an interesting addition to League of Legends' roster, as she's the first new character to have started life outside the game. Ambessa features in the first season of Arcane as the mother of Piltover elite Mel Medarda, but with the release of Arcane Season 2 next month, will step onto Summoner's Rift as a full-fledged League of Legends character. While spin-off strategy game Teamfight Tactics has played host to a number of outside influences, most relevant among them Arcane Season 1's Silco, none of those have been included in the main game before now.

As a leader from the war-mongering empire of Noxus, Ambessa is an able and aggressive fighter, wielding twin chain-axe weapons, and using hefty armor to limit incoming enemy damage. If that makes her sound like a tank, you'd be wrong - Ambessa seems like a quintessential example of what League of Legends refers to as a 'Juggernaut'. This character archetype can give and take plenty of punishment, but is supposed to be held back by limited mobility - if you can stay out of a Juggernaut's reach, you'll quickly alleviate any threat they pose.

I say supposed to be held back, but that's not really the case here. Ambessa's passive ability grants her a dash after every active ability cast. In an efficient combo that leads to the kind of stickiness that ensures that once Ambessa is close to you, she'll be very hard to remove. It's not an entirely new tool - marksman character Kalista has a little hop she uses after every single attack, but that's a better fit for her glass cannon-style character class. On a warrior like Ambessa, this is pretty terrifying.

The reactions of the community are diverse. Some players are pointing out the complexity of Ambessa's skills compared to those of older champions - while the new arrival gains mobility, attack range, attack damage, and resource replenishment from just her passive, a character like Nasus only gets flat life steal from his version of the same skill. Others have noted that this could be the end of the game's 14-year-long mobility creep arc - with a dash on every angle ability, "you can't creep mobility any higher," even if some players in the comments on that post are prepared to view that as a challenge. My favorite reaction genre, however, is that of players who have simply given up. That includes former European champion Andrei 'Odoamne' Pascu, who simply tweeted, "Honestly, what the fuck at this point" in response to a rundown of Ambessa's abilities.

I've been around for a lot of League of Legends champion releases by this point, and so I know how this goes - streamer ioki probably said it best in their acknowledgment that "she's getting nerfed 10 times on release guaranteed." Ambessa will release astonishingly powerful due more to the number of tools in her kit than the numbers behind that kit, and as such, Riot will have little choice but to reduce those numbers over and over again until she's no longer viable. That's a fate that's befallen plenty of new arrivals and will befall many more before League of Legends is done, yet Ambessa still feels like a step beyond what we've seen before. Given that this comes so hot on the heels of another Arcane fumble - the $250 skin gacha system unveiled just after Riot laid off a bunch of cosmetic designers - it's perhaps not the best community marketing the studio could have come up with for the upcoming second series.

Arcane Season 2 isn't the end of Riot's animation push, and fans are already theorizing where in the League of Legends universe we're heading next.

Although the number of affected developers wasn't initially confirmed, Riot later revealed in a statement to Eurogamer that 27 people on the League of Legends team have been affected, as well as five people in publishing roles. As previously mentioned, these include Ben Rosado, who designed the Ahri skin that was part of the Signature Immortalized Legend Collection bundle to celebrate four-time world champion player, Faker. This bundle set purchasers back a whopping $450 in RP (in-game currency), and while the exact number of sales isn't known, despite the fact that some planned to boycott the character, plenty ended up buying it.

Rosado isn't the only skin designer affected, as Tereza 'Teya' Rozumkova, a character artist behind 23 different skins including Star Guardian Akali and Mythmaker Irelia, was also impacted after four and a half years at the studio. It's a shocking loss of talent, and even more surprising when you consider Riot's claims that the layoffs weren't about saving money, but "making sure we have the right expertise so that League continues to be great for another 15 years and beyond." 

Just to make matters worse, the reveal of this new gacha system came just one day after the layoffs were announced.

The gacha system ties into the introduction of a new, potentially very expensive tier of skins – Exalted skins. Riot has explained that they'll be obtainable using a new currency called Ancient Sparks, which can be bought for 400 RP each. Using one will give you the low, low chance (0.5%, to be exact) of pulling "S-tier content" such as the shiny new Arcane Fractured Jinx skin – the first of this new tier. There's mercifully a pity system so that you'll be given a guaranteed S-rank pull after 80 attempts, but that's going to cost 32,000 RP – a ludicrous amount of currency that, if you're spending the absolute minimum amount of real money you can on bundles, will cost you $240. It might not be the $450 Ahri bundle, but it's still a very considered purchase if you end up having to go all-in. 

Needless to say, the reaction to this series of events hasn't been positive, with some calling it "disgusting," and others saying that they're "not spending another penny on this game." Riot admits that "there’s been a lot of focus on luxury goods this year," but claims that "we're also exploring new technologies, features, and content types (even outside of skins) that are meant for a broader audience, which we’ll be able to share more on later this year."

5 days after reports of 650 more Microsoft gaming layoffs, the company announces plans to pay out even more money to shareholders.

"The team has poured their hearts and souls into making the game as good as it can be for Steam Next Fest," CEO Joe Tung — who was previously executive vice president of League of Legends at Riot — said in a statement posted to Discord. Theorycraft's work seems to be paying off. At the time of writing, Supervive is the Next Fest demo with the second most daily active players, right under Delta Force. 

Supervive offers "a wild, open-ended combat sandbox," according to its Steam description, with multiple game modes, various flame-wielding hunters, and seemingly a metric ton of blinding lasers. Its development team includes many former staffers from games like LoL and Valorant, and so, even in its demo form, Supervive has the same high-intensity sheen as any AAA battle royale. 

That could be why, while Theorycraft held play sessions with streamers like loltyler1 this week, Supervive gathered nearly as many Twitch viewers as League of Legends — though its viewership has since dropped down to a more organic 18,000. 

In any case, Supervive seems to be in a strong position to rival the games its experienced developers used to work on. It does not yet have a release date, but its demo is live for 24 hours a day through the end of Next Fest. 

The single-player breakout of Steam Next Fest so far is an open-world crime-fighting game that looks like the exact opposite of GTA.

In an update shared to Twitter, Riot co-founder and chief product officer Marc Merrill shared "some important updates" about League of Legends. Chiefly, there have been some "changes to our teams and how we work to make sure we can keep improving the League experience now and for the long-term. Merrill stresses that Riot isn't "slowing down work" on League and that it's actually "investing heavily in solving today's challenges faster while also building for the future."

That's an interesting way of saying Riot is laying off "some roles".

"This isn't about reducing headcount to save money—it's about making sure we have the right expertise so that League continues to be great for another 15 years and beyond," Merrill said. "While team effectiveness is more important than team size, the League team will eventually be even larger than it is today as we develop the next phase of League."

Riot developers impacted by the layoffs will be offered a severance package that comes with six months' pay, an annual bonus, health coverage, job placement assistance, "and more."

It hasn't been a year since Riot's last wave of layoffs. In January, the company killed about 500 jobs, 11% of its workforce at the time, and announced plans to effectively shutter its experimental Forge indie label after the release of Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story.

Former Blizzard president says the "gaming downturn" is "a little bit overstated" and companies just wanted to "cut back" after the pandemic.

Riot Games' communications manager, Joe Hixson, has debunked a viral post claiming the studio was making "a new hero shooter to compete with Deadlock" alongside tech conglomerate Tencent. 

"I see lots of crazy rumors, but this is extra fake," Hixson tweets today. As Hixson also notes, the screenshot in the post below might look very similar to headlines published on news sites like this one, but the headline only exists online on one 4Chan board. The 'article' also has a publication date of March 2024, predating Valve's first private playtest in May.

"Tencent doesn't fund our [development] like this," Hixson adds. "That's not how this works… that's not how any of this works." 

Riot Games is seemingly hammering away on something in silence, though whatever it has in production apparently doesn't resemble Valve's newest hero shooter MOBA all too much. "There's a lot cooking in [research and development], but nothing like Deadlock," Hixson concludes.

Deadlock itself has had a mysterious road to announcement. Valve quietly released a series of invite-only playtests earlier this year with a polite, legally non-binding request to players not to share any details about the game. Obviously, screenshots and footage describing the game as a Frankensteined mix of Overwatch and Dota popped up within weeks, and Deadlock soon attracted tens of thousands of players even before Valve officially lifted the lid on the project.

