Blue Essence and Account XP Update

We’re making some changes to Battle Pass rewards and account XP.
Dev

Hey all. Meddler here following up on Blue Essence and account level XP earn rates post Season launch.

TL;DR: We meaningfully screwed up on this one. The numbers we shipped were pretty far off from what they should be for many of you. We’ll be putting out fixes for that during Patches 25.S1.2 and 25.S1.3.

We want to get into the details, so we’ll talk through:

  • What we intended

  • Where things are wrong

  • Details of changes we’re making

  • Cause of these problems

What We Intended

When we shifted into the new Seasonal model our intent was for Blue Essence earn rates to be the same, or slightly better, for all players, with new and casual players in particular seeing a more meaningful increase. We intended for BE income to move over to the new Pass as part of simplifying League’s rewards systems, but BE from the Pass was intended to, at minimum, offset any losses elsewhere.

When it comes to account level, we didn’t intend to change the number of games it takes to get access to Ranked, or for those players who value account level/the associated icons, change the speed of leveling.

Where Things Are Wrong

There are a few problems we’re seeing. For a lot of you, BE rates are significantly lower right now. 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.

Digging into the BE issue, we see the following impacts for different types of player. Because old BE earn rates and the new Battle Pass progression can vary based on how effectively Missions are completed, we’re looking here at four different example player types for sake of discussion, based off the amount a player engages over a two month period.

In this chart, Low refers to players who rarely play for Pass efficiency, Medium to players who occasionally do, High players frequently do, and Super High players are incredibly efficient at finishing Pass Missions and completing Milestones. Most players fall around the Medium, to sometimes Medium-High mark for context.

So in short, the changes landed as intended for low engaging players (often, though not always, more casual players), but we missed the mark a lot for other players, especially those who play a lot.

Changes We’re Making

First, when it comes to BE earn rates, we’re going to significantly increase the free Pass earn rates as per 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. The Epilogue changes should go live in Patch 25.S1.2.

All of the changes in the table above will be implemented before the Act 2 Pass is live.

Because the Act 1 Pass is already live, and a decent number of you have progressed past the BE Milestones, we’re not able to adjust the Milestone rewards for this Act. Instead we’ll be granting 4250 BE through a one-time easily-completable Mission, which will go live by Patch 25.S1.3, to compensate for the BE that should be a reward at those milestones. You’ll get this BE regardless of whether or not you finish the pass, but we won’t be able to add retroactive repeating BE increases that are earned before those changes go live.

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.

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.

Cause of These Problems

When the Passes went live, we saw a large amount of feedback and analysis from many of you, which caused us to take another look at the math. When we did, we 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.

As for account XP, the problem is very similar—we hadn’t accounted for the loss of FWotD, which meant drastically slowing the progression of accounts and therefore access to Ranked.

Next Steps

As we work on getting these changes out, we’ll also be digging more into exactly why this slipped through to begin with, and how we can prevent similar issues from arising in the future. We’ll keep you updated as we continue to look into these systems on any potential adjustments, and we apologize for our misses here on both the numbers tuning and comms around what was/wasn’t changing.