/dev: Seasons in 2025

In today’s Dev Update we talked about how Seasons will look and what you should expect next year and beyond. In short, our goal for Seasons is to have thematic experiences that touch and influence how you experience League—from champion releases, game modes, (some) gameplay changes, to even events and the Battle Pass (formerly Event Pass, more on that below). We want to immerse you into the Seasonal thematic both in and around the game.

So today we want to dive a little deeper into some of the things you’ll see in January, mainly what Seasons are, how they’re structured, and how we streamlined some existing systems in League. We also have blogs that dive deeper into the Season One gameplay, Ranked, and Swiftplay.

Seasons

Over the years we’ve fleshed out the world and regions of Runeterra, as well as alternate universes like Star Guardian, High Noon, and Dark Star. We’ve tried to create moments to highlight and give you special experiences like summer events, or narrative drops around champions or skin releases. And now we want to take that experience further with Seasons.

In 2025, we’ll have three Seasons where we’ll follow champions across different regions of Runeterra. Each will have their own unique theme and narrative that will connect throughout 2025 and will be the anchor for the majority of the content that we put into the game. This includes things like gameplay, modes, skins, mini-games, and champions which will have a strong connection to the Season’s theme, delivered in two Acts per Season.

We’ll still do things like the Lunar Revel event, moments like April Fools, and release skinlines that aren’t tied into the current Seasonal thematic, but the majority of our content will be connected to the theme of that Season. Ultimately, our goal is to show and immerse you into different parts of Runeterra from the moment you open the client to the moment you see a Victory screen and everything in between.

The first thing you should notice next year is that the client has received a facelift to streamline your experience and highlight the seasonal theme. We want to remove noise and clutter, all while bringing the Season’s thematic to the forefront of (almost) everything next year. Small disclaimer though that these changes to the client are just visual.

The updated home page, called the Activity Center.

Because each Season will be the focus of content going into League, we wanted the client to reflect that as well. So now the landing page will focus entirely on the Season, League, and things you can do in it. Beyond putting the thematic in the forefront, you can also follow your progression throughout the Season—from the story’s progress itself to the Battle Pass. And, as the Season progresses, so too will its page in the Activity Center..

You can also track time-limited events like Lunar Revel, new champion releases, your Ranked journey, mini-games, and more from the side-bar in the Activity Center.

The Info Hub.

To keep the landing page focused on League activities we moved news and information about League into a new place called the Info Hub. Every time a new patch drops the Info Hub will show up over the Activity Center to show a rotating list of what’s new: cinematics, new skins, new champions, esports news, Dev Updates, and more. (And if you’re also a TFT player, you can toggle to the TFT version of the Info Hub on the top left). It’ll only pop up once per patch when you first log in, but if you ever want to go back to look at it again, you can always pull it back up from the Activity Center.

Battle Passes & Rewards

Seasons also gave us the perfect opportunity to take a better look at some of League’s core rewards systems and see what we could level up or clean up, as over League’s history we may have made one too many rewards systems. We also wanted to make sure the Battle Pass was a strong extension of that season’s theme, tailored to the overall moment.

Over the years some of our systems have become needlessly complex, with excess currencies, or unnecessary steps to craft or claim rewards, overlapping reward types, and so on. Needing three key fragments to make a key to unlock a chest to get a random skin shard, which you then need three of to get a random skin, or orange essence to convert the shard into the skin is just... a convoluted experience We still like some of the agency you get in crafting and choosing to get a randomized reward, but it should be something you opt into rather than be required to receive a reward.

To make League more consistently rewarding to play, we’re introducing a new Battle Pass system starting next year. There will always be a Pass active and will now last four patches instead of the current two. This extended duration gives you more time to unlock rewards while requiring about the same amount of gameplay per week to do so. This change will allow for steady progress without feeling pressured by event schedules.

Battle Passes will be the core vessel for how you track and earn rewards going forward. We want it to be  a focused, singular area where you can find all of the rewards clearly presented—and make it easy to understand how to earn them.

Everyone will have access to the free pass, which grants various rewards, including a Seasonal skin. And, if you choose to buy the paid version, we want to ensure the differences of what you are getting are very clear.

We want the new Battle Pass to mirror the Seasonal thematic experience. (Disclaimer: These are examples, we don’t want to spoil the first Battle Pass just yet. Arcane Singed is available from the Arcane mini-game.)