But Deadlock hasn't even launched yet, and thus, is probably too young to inspire competitors in the first place, despite early players being smitten with it. A former Overwatch pro called Deadlock "the future of gaming." And it doesn't hurt that Valve added anti-cheat features to Deadlock that it never got around to with Team Fortress 2.

The Risk of Rain developers joined Valve less than a month ago, and one of the legendary roguelike’s creators is already working on Deadlock. 

Not long after the new patch dropped, one fan took to the game's Discord to share their disbelief, only to be met with a rather optimistic Valve employee. "Think of it as a buff, more chance for you to pick the hero."

So what's the damage? As per Deadlock Intel, it mainly concerns the gargoyle's 'Kadzu' bomb, which summons a raft of vines that damages and slows enemies who get caught up in them. You're still getting all that goodness, though damage has been reined in, and the vertical radius is now fixed to a two-meter pancake shape. Additionally, Ivy's Air Drop explosion now respects line of sight, which isn't out of step with changes we've seen elsewhere in Deadlock for heroes like Haze and Pocket.

Elsewhere in the patch, you've got some meaty changes to another hero called Mirage. His bullet radius has been reduced to six from eight, so it won't be quite as easy to land your shots as it once was. His Tornado ability has also been reined in alongside Djinn's Mark.

Finally, there are more general updates, like reductions to respawn times, zipline boost cooldowns, and more.

We'll need to wait and see if the update affects Ivy's popularity, though fans seem pretty on board with the changes Valve has made so far. This is probably because their kit is still really strong, but also, perhaps, because they may have an easier time picking them.

YouTuber figures out how to run Valve's Deadlock on PS4, and it's completely worthless: "I'm scared to even move the mouse"

Duncan "Hopoo" Drummond popped up in the official Deadlock Discord yesterday to introduce himself to players. In no time at all, he was already fielding reports and balance feedback. That Discord is only accessible to Deadlock players, but Drummond's sudden appearance made enough of a stir to quickly make the rounds on places like Reddit.

Drummond co-created Risk of Rain alongside Paul Morse when they were both students, and eventually his online handle 'Hopoo' would become the name of development studio Hopoo Games. The studio grew slightly over the years, bringing in new folks for Risk of Rain 2 in particular, but Drummond remains credited as programmer, artist, co-designer, and co-producer on that original game, and is similarly credited in its sequel.

Back on September 2, Hopoo Games announced that "Duncan and Paul, alongside many other talented members at Hopoo Games, will now be working on game development" at Valve. That meant the effective shutdown of the studio - "sleep tight, Hopoo Games," as they put it - and the end of production on their own unannounced game. What we didn't know, however, is exactly what role the devs would be taking on at Valve. That mystery has now been cleared up for Drummond at least. 

Deadlock does what Valve didn't get around to with Counter-Strike, turning the hero shooter's cheaters into frogs.

Thanks to its "anti-cheat detection system," Deadlock leaves every cheater's fate in opposing players' hands. If someone dares to cheat, opponents will be given two options - they can either instantly ban the guilty player, or they can opt for something far funnier. They can turn them into a frog for the remainder of the match. Right now, Valve says the system is just "set to conservative detection levels."

The team is still working on "a v2 anti-cheat system that is more extensive," but fans love it already - as do Valve veterans themselves. Speaking in a post on Deadlock's unique anti-cheat measures, former Counter-Strike: Global Offensive developer Burton Johnsey reveals that the company's older iconic shooter almost featured a similar system. "Holy crap, they finally built codename 'FU Surprise Mode'?!"

He continues: "When I worked on VAC, Rich and I designed this for CS but the cheater was a chicken." That's right, CS stans - the community could've had anti-cheat chickens. While it probably won't happen in Counter-Strike 2, Deadlock at least has frogs. They aren't the only thing to come to Valve's hero shooter with its recent update, either - new hero Mirage has arrived as have various smaller changes.

Former Overwatch pro blasts Deadlock as "dogs**t" during a particularly bad game, only to have a huge change of heart later that day: "The future of gaming"

In a clip from his stream (via Deadlock Intel), xQC - who played on the Dallas Fuel Overwatch League team and also represented Canada in the game's world cup - is having a very bad game. With his team down more than 40,000 souls (Deadlock's combined currency and XP marker), the streamer finds himself taking huge damage from his opponent and offering almost nothing back in return.

"The game is dogshit," xQc complains after he finds himself almost one-shot by an enemy player, despite his teammate's suggestion that they're enjoying the game more as they learn to play it better. Seemingly not too long after that, however, the streamer changed his mind pretty significantly.

In another clip, shared on the same day, he tells a friend "you should play this game, man. This game is actually the future of gaming. This game is actually fun. Deadlock, this shit goes hard." That friend seems a little confused by this sudden change of heart, suggesting that xQc had previously claimed that Deadlock would be "dead on arrival," but the streamer swiftly changes the subject rather than investigate those claims further.

As a long-time League of Legends player, I can see what's happened here. There aren't many genres of game where you can be starved out as hard as you can in a MOBA - fall too far behind, and it does often feel like you're not able to do anything except wait for your opponents to potentially make a mistake. In xQc's defense, those are the LoL games where I complain loudest about how I'm never playing again, but there's no one to hold me to those claims when I inevitably run it back a few minutes later.

The sentiment around Deadlock does seem to be pretty positive in the esports community - in August, former FPS pro Shroud said the game was "going to easily take over," while a number of players say they're planning to leave the content creation spaces for their current games in order to pursue Deadlock. With Valve's reputation for shooters and its experience with esports, however, maybe that's not too much of a surprise.

As cheating in Deadlock rears its head, Valve goes, yeah, maybe anti-cheat for its new hero shooter is a good idea.

This is where I would normally link to Valve's patch notes on Steam's news feed or forums. But Valve seems to have forgotten about the features it built on the storefront that it also built since the patch notes are actually hidden away in a totally separate forum that you can only access with a password obtainable in Deadlock's main menu - or you can check out PC Gamer, who have kindly listed out all 100+ changes.

Among the changes are dozens of balance adjustments that tweak how much damage certain guns or abilities do by tiny percentages, for example, as well as new voice lines for several heroes, typo fixes, a new profile page showcasing career stats, and visual updates to models that were still clearly placeholders. 

The more major additions include new options for vertical play, as most heroes can now wall jump across levels without expending any stamina. Some levels are also getting ropes that you can shoot from while hanging, allowing you to camp out on rooftops easier than ever. Snipers, assassins, and cowards can all rejoice. 

While Valve was still pressing its fingers to its ears and screaming "la la la" - before it officially announced Deadlock - leaked footage from the game already gave everyone the heads up that this wasn't simply a hero shooter competitor - it was also a MOBA with very MOBA-ish lanes and the very MOBA ability for players to actually pause online matches for everyone, surprising many a confused Overwatcher prepared to power through joint pains. Deadlock's new update means players can only pause once per match, and a team can only pause three times in one match total.

Valve's 6v6 shooter will probably get plenty more updates in the months and years to come as it chugs along with its ongoing playtests that you can only access via an invite (which aren't hard to find online, at all, by the way.)

Deadlock is “going to easily take over,” says streamer Shroud, adding that it’s the “best third-person shooter I’ve ever played.”

The brief teaser trailer Valve revealed on its newly published Deadlock storefront gives little to nothing away, showing a large, shifty looking character standing in front of a supply store. At some point, three characters sneak past an alleyway in the far distance, and that's about it. However, the Steam page's genre tags confirm Deadlock is indeed an online third-person hero shooter MOBA.

Due to Valve's baffling decision not to make players sign a formal NDA or agree to an embargo before inviting them to play Deadlock's closed beta starting back in May, we've known that for a while. For clarity, the game does prompt players to click through a pop-up asking them to "not share anything about the game with anyone", but it turns out it's really easy to just click away from it without explicitly acknowledging or agreeing to any terms. In all my years as a video game journalist, I haven't seen anything quite like it.

The most high-profile not-leak came from The Verge's Sean Hollister, who wrote up his impressions and shared 24 minutes of gameplay in August after receiving an invite and clicking right past the dismissible pop-up. But well before that, people who had received invites were sharing gameplay clips and describing the game as something of a Frankenstein monster combining elements from Overwatch 2, Dota 2, Valorant, Smite, Team Fortress 2, and Orcs Must Die.

It's very possible, likely even, that Valve didn't intend its weird not-NDA to be so easily dismissible, but even if you could only access the game by clicking 'OK', that's still a very unconventional agreement rife for abuse.

To be clear, I'm not making any excuses for taking any sides here. Valve clearly didn't want people to share information about the then-unannounced game; it's just weird to me that it didn't take any additional measures to ensure that didn't happen. Regardless, Deadlock's Discord admin Yoshi shared a message Friday that reads, "We are lifting the rules for public conversation about Deadlock to allow for things like streaming, community websites and discussions."

So, yes, Deadlock is now very much out in the open and we're all free to talk about it as much as possible. The only information I could glean from its Steam page besides the genre tags is that it's "in early development", but if you want to know more about what it looks like, it'll be even easier than it already was to find gameplay footage online.

Now I have the sudden urge to peruse our list of the best MOBAs. Can't imagine why.

When T1 support player Keria took the title along with his team back in November, he was quickly disappointed to learn that he couldn't have the skin he wanted. Keria's favorite champion is Lux, but the rules state that you have to have played a character during the tournament in order for them to be eligible for a Worlds skin. In a classic example of suffering from success, T1's run through the tournament was so decisive that Keria didn't have a chance to play the character, so he wasn't able to pick her for his skin.

At the time, Keria said that he had "only thought about making a Lux skin," and that he wanted something "pretty." When Riot told him that he couldn't have that skin, but it could try and make his alternative good-looking, it was pretty clear he didn't believe them: "I just frowned."

Now, many months later, Riot is finally able to show off the skins it's cooked up for this year's World Champs. And while Keria's bespoke T1 Bard obviously isn't the character he was hoping for, there are a couple of details woven in that offer a nod to his real pick. Lux's portrait appears briefly in the animation of one of Bard's skills, but the real symbolism is in the skin's recall animation. That features a spectral version of Lux that Bard offers some comfort to, before the pair of them hold the Worlds trophy aloft together. It's not quite the skin he might have designed himself, admittedly, but it's probably the closest Keria could possibly get while abiding by Riot's rules.

Earlier this summer, Keria's teammate Faker got in some skin-themed hot water, as  players protested his $500 skin with a forced boycott, perma-banning Ahri to stop anyone using her new cosmetic.

In a tweet earlier this week, Temtem developer Crema posted a video about its upcoming spin-off, Temtem: Swarm. A Vampire Survivors-style roguelike, Swarm pits Tems against hordes of enemies, tasking you with lasting as long as you can amid its top-down, 'bullet-heaven' gameplay. 

Unfortunately for Crema, that real estate is a little crowded right now. "Put a finger down if one of the biggest companies in the industry with millions of players all over the world just announced that their survivor-like game mode is named exactly like your new, upcoming survivor game," the video below jokes. 

That company is League of Legends developer Riot Games, which recently unveiled Swarm, a top-down, 'bullet-heaven', Vampire Survivors-style roguelike that pits members of LoL's heroic Anima Squad against hordes of enemies. League of Legends: Swarm was teased several months ago, but has only just been officially named ahead of its release next month.

Adding to Crema's woes is the fact that that launch takes League of Legends: Swarm into 2024's third quarter, which is the same release window that Temtem: Swarm currently sits in. Temtem's spin-off could release as late as September and still hit that window, of course, and perhaps it will quietly slip back a bit to allow League of Legends fans to get their fix first.

It's worth pointing out two things here, of course; firstly, this is definitely delivered in jest, and secondly, the crossover between Temtem's creature collecting and League of Legends' MOBA audiences seems like it could be pretty slim. The timing is undeniably unfortunate, but Crema seems to be taking this coincidence pretty well.

If you're looking for even more permadeath action, check out our list of the best roguelike games.

Signature Ahri is a particularly fancy skin, designed to commemorate League of Legends' all-time esports great Faker. Trouble is, the fanciest version costs $500, and players aren't happy about the potentially slippery slope that could set Riot sliding down. The concern is that if it's willing to charge this much now, it'll be happy doing this again in future, milking the community for ever-larger amounts of money.

Even as the skin was announced players were expressing plans to stop those who purchased it from being able to use it by deliberately banning Ahri from every game. Now that the skin has released (and key developer Andrei Van Roon has further stoked controversy by making it clear there are no plans to back down from this kind of drop), they've come good on that threat: Ahri's ban rate has rocketed, doubling almost overnight in certain regions.

It's unlikely that that spike holds for long - when you've only got five bans to use across your team, using one of them to spite players who might not even be in your game is a bit of a waste, and eventually Ahri's ban rate will probably return to normal. Still, it's amusing to see that the parts of the community expressing their concern did come good on their threat, even if reports suggest that the vast majority of these bans are coming from Western regions, rather than the Chinese and Korean markets that seem more likely to purchase the skin in the first place.

Elsewhere in the League of Legends ecosystem, Arcane is ending with Season 2 - but fans are already theorizing where it's heading next.

"Arcane is just the beginning of our larger storytelling journey and partnership with the wonderful animation studio that is Fortiche," Arcane co-creator Christian Linke told fans. "From the very beginning, since we started working on this project, we had a very specific ending in mind, which means the story of Arcane wraps up with this second season. But Arcane is just the first of many stories that we want to tell in Runeterra."

The League of Legends community has long since latched onto the other stories that could be told in a manner similar to Arcane. There's the Ruination, a tragic story of lost love that's the origin story for several champions and has already been adapted and expanded in both a game and a novel. There's the Demacian civil war, depicted in part in a musical trailer several years ago, or the conflict over the Freljord, a frozen waste home to both a trio of gods and three warring tribes, or the Fall of Icathia. 

Runeterra is a land rich in stories, but there are two that currently stand out as strong follow-ups for Fortiche. The first takes our attention to Targon, an isolated land a long way from the mean streets of Zaun, where civilization is built around the foothills of a mythical mountain. There, the religious groups of the Solari and Lunari fight over their respective worship of the Sun and Moon. Champions Leona and Diana are 'sun and moon canon lesbians' mentioned in the tweet below, with an angsty rivalry that feels like the perfect fit for Arcane's storytelling, but there are plenty of champions that would be an excellent tangential fit for the world.

An even more compelling theory, however, pertains to the Noxian invasion of Ionia. Noxus, a warmongering nation, is already working with the citizens of Piltover in the final episodes of Arcane's first season. In the recent trailer, we see the Enforcers come face to face with Singed, the scientist who appears briefly in season one and is a key part of one major season two characters' arc. In his official biography, Singed eventually finds his way toward working with Noxus - "who contracted the alchymist to help [...] break the bitter stalemate of the war in Ionia."

It would be a strong setup for a new series. Not only is the Ionia conflict one of League's oldest yet least well-told stories, but it would work as an ideal bridge for a new Fortiche project. Neither directly linked to Arcane nor so distant from it as to be entirely brand-new, it would offer an excellent next step into a story that could still involve a wide array of champions.

We've still got several months to wait for Arcane, so I imagine we're several years away from discovering what Riot and Fortiche are cooking up next. Nevertheless, there's a treasure trove of stories to pull from, so I'm excited to see what's to come.

Arcane fans are shocked to see Vi as a cop - but League of Legends players want you to know that's been her job for 12 years.

After the first Arcane Season 2 poster drop focused on Vi and Jinx, a brief teaser snippet changed the focus slightly, onto Vi and Caitlyn. Accompanied by a handful of currently unknown characters, the duo step forward wielding their iconic weapons - Caitlyn's rifle and Vi's gauntlets. What's caught some series fans by surprise, however, is that both characters are now kitted out in Enforcer gear, placing them firmly within the ranks of Piltover's police force.