Objectives & Battle Pass Experience (BXP)

You’ll gain passive experience on your Battle Pass as you play, but if you really want to progress on your pass fast there will also be missions to get through it faster.

You’ll be able to track all of your missions in a new Objectives tab so you can track your progress for all of them in one spot. You can also see the rewards clearly on the screen—sometimes it’ll be something other than just pass experience.

We’re also increasing the number of missions that are available at any given time. You’ll now have dailies, weeklies, Act-long missions, events, Mastery missions, and more. Because there are more missions available with more variety, we’re also making it so most missions have a singular objective (some of which are themed).You won’t need to complete every mission to finish your pass, and can choose where you want to focus your time and energy—if you’re able to do your daily mission every day, you don’t need to go too far into other missions. If you're unable to play every day, that's fine too, as the passive experience for playing games, Act-long missions, and infinite Mastery Milestone missions will cover you.

We want to give you more creativity when it comes to completing passes, so it should become less of a “play X number of games” grind and more of a varied experience. That said, it should still take the same gameplay investment to complete a pass than it does today because now everything adds pass exp, even though the pass is double the length.

In addition to all of these changes, you’ll also be able to view a snapshot of your Battle Pass progression from anywhere in the client.

Pass Rewards

All right, let’s talk about rewards. We’re removing the Event Shop and Tokens, and now you’ll unlock all your pass rewards directly on the track (we know, revolutionary, right?). The Battle Pass will have a free and paid version (which you can purchase for the same bundle prices as an Event Pass today), each with unique skins: Every free pass will have one unique Seasonal skin, and every paid pass will also have  three more unique Seasonal skins and the Seasonal Prestige skin (5 unique skins total). There are a bunch of other rewards, which we'll get into down below.

Paid Pass Options

• 1650 RP - Battle Pass

• 2650 RP - Battle Pass, 10 Pass Levels, Champion receiving the Prestige, Prestige Emote

• 3650 RP - All of the above, 25 Mythic Essence, Prestige Chroma

There will be 50 levels that you can unlock on the Battle Pass, with a variety of rewards including skins, titles, borders, emotes, icons, loot orbs, banners, and more! There will also be repeatable levels beyond the 50 for Blue Essence and Orange Essence.

Free Pass

There’s always been a “free pass” track for Event Passes, but they’ve never felt all that great, and if you didn’t buy the pass, you typically ignored it. We wanted to fix that: If you never spend a dollar in League, but are spending your time, it should feel rewarding.

On average, fully free-to-play players earn about nine skins a year (including the three Victorious skins each split and crafting). So when looking at rewards to include in the Battle Pass, we wanted to at least hit that number for the year. Next year you can earn 12 skins from the free pass (15 if you include the three Victorious skins) just by playing League. But, as we said earlier, we want to simplify the system, so we will be rewarding you with straight-up skins. No more skin shards.

You’ll be able to get skin shards through purchasing or obtaining Hextech Chests and Event Loot moving forward. The shards you have now aren’t going anywhere—they’ll be in your inventory.

You can get more free skins a year next year when this change takes place. We’re just taking the shards and rerolling out of that free experience.

You can earn two free skins per Act from the free pass just for playing. The first skin in the pass will be a unique, Seasonally-themed skin for hitting pass level 20. It’ll be obtainable by everyone while that Battle Pass is active, but will never hit the reroll pool. The second skin will be a random 1350 RP or lower skin for hitting level 45 on the pass. If you already own all the 1350 skins then it’ll give you a random 1350 skin permanent in your inventory that you can either dust or reroll.

The full list of the rewards for the free Battle Pass should look like this:

• One thematic Earnable Skin Permanent

• One random 1350 RP or lower Skin

• One Title

• Two Emotes

• Two Mystery Emotes

• Three Icons

• Two Mystery Icons

• Four Champion Capsules

• 4750 Blue Essence (plus infinite repeating levels at the end of the track)

Paid Pass

If you choose to upgrade to the paid pass, you’ll be able to obtain the Seasonal Prestige skin as the capstone reward (read: the final non-repeatable reward). We’ve heard your feedback that one of the more frustrating experiences was having just not enough Event Tokens to unlock the Prestige skin at the end of the event (or wanting some borders and other goodies as well). We believe that by  adding the skin as well as borders to the pass will give the pass more value, but will also make getting the rewards you want less frustrating.