That's not gone down too well. Putting any potential negative feelings about the police as a whole to one side, some fans are flabbergasted as to how Vi - a character whose parents have spent a lifetime under the thumb of the Enforcers and have experienced their brutality first-hand - would eventually join the force. In Season 1, we come to know Caitlyn - a citizen of the upper class - as a member of the Enforcers, but we meet Vi through an almost entirely different lens.

That led several series fans to speculate about the narrative gymnastics that Arcane would be attempting in order to justify this apparent change. But for League of Legends fans, it came as no surprise at all - when Vi arrived in the game in 2012, it was literally in the role of 'The Piltover Enforcer'. In the game, Vi has never really existed as anything other than a crime fighter, and in contrast to Caitlyn's calmer, more calculated approach, Vi tends to opt for an approach that veers far closer to the 'brutality' type of policing.

League of Legends players wasted very little time telling those shocked by Vi's new appearance that a decade of storytelling backed up this version of their newly problematic fave. And while Arcane is canon to the LoL universe, that means it exists alongside what came before, rather than existing in its place. I still think that Riot and Arcane studio Fortiche will have some work on their hands to sell this transformation, but given the importance of the show's most popular ship to the story so far, perhaps that'll be simpler to pull off than we think.

Elsewhere, Arcane fans are speculating that Season 2 could feature a substantial time skip.

That's according to Twitter user Starlight, who runs an online third-party store allowing League of Legends and Genshin Impact players to purchase in-game currency at reduced prices thanks to regional conversion rates. Even with those lower prices, however, Starlight says that players are going to pretty extreme lengths to procure League of Legends' hyper-expensive new skin.

In a tweet yesterday, they asked "Can you guys stop taking out loans to buy the Ahri skin," referring to that $500 bundle. "I don't want to put you into debt," they continued. "Legit every second order is with a loan agreement." In subsequent tweets, they clarify that in some countries, such as the UK and Germany, it's possible to pay with loan agreements via Paypal, and pay the money back over 3-6 months.

At what appears to be 0% interest, that's not technically any more expensive than paying straight up, but it's still far from the most sensible financial choice. Given that you'll have to purchase four maximum-size bundles of currency for a total of £400 ($508), the skin in question - a Signature Ahri cosmetic intended to honor League of Legends' best-ever player, Faker - you're already setting yourself back a substantial amount to even afford the item. And given that some League of Legends fans are planning to permaban the champion to prevent anyone from using the skin, it seems like this might be an even more unwise investment than it first appears.

Faker might be the GOAT, but $500 still seems a bit steep.

The Signature Immortalized Legend Collection is the most expensive offering in a range of three different bundles. As well as cosmetics for two of Faker's best known characters, it comes with several other, smaller bonuses, many of which are entirely exclusive to the bundle. If you want all of those bonuses, however, you'll be shelling out a total of 59,620 Riot Points - League of Legends' premium in-game currency.

To put that in perspective, most skins cost 1,350 RP, which you can amass through a total of around $16 in spending. To amass the nearly 60,000 points you need for this bundle, by contrast, you'll be buying four of the biggest bundles, setting you back $100 each, plus another $50 bundle to make up the rest. That's a total cost of $450, making this far and away the most microtransaction Riot has ever offered - last year, players were angered by a skin placed behind a $200 gacha system, and this more than doubles that price.

Unsurprisingly, the response has been pretty negative. There's obvious community reverence for Faker, but equally obvious frustration at Riot, with the game's official subreddit discussing the cost at length, and multiple high-profile esports figures speaking out.

Some players are even planning an in-game protest, a form of forced boycott of the skin. While no-one can stop anyone else from purchasing the cosmetic, they can attempt to stop them from using it. League of Legends' ranked matches utilize a pick-and-ban phase, and if your champion is banned before the start of a match, you have to use a different one. With that in mind, players are already planning a mass target-ban of Ahri from the skin's release date on June 12. If you can't play Faker's signature champion, you're not likely to have much luck trying to use the expensive new skin you bought for it.

Riot does have an unfortunate habit of testing the waters with this kind of thing before walking it back when players make their displeasure known. Whether that happens here remains to be seen, but I'll be fascinated to see if the developer tries this again with its next Hall of Famer.

I don't think this bodes very well for the LoL MMO I'm looking forward to either, and I'm already pretty worried about that one.

Yesterday, Phillip Koskinas, head of anti-cheat at LoL and Valorant developer Riot Games, showed off a graph outlining League of Legends bans, showing a substantial uptick in punishments meted out since the start of the month. That uptick matches up with the rollout of Vanguard, a somewhat controversial anti-cheat tool that operates at 'Kernel level' on your machine, meaning that it can prevent disallowed software operating at the same time as the game.

Vanguard has not proved particularly popular, primarily because of its access to players' systems, and reports that it was damaging PCs. Riot has hit back against those claims, and seems to be standing by Vanguard - Koskinas' tweet seems evidence of strong support, and Riot's official Dev Team account quoted that initial post to provide a little more context behind that rise in bans.

The new software means that the League of Legends devs are now "starting to target more cheats that we weren't able to action on in the past." That explains the rising number of bans, but it also means that recent ban-waves "come with League's first ever Hardware ID bans, increasing the action weight against cheaters."

A Hardware ID ban is different to an account ban, in that it targets the identification tools of your system, effectively removing the ability to access the game from your current computer. In the past, prolific cheaters could have their accounts permanently banned, but could simply boot up new accounts, or even buy pre-levelled ones at relatively low cost. Now, their entire PC can be banned from the game, significantly increasing the price of starting over.

In this 14-year history of League of Legends, this is a step that Riot has never taken before. The most high-profile similarity was the 'indefinite' banning of streamer Tyler1, whose repeated disruptive behaviour at the time led to Riot arranging to ban any account that could be identified as belonging to him, before his eventual return to the game. Even then, however, Riot was unable to target the streamer's hardware, resorting to manually banning individual accounts.

Calls for hardware bans have grown over the years, particularly as the issues of botting and account selling have become more prevalent. Whether the hardware bans fix those issues in their entirety remains to be seen, but this is still a substantial step forward in Riot's attempts to take on cheaters.

Found yourself booted from your favorite game? Here are the best PC games you can play instead.

Last week, organizers of League of Legends' Vietnam Championship Series (VCS) announced that matches would be postponed while they investigated participating teams, delaying playoff and final dates. Organizers noted the impact on the tournament but pledged their commitment to competitive integrity.

Later that day, Vietnamese esports site ithethao reported (translated via Google) that over two days, all eight teams in the competition were summoned to the VCS broadcast studio by Riot Games, as the developer investigated reports of match-fixing. At the time, neither Riot or the tournament organizers had used the term 'match-fixing', but in a new statement, issued earlier today, the Organizing Committee announced the temporary suspension of 32 players across all eight teams in the VCS pending further investigation.

Traditionally, League of Legends teams are made up of five players, and in a league of eight teams, that could mean as many as 80% of players are being investigated. That's not strictly the case, as some teams employ multiple substitutes, so the figure reportedly comes down to around 65%, but with all eight teams under investigation, it's clear that the competitive integrity of the VCS is in serious doubt.

While the VCS isn't one of LoL's four major regions (Korea, China, North America, and Europe), it's cemented itself as one of the bigger players in the game's global esports scene. Over the years, the region's representatives at international tournaments have tended to punch above their weight, earning the league additional slots in recent world championships.

The response to the investigation in Western leagues has been mixed. Esports manager Chris Smith, who was also a regular on NA broadcasts for many years, said the scandal was "shocking" and that "the stench of this will never leave the Vietnamese Esports scene." His former broadcast colleague, Isaac Cummings Bentley, however, suggested that pay issues within the region are likely to have led to match-fixing: "If their salaries aren't making ends meet, they'll inevitably turn to other means. There's a reason that match-fixing, boosting, etc. is extremely prevalent in games & leagues where there's no $$$."

Within the wider community, plenty are speculating what this might mean for one of the more substantial presences within the global esports scene. Some have suggested the League will be filled with substitute players unable to compete at the same level as the players they're replacing. Others have wondered whether Riot will simply absorb the series into another region, in a manner similar to the Oceanian league's combination with the NA LCS. European pro and analyst Erik Wessén summed up sentiments with a simple message - "Salute to VCS which has fallen." 

Elsewhere within Riot, the League of Legends MMO has been "reset," and the devs are going dark.

"For every Gem that you’ve ever spent in Smite 1 - free or purchased - you’ll receive a Legacy Gem in Smite 2," as the devs explain in an official FAQ. "Legacy Gems can be used to pay for 50% of the price of most in-game purchases in Smite 2 - so things like skins, Battle Passes, and events in Smite 2 will be half-off until you spend all of your Legacy Gems."

So you're basically getting half of all the money you spent in Smite 1 back in Smite 2. If you purchase a Founder's Pack for Smite 2, however, your Legacy Gems will be doubled, effectively making this incentive a full refund via in-game currency. Hi-Rez Studios hasn't announced how much those Founder's Packs will cost, but if you've dumped any serious cash into Smite over the past decade, that might end up being quite a deal.

Smite 2 is promising a "multi-generational leap" over the original, moving from Unreal Engine 3 to Unreal 5, and that means that the devs have had to rebuild everything from the ground up. As a result, the sequel is ditching a lot of the original game's content. "To just port every skin to Smite 2 would take about 246 person-years of work," the devs explain. "And we couldn’t both do that, and make Smite 2 as amazing as we knew it could be if we focused on starting anew."

For now, Smite 1 will continue to operate independently of Smite 2, which is set to offer its first alpha test in spring 2024.

Smite is one of the best MOBAs out there.

In a preview ahead of the game's new season, head of League studio Andrei van Roon announced that Vanguard would be coming to League of Legends. In an accompanying press release, Riot said that the decision was "a response to the feedback around high number of bots in games, disruptive smurfs in Ranked, and an increase in scripting." As in Valorant, Vanguard implementation will allow for live matches to be terminated if cheating is detected, with ranked points being refunded to players affected.

Vanguard seems to have been pretty effective - I'm not a regular Valorant player, but while I don't imagine there's no cheating whatsoever in Riot's tactical shooter, it's rare - if ever - that I get to hear about it. That's likely because of the greatest controversy around Vanguard at launch: the fact that it's always on.

Vanguard runs in the background, booting up with your PC and working constantly - the Vanguard client tackles in-game cheater, but the 'kernel-mode' driver behind it is at work whenever your PC is on. The idea is that the anti-cheat will assess other programs on your PC, blocking them if they have a known vulnerability that could mess with its active anti-cheat systems. If you don't let Vanguard start up at the same time as Windows, then it won't trust your PC, and you won't be able to play Valorant, or, now, League of Legends.

At launch in particular, Vanguard was seen as too intrusive. Always-on technology is rarely popular, especially when there's the sense that it's policing what you can and can't do on your own hardware, and there were reports that Vanguard was getting in the way of software attached to keyboard and mouse control, and even tech designed to control the temperature of your PC. Since its launch in 2020, however, Riot has walked back the number of programs that its software interacts with. In the meantime, Valorant has gone from strength to strength, becoming a growing part of the global esports scene and a staple of Twitch, with anti-cheat concerns fading largely into the background. There'll likely be some teething issues with the LoL integration, but Riot's had plenty of practice ironing out those problems over the years.

Elsewhere, League of Legends' 2024 season will see some substantial overhauls, but the really exciting aspect of the LoL universe this year is the return of critically acclaimed animation Arcane Season 2. That will be partnered with the arrival of one of the show's characters within League of Legends itself, a first for the game.

This "forbidden" League of Legends build infinitely buffs almost every stat in the game, and it's probably going away forever next month.

Heroes of the Storm fans were left high and dry back in 2022 after Blizzard announced that it was ending major development on the title, meaning no more content updates and a permanent shift to maintenance mode. Now, keen to keep the fun going, a small team is taking it upon themselves to build their own version of the game within StarCraft 2.

In a video shared on YouTube (thanks, VG247), those behind the mod, fittingly titled Resurgence of the Storm, discuss their motivations for making it and give a rundown of what it's all about. "Like many, we miss Heroes of the Storm," the team explains. "We miss reading patch notes, getting excited for new Heroes, reworks, balance changes, so we took it into our own hands."

Currently, there are 15 Heroes available, including familiar favourites with new or altered abilities and talents. The team plans to make many more Heroes playable and currently has their sights set on adding Brightwing, Greymane, Li-Ming and Muradin to the mix.

That being said, Resurgence of the Storm's creators are keen to highlight that this is "not a full replacement" for Heroes of the Storm, and not all of that game's features will be included. "As a StarCraft 2 mod, some things are not possible; some models and abilities cannot be replicated or ported over," they explain. "Most importantly, there are no Quick Cast settings, everyone plays with On Release."

If you've been lamenting the lack of fresh content in Heroes of the Strom and want to give Resurgence of the Storm a whirl, it's available to download right now, and the instructions for downloading and running it can be found in the footage above.

Lastly, the video emphasises that Resurgence of the Storm is a vastly time-consuming project being put together by a very small team, and without financial support, development on the title, as things currently stand, will end in March. It doesn't cost anything to play, so if you're impressed with what you see, you might want to consider donating to keep the project up and running.

For more multiplayer mayhem check out our guide to the best MOBA games.

Earlier this week, Valve pushed this year’s festive winter update, called Frostivus, which promised to gift players on the nice list and punish those on the naughty list. The publisher/developer said that the ban hammer would be coming down hard on thousands of players who used smurf accounts, engaged in toxic behavior, or paid to arbitrarily boost behavior scores. 

Twitch streamer “masondota2” was one of the poor naughty list victims, and he opened his chunk of coal gift live on-stream. The clip below sees the streamer open his gift chest, discover the Highly Toxic Lump Of Coal, and react to his unexpected permanent ban: “What if I just never opened it? Are they serious?” Not the most jolly Christmas gift.

The streamer then took to Reddit (in a now-deleted post) to talk about the ban and admit to using a behavior booster, which is when someone else plays on your account nicely to increase your behavior score. Players with lower behavior scores will usually be matched together for a toxic showdown, and wait times are also relatively longer. Some viewers had already noticed the streamer’s inconsistent scores a month ago, so it’s no surprise that Valve has clocked on too. 

Valve’s crackdown on rule breakers comes shortly before the new year and amid complaints around toxicity in Dota 2. Several comments on masondota2’s deleted post call out frequently unpleasant interactions in the game over the last few years, but hopefully, that will change with Valve’s updated stance.

Are you one of the affected Smurfs? Check out the other best MOBAs available right now. 

The company mentioned the crackdown on smurf accounts in a hilariously brutal blog post detailing this year's winter-themed Frostivus update. "You might remember back in September, we got out the ban hammer and permanently banned 90,000 smurf accounts," the post reads. 

Since then, Valve has continued monitoring behavior and is now "engaged in an even more aggressive ban wave, including many tens of thousands of smurf account bans today alone." It's Santa versus the Smurfs, then.

For those who are yet unsmurfed, smurfing refers to the act of creating multiple accounts, usually in competitive games to score easy wins against lower-level players.

"And smurfing isn't even the only naughty thing players are getting up to," the blog continues, citing bad behavior and paid behavior score farmers as other issues. "Regardless of how you've been naughty, we've been watching you (not while you're sleeping, calm down) and we're cracking down on all of it. Punishments will be handed out for all of the above, including behavior score penalties — and in serious cases, main account bannings."

Valve explains that the permaban hammer is coming down so hard because "smurfing (and other negative behavior) makes matches worse," and the company wants to move into the new year with a clean slate. "We'd like to wish everyone a Happy Frostivus Update," says Valve, "except smurf accounts, who we assume will not enjoy the update as they choke on their richly-deserved coal-flavored just desserts." Ouch. 

On the naughty list? Check out the other best MOBAs available right now. 

Senna is part of a small group of League of Legends champions that keeps growing stronger throughout the entire game. While most characters stop improving once they've reached max level and filled their inventories, some of them have spells that keep increasing certain stats indefinitely. Senna, who collects souls from defeated enemy units, gains attack damage (AD) for every soul, with additional attack range, crit chance, and life steal for every 20 souls she gets. 