In addition, you’ll also unlock a bunch of other rewards including more skins, Ancient Sparks for the Sanctum, banners, and more:

• Everything from the Free Pass

• Three Ancient Sparks

• One Prestige Skin

• Three Reward Skins

• Three Borders

• Seven Loot Orbs

• One Banner

• One Ward Skin

• Two Emotes

• Two Icons

• 1000 Orange Essence (Plus an infinitely repeatable 25 OE every 5 levels after 50)

We’re also making another small adjustment to Prestige skins moving forward. Historically Prestige skins have always been based on a non-Prestige version of the skin. But from now on there will only be the Prestige version. This wasn’t a decision we made lightly, but we think that focusing entirely on the Prestige version without a non-Prestige base will let us make the Prestige skin a lot more “prestigious” and will lead to higher quality Prestige skins.

We’re also permanently adding the ability to purchase levels in case you’re not able to complete the pass for whatever reason. And, like the current Battle Passes, it will store your progress in the paid track even if you didn’t purchase it at the start of the Season.

Other Rewards Systems

As we were working on the Battle Pass rewards, we also cleaned up redundant things in the store and  eliminated some confusion with a few other systems.

Honor and the Honor Shop

As it currently stands, the Honor system is more of a checkbox that you hit at the end of the Ranked season for a free skin (or some sparkly VFX on your back animation), and we want this system to be more. We want League to be a place that fosters a healthy environment by promoting and rewarding positivity, and punishing disruptive behavior. So we’re making some changes to the Honor system to reflect this.

Earlier this year we shared some of the work in this space, and starting with the launch of Seasons we’ll be introducing some of our next steps. Moving forward your Honor level will be tied directly to how you are rewarded in League. A positive Honor level will grant you increased pass experience that will increase as your Honor level does. Your Honor level will also define your social experience in League going forwards, with high Honor players earning more social privileges than their counterparts. This starts with your access to social capabilities, from All Chat and post-game chat to pinging and emote frequency, and more.

Because we’re making Honor tie directly into the Battle Pass system, we’re also removing the Honor Shop and Honor Tokens. With Honor gating your social experience and determining your rewards, we want it to feel like an integral part of your League experience. Keeping Honor and the rest of Store and Season Rewards separate is contrary to that goal. So we're integrating Honor more deeply into the League ecosystem while deprecating the isolated space that is the Honor Store. We don’t think that making Honor a checkpoint at the end of the Ranked season led to a positive outcome, and we’ve admittedly kind of trolled for years by not offering anything in the Honor Shop that’s actually worth getting. So we’re removing it entirely.

That said, at the end of this season we will be releasing Three Honors Shen, who will automatically be granted to all Honor level 5 players early next year.

In the first patch of the year we’ll be adding ALL Honor skins to the Honor Shop in case you have any leftover Tokens. And later in Season One we’ll be officially closing the Honor Shop and converting all leftover Honor Tokens to 1050 Orange Essence per Token (enough to upgrade an Epic Skin Shard from your inventory). After the Honor Shop closes, the existing Honor skins will become a one-time unlock for hitting Honor level 5 in the future.

Some of these changes won’t immediately be available in Season 1, such as the passive bonus to pass experience and the access to social features. You can expect that to be coming later next year in 2025. We’ll share the specifics of those closer to when they’re coming to the game next year.

Hextech and Masterwork Chests

A perfect example of where we wanted to exercise our new philosophy for rewards was within the Hextech and Masterwork Chest space—specifically confusion and decluttering. Masterwork Chests were often purchased for one of two reasons: Either for wanting to obtain Mythic Essence, or there wasn’t an event active but someone wanted the Orb equivalent in them. In 2025 you’ll be able to more consistently obtain Mythic Essence through the Sanctum, and since there’ll always be a pass active, Orbs will always be available. So Masterwork Chests are redundant and will no longer be for sale.
As for what happens to existing Masterwork Chests we’ll be rolling out changes in two phases:

Phase 1: Masterwork Chests will no longer be sold in the Store starting in patch 25.S1.1 on January 6, 2025. At this time, we also will be moving away from using them as rewards in other systems such as Battle Passes and Ranked Rewards.

Phase 2: The Masterwork Milestone track will be deactivated at the end of Season 1 Act 1 in patch 25.S1.5 on March 5, 2025. When they’re deactivated, all earned rewards on the track will be autoclaimed as well. Please note that you only progress the track by opening Masterwork chests, so any unopened chests will not count towards your progress.

After Phase 2, any remaining Masterwork Chests in your inventory will remain