At around 60-80 souls, Senna is widely thought to have 'scaled' - a League of Legends term for converting relative early-game weakness into late-game strength, and the opposite of 'falling off.' But she can go on collecting souls as long as the game itself continues to run, theoretically allowing her to grow in attack power forever. Normally, that strength is a counter to her squishiness and lack of mobility, but one player has managed to get around that particular issue, by coming up with a build that allows Senna to continually buff every important stat in the game.

There is a forbidden Senna build that scales every single stat infinitely. Check it out before its gone. from r/leagueoflegends

In a post on Reddit, one player has created a Senna build that they claim scales harder than anything in the game. It starts with Senna's own kit, which increases all of those aforementioned stats automatically. As her attack damage grows, so does the healing and shielding, and enemy slowing on some of her spells - the latter of which eventually reaches 100%, making it a root, not a slow. But it's once Senna starts building items that things start to really synergize together.

The build starts with Heartsteel, traditionally a tank item that grants bonus health every time its user is able to stack it by auto-attacking a nearby enemy. That makes for infinitely scaling health, but it can also be used in tandem with another tank item, Demonic Embrace, which turns extra HP into magic damage. More magic damage applies to Senna's healing and shielding, but also to the movement speed ability on her third spell, granting ever-increasing move speed as well.

From there, the build moves to Spear of Shojin, which offers scaling cooldown reduction based on extra AD. As I've already discussed, Senna's AD scales forever, so now so do her ability cooldowns. It's not long before the eight-second duration of that spell outlasts its cooldown. Shojin also synergizes with Runaan's Hurricane, an item that fires extra attacking bolts that allow you to hit multiple targets with a single auto attack, which allows Senna's primary healing ability to also have a negligible cooldown. That might cause mana issues, but those are circumvented by the fifth item, Essence Reaver, which also scales with AD, and eventually allows Senna to actually refill her mana bar by casting spells. The final item, Titanic Hydra, works alongside everything else to cast splash damage on every instance of attack damage that Senna deals, scaling off her also infinite base health, in a cascading effect that's said to "melt" grouped enemies.

It does sound like an incredible time - if you can get it to work. There are a couple of tools to get around the obvious weaknesses - with no boots you'll move extremely slowly, and without the warding tools that are a traditional part of Senna's support role, you won't have the vision you require, so you'd be best served by playing in a pair with a couple of actual supports. 

Also, it's worth noting that right up the top of their post, our Senna savant says, "This build is not good in a real game." It's actually Heartsteel that seems to be the limited factor - without the bonus health, many of the other items don't really work in close enough tandem to get the build going, and given the time it takes to get that item cooking, "the required scaling for real payoffs is not realistically achievable." That said, their description for what it might do if it did work is extremely enticing: "There is a champion with massive AD, hitting you from screens away. You cannot move, and she will keep you in place until you're dead, before becoming untargetable and zooming away. If you do manage to get up close to her, she has huge amounts of health [and even if you do hit her], she will instantly heal all of it back." Add to that the fact that Senna only gets stronger against multiple enemies, and would normally be able to play around an entire team of other players, and it's a horrifying concept.

Sadly, it's unlikely to be around for very long. As part of the 2024 Preseason, Riot has announced a substantial item rework that's going to hit several of the items in this build. With two-thirds of these items understood to be changing, it seems likely that the build will be affected in some way or another. Whether it becomes more or less viable remains to be seen, but if it's truly this powerful, I can't imagine Riot will let it survive for very long if it accidentally buffs it during Preseason.

With League of Legends Worlds 2023, Faker's GOAT status is been finally, irrevocably confirmed

League of Legends' Public Beta Environment (PBE) is the game's testing server, and it's currently filled with all of the new items that will be making their way to the game with the new season in January. One of those new items is Experimental Hexplate, which grants its owner some extra HP and some physical damage-related stats, as well as 30 Ability Haste (League of Legends' term for cooldown reduction) on their ultimate ability.

Last week, PBE players realised that due to a bug, if they purchased the item and then refunded it, they'd lose all of those stats, as expected - with the exception of the Ability Haste. As a result, they could purchase and un-purchase Experimental Hexplate over and over again, stacking their Haste until the stat's diminishing returns capped out.

The result, according to YouTuber and prolific PBE tester Vandiril, was that every game was filled with characters constantly spamming their ultimates. In the video example below, Vandiril is playing Teemo, a character who's trap-based ultimate already has a very low cooldown, but they suggest that the real villain is Karthus. The lich-themed champion has perhaps one of the strongest ultimate abilities in the game, allowing him to strike every enemy with a powerful burst of damage no matter where on the map they are. There are only a few ways to reliably dodge a Karthus ultimate, and all of them are on a longer cooldown than these amped-up ults.

Vandiril claims that "pretty much every game" features one copy of the champion on each team. Normally, that might not be a problem - Karthus's powerful ult is traditionally counterbalanced by his lack of defensive stats and a long cooldown - but Vandiril also says that at max cooldown, the spell is being cast "every 20ish seconds," all from the safety of Karthus' base.

Combined with other spammable ultimates, Vandiril says it was "impossible to playtest the new season." The issue first reared its head in the middle of last week, and by the time it had become common knowledge, many Riot developers were away on their Thanksgiving breaks. The item was reportedly fixed last night, but that only proved Vandiril's prediction that the testing server would be more or less completely unfit for purpose for around five days, hampering bugsquashing efforts ahead of the most disruptive time of the year for League of Legends.

Elsewhere, the new League of Legends world champion is sad because he can't get the "pretty" prize he really wants.

The trailer, posted on the League of Legends: Wild Rift Twitter account, showcases Sivir, a battle mistress who can quickly cut groups of enemies down to size with her bladed boomerang, create magical barriers to block enemy attacks, and provide a boost to allies movement speed. All in all, she's a helpful lady to have on the battlefield, though her impressive abilities have been overshadowed by the fact her name isn’t pronounced properly in the latest trailer.

Sivir's been around since the game's original launch in 2009, but instead of pronouncing it as Siv-ear, like it's supposed to be, she's instead referred to as Severe. This led to speculation that Riot had used AI to introduce the character to the series' mobile offering, and fans were less than impressed. In the comments, they urged the developer to stop using AI and keep to the traditional method of hiring real people for the job. "There are actual humans who do voiceover for a living. Hire them," one League of Legends fan wrote.

As it turns out, it wasn't AI at all. In reality, it was a very real voice actor who was given no guidance from Riot. According to prominent LoL commentator @MedicCasts, "the voice actor tweeted (and has since deleted) saying their voice was heavily edited and they were given no direction".

League of Legends fans have since come out in support of the voice actor and are rather baffled by the whole situation. "Hiring a voice actor and giving them no direction is a pretty poor move", said one LoL player. "Well, this boggles how Riot managed to edit the voice so heavily that every intonation sounds the same/similar to AI," wrote another.

While it wasn't AI on this occasion, with the use of the technology on the rise, we could very well see AI-generated voices adopted more and more in games. Recently, several voice actors from prominent games such as Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Starfield hit out at Microsoft for its latest AI efforts, which are capable of generating character dialogue. Additionally, the new Naruto fighting game has received backlash over a questionable redub that some suspect is the result of AI manipulation.

According to legendary creator Hideo Kojima, "humans should be above"" AI.

One of League of Legends' longest-running traditions is the creation of a collection of cosmetics inspired by the winners of each year's world championships. Each player earns a cut of the revenue from their skin, and the only catch is that their cosmetic has to be for a character they played at least once during the tournament itself.

Enter Keria, T1's support player, whose only goal (beyond lifting the trophy, I assume) was to get a skin for his favorite character, Lux. Putting to one side the fact that Lux has some of the most plentiful skins in the entire game (the current count is 17), Keria seems to have been pretty single-minded about his choice, should he win the tournament. 

The catch, of course, is that he didn't get a chance to play Lux a single time. A quirk of the way in which LoL's pick-and-ban drafting system works means that Lux was never a high-enough priority pick for the team. Keria's lane partner, Gumayusi, is quoted as having suggested that, had things worked out very slightly differently, they had a meta-relevant way to pull Lux into play, but high-level tournaments mean that you often don't get to play what you want.

Keria's disappointment was on display a few hours after his win. Unable to sleep, he jumped on stream, where esports journalist Ashley Kang translated his comments about his skin. Keria told viewers that "I only thought about making a Lux skin. I never thought about any other skin." In a meeting with Riot to discuss what each player wanted for their skin, he even says he "spent most of my time talking about Lux."

Even more disappointing for Keria, what he wanted out of his dream Lux skin is a tough fit for other characters. Having spent his semi-final press appearances suggesting that a significant part of his inspiration to reach the final was an opportunity to meet K-Pop outfit NewJeans, Keria told his viewers that he asked Riot to make his cosmetic "pretty." That would be an easy enough task for Lux, a young woman who Riot has given multiple anime-girl makeovers in its time, but it's a much harder ask for Keria's other potential picks.

His most successful champions during the tournament were Tahm Kench, Bard, and Renata Glasc. Respectively, those champions are a frog, a mysterious celestial being, and a middle-aged drug lord in an imposing face mask. While a skin for any of those champions would still benefit from Riot's excellent art design, it does seem like it would be hard to make them look 'pretty', per se - and when Riot's skin designers implied they would try their best, Keria says he just frowned at them.

Keria's predicament has sparked some debate on the League of Legends subreddit, with some players suggesting that a world champion should be allowed to have whatever skin they want, and others arguing that the whole point of the Worlds skins are to capture the tone of the tournament and the actual achievements of the players. Despite that debate, however, it sounds as though Keria's stuck with Bard or Renata. And, as many fans have pointed out, there's nothing to stop him following in his teammate Faker's footsteps, and simply winning the tournament a second time to finally claim his prize.

Even without Faker, this League Of Legends team won so hard that they're now exempt from South Korea's military service.

This year's Worlds competition has swapped to a Swiss format that leads into the single-elimination knockout rounds which will determine the final winner of the event. In the most basic terms, the Swiss stage is a sort of truncated round-robin tournament where teams with matching win-loss records face each other according to random draws. So the stage starts with all the teams facing off against their drawn opponents, then 1-0 teams face each other in randomly-drawn matchups as the 0-1 teams do the same. Teams that win three matches move on to the knockout round, while teams that suffer three losses are eliminated.

It's all a bit complicated, but organizers explained in a blog post that this format was "focused on creating more best-of match play and more opportunities for cross-regional competition." We may get all that in the end, but it only took one day for the competition to suffer some absolute nightmare RNG and accidentally put together five straight local competitions.

Once the field split out to 1-0 and 0-1 pools and the matchups were assigned, we ended up with five local matchups. North American LCS competitors NRG and Team Liquid faced off, EMEA's LEC saw MAD Lions and Team BDS go against each other, and China's LPL had JD Gaming and Bilibili Gaming going at it. South Korea's LCK got it even worse with two matchups: T1 versus Gen G and KT Rolster versus Dplus KIA.

With five out of the eight matchups for the day turning regional teams against each other, fans and pundits pretty quickly started making the Captain America: Civil War memes.

The Swiss stage continues through October 28 while the World Championship itself is set to conclude on November 19, so we'll see how much more cross-regional competition we get in the weeks to come.

One League of Legends dev settled a 14-year debate by revealing the MOBA's worst matchups, and one character was such a loser that he's 3 of the bottom 4. 

A 'hard counter' is one character or strategy that entirely shuts down another. Think rock-paper-scissors - rock will never beat paper, so you might argue that paper is a 'hard counter' to rock. The idea is found across all kinds of games, but if you find yourself on the receiving end of one in a game like League of Legends - with its lengthy games and focused 1v1 laning phases - it's unlikely to feel very fun to play.

Now, Riot has revealed arguably the hardest counter in the entire game. In a post on the League of Legends subreddit, one user asked "What do you think is the single worst champion matchup in the entire game?" Phrased another way, "What champion, when facing a specific other champion, do you think has the lowest chance of winning?" With a roster of 164 champions, there are a lot of potential matchups, but a Riot QA Engineer quickly jumped into the thread to provide the definitive answer: Malphite vs Sylas is so one-sided that Sylas has the massive upper hand, almost regardless of how you play him.

To get a sense of what that means, it's worth discussing who these characters are. Malphite is essentially a sentient mountain, whose main role in the game is as an anti-physical damage tank, and who has a massive, teamfight-engaging ultimate ability in which he charges forward and knocks up anyone caught in the blast. Malphite wants to build lots of armor, but he can build magic damage instead if he really wants to blow people up with that ultimate (but at the cost of his tankiness).

Sylas is, for all intents and purposes, a communist wizard, whose own ultimate allows him to steal the ultimates of other champions. Perhaps you can see where this is going. Sylas does the exact wrong kind of damage for Malphite, and can take his ultimate away to use on his own team, twisting it with the magic damage that Sylas already wants to build so that it does way more damage than Malphite can hope to do.

Sylas is also a real bully in a direct fight between the two of them, thanks to his innate ability to heal a percentage of the damage he does. To counter that, Malphite can buy an item called Bramble Vest, which curtails enemy healing. Unfortunately, it's an armor item, so while it's nice for Malphite, it does nothing to reduce the damage that Sylas is already doing, making it a very expensive gold sink in a matchup that Malphite is already struggling in.

It's such a disastrous matchup that it barely matters where Sylas plays the game - Malphite will still probably lose. The mage can be in the mid lane, top lane, or even the jungle, and he'll still counter the mountain so hard that those three possibilities are three of the four worst situations in the entire game. The maths behind exactly how many different matchups there are in a given game is too hard for my tiny brain to comprehend - one 2014 attempt to calculate the number of total team permutations topped out at more than 47 quadrillion, and the maths has only become more complex since then. Yet for all those possibilities, the mage whoops the mountain harder than pretty much all of them.

The only matchups that come close are actually pretty similar. Elsewhere, GalaxySmash revealed Rammus vs Mordekaiser features in the other slot in the bottom four when both characters play top lane, with Rammus' jungle role not far behind. Funnily enough, Rammus is another armor-stacking tank, while Mordekaiser is another melee-focused magic user with plenty of healing in their kit. That's a pretty substantial pattern, but it's also probably what you get if you build a physical damage tank into a magic-heavy matchup - team-building is important, people.

League of Legends Worlds 2023 has just kicked off, shortly after these Korean players did so well they exempted themselves from military service.

Earlier this week, the Asian Games hosted various esport tournaments for popular games such as Street Fighter 5, EA Sports FC, and Dota 2. But it’s the South Korean League Of Legends team that won the ultimate prize in a match against Taiwan.

As APNews explains, the South Korean government makes exemptions so athletes, musicians, and dancers can skip military service - as long as they bring their country enough renown through winning notable competitions and prizes. Even though there’s been some controversy around whether esports pros should be considered for the exemptions, the League Of Legends team won so hard they couldn’t really be denied. 

What makes the victory even more impressive, is that the team’s star player (Lee “Faker” Sang-Hyeok) wasn’t even playing in this particular match against Taiwan. When the gold medals were handed out, though, Faker received some of the largest cheers, since he’s one of the most recognisable pros in the League Of Legends scene. Despite not playing in the final, Faker also won exemption from military service - just in time since too, as Faker’s service would have been due within the year. 

Faker did have some encouraging words for his teammates, who handily made up for the star player’s absence. “I was sad not to be playing in the gold medal match,” Faker said after the gold win. “However, from a team point of view, everyone did a good job, so I think winning the championship is the best however it is done.” South Korea also won gold in the Street Fighter 5 tournament. 

League Of Legends fans might be interested in the spin-off that shares much DNA with Stardew Valley.

Earlier this week, developer Riot Games revealed the new skins heading to the game with its next patch. As well as a suite of introductions to the game's Cosmic skinline, the patch includes a 'Chroma' - a recolor of an existing skin, sold separately - for Dark Cosmic Jhin, which was released in 2019.

While the Chroma - dubbed Dark Cosmic Erasure Jhin - offers new art and a scarlet twist on the line's purple color scheme, as with any similar cosmetic it won't change anything about the character's animations. The greater issue among the community, however, is the gacha-style system that's been introduced to grant access to the cosmetic. 

Dataminer Julex has determined that purchasing new capsules offers a chance to find the Erasure chroma, but the only way to guarantee a drop is to purchase 30 pulls. That comes at a total cost of 22,500 of League of Legends' premium currency, which will set you back $200 for the cheapest bundles.

The response has been significant. While League of Legends does have a reroll system allowing players to earn random cosmetics, entry into that system is based on rewards you've already earned by playing the game. For many players, this system steps over a line towards full-fledged gacha that's not been present in the game during its decade-long history.

One Reddit post describes the system as "a new low point," decrying the monetization processes this might kickstart elsewhere in the game. Noting the prevalence of systems that have allowed players to save up their reroll currency in order to ensure they get what they want, there's a sense that this is a slippery slope that's only likely to lead to more of these loot drops.

Other players are drawing comparisons to the systems implemented by former League of Legends SEA publisher Garena, claiming that this system is actually less generous than the literal gacha mechanics implemented in that region. There's also a sentiment that Riot is testing the waters here, attempting to determine how this system will be adopted by the wider community. Thus far, it's not exactly been well-received. 

Check out our list of the best PC games.

Jeremy Lee, executive producer on the company's flagship title, has helped oversee LoL's journey from a massive game with limited cultural presence into one of the biggest multimedia franchises on the planet. Speaking to GamesRadar+ ahead of MSI, one of the biggest international esports tournaments in the world, Lee acknowledges that many things have changed since that original launch.

"The world was different in a lot of ways when League of Legends launched. It was a very unusual and kind of shocking thing to have a free-to-play game at the time." Nowadays, many of the biggest games in the world are free, funded entirely by cosmetics and battle passes, but that certainly wasn't the case 14 years ago. 

Caught in a Blizzard

Few games have had the staying power of League of Legends. Perhaps the biggest that comes to mind is World of Warcraft, a game approaching its own 20th birthday next year. Major expansions every few years have allowed WoW to maintain its relevance, but LoL doesn't have that same rate of relative change. When I ask Lee how Riot has maintained that enduring appeal, he notes that "it's pretty unprecedented. There really are so few comparison points. We're really in uncharted territory when it comes to games that are multi-generational." 

The core of the success, however, lies with the players; "the only reason that LoL is going into its 14th year is that partnership. The thing that guides us is what players are asking for." Sometimes, that's a more diverse roster of champions - League of Legends now plays host to characters drawn from south Asian, African, meso-American, and Caribbean heritage; many characters are built around positive portrayals of disability; romance is not a key part of League of Legends, but characters like Neeko and K'Sante offer fledgling LGBTQ representation.

Much of the time, the requests are less flashy - server improvements or new graphical options - but as Riot's place in the cultural zeitgeist expands, Lee says players are helping shape LoL's next narrative phase; "more and more games are becoming the center of entertainment generally." Citing HBO's The Last of Us, he points to Arcane. League of Legends' Netflix limited series was a triumph, sweeping the Annie Awards, and claiming Emmys and Hollywood Critics' Association titles along the way. For Lee, however, all that is a nice little extra; "what we're trying to do is serve players who love League of Legends. When something like Arcane ends up being  interesting and exciting for people who don't know the game, that's awesome, but it's a bonus for us."

That sentiment, however, comes at the end of a difficult period for LoL's narrative efforts. Arcane was a bright spot, but Riot has struggled elsewhere. In the summer of 2020, the Spirit Blossom brought an in-game visual novel to the League of Legends client. The idea was well-received, but when it reared its head again the following summer for the Ruination event, the absence of certain characters and a less well-realized story left fans disappointed. Since then, events have been driven by battlepass-style cosmetic drops, and Lee suggests that everything had begun to feel "a bit same-y."

Dead game

"Overall, one of the sentiments we were hearing was 'Riot's more interested in other things now, League of Legends isn't important to Riot anymore'. That isn't true, but some of the inadvertent things we had done certainly made it feel that way." Events like Ruination contributed to that, but the spark of a full-fledged panic came from a video released at the start of the year. Traditionally, the beginning of each annual season is marked with a flashy cinematic, but 2023's was so low-key that players assumed it was the beginning of the end for the game. Riot apologized, and Lee suggests that the response has helped kickstart an entirely new relationship with fans.

"It wasn't the only thing that had not gone well, but it was a really major moment where all players were looking at it, and saying 'this is something we're really looking forward to, and you missed the mark'. For the dev team and for players it was really disappointing." In response, Riot issued a rare apology, the start of a new way that the company realized it could talk to fans. In the days after the initial backlash, Lee appeared on a simple, phone-style video alongside League of Legends' studio head, filmed in Riot's offices rather than a fancy studio environment, to explain the whole situation.

"Over the last four or five years, we've been waiting to do videos where everything's polished and everything's perfect, and we can announce a bunch of stuff all at once. We realized based on what players were telling us that we don't have to do it that way. Those are more important to players." The result is an approach that Lee says is like "going back to our roots. It's going well in that we have a much better two-way conversation, and I'm looking forward to this summer where we're releasing a lot of content that's the result of those conversations, but that's just the first step."

Riot has teased some of that content already. A new '2v2v2v2' game mode is on the horizon. A new event intends to introduce a new theme, with new storytelling ideas. The long-term success of those ventures is reliant on players' enjoyment of them; Riot's pivot into music stemmed from the positive response to 2013's 'Get Jinxed' music video. So did Arcane, but other projects have fallen by the wayside, canned when players got bored. That doesn't worry Lee - "players who love League of Legends can have a variety of ways to engage [...] and I think there are still more avenues to explore. There's always something being pitched, always something being prototyped. The future, however, remains firmly tied to traditional, 5v5 League of Legends: "The core is so strong. People ask 'are you going to do LoL 2?' I think we've done that many times over."

The first tease of the League of Legends MMO came in 2018, but it was two years before the project would be officially confirmed. Greg 'Ghostcrawler' Street, an acclaimed World of Warcraft developer, was in the driving seat, and while it was clear the project was in its very early stages, there was a lot of faith in Riot. Its world is ready-made for an MMO, and the company has been quietly absorbing a lot of former Blizzard talent into its ranks, the prestige of both studios and their relative proximity to one another making it easy for developers to make the jump.

But it didn't take long before the cracks started to show. Just months after the official confirmation, Street himself suggested that he wasn't sure the game would ever ship, stressing nothing was ever certain in game development. At that point, he said that progress on the project was "going great", but that there was always a chance that the current team wasn't the right one to make the game. Barely six months after that, Street said that Riot would cancel the game if it wasn't good enough, noting, at least, that money wouldn't really be a factor in that decision. There was something refreshing about Street transparency around the realities of game development, but these weren't exactly the project updates I was looking for.

Then, just over four months later, Street announced that he was leaving Riot altogether. Citing personal issues, Street departed after nine years, telling fans that "the MMO is in good hands".  Six weeks after that, however, one of those sets of hands made their own departure – Justin 'Xenogenic' Hanson, principal game designer on the MMO, announced his own last day at Riot in April. The company, it seemed, was hemorrhaging important staff at a relatively alarming rate. 

MMO MIA

Two significant departures from the same project in quick succession was certainly a blow, but in a company of thousands, some amount of turnover is a near-certainty, however unfortunate the timing might be. Capping off that awkward few months was the announcement that Riot's CEO, Nicolo Laurent, was stepping down from his role. Laurent – who has led the company through the lows of its sexual harassment cases as well as its notable expansions into new games, indie publishing, and acclaimed multimedia efforts – will have been an important part of the decision to develop the MMO in the first place.

His replacement as CEO, company president A. Dylan Jadeja, is unlikely to burn Laurent's legacy to the ground, but his message is strangely reminiscent of aspects of things Street has said about the MMO: "The goal [...] is to make Riot, unequivocally, the most trusted and authentic game company in the world. The kind of place where people know that everything they play and experience from Riot will be amazing."

Any change in leadership, however benevolent, is likely to take stock of what they think is – or is not – working. MMOs are notoriously difficult to make, and a project recently robbed of two of its most senior developers, one which has never been seen by any member of the public, could easily find itself on the chopping block. I hope that doesn't happen, but games industry projects get canceled all the time, and the future of this one is far from certain.

For something you can actually play right now, here's our list of the best MMORPG you can play in 2023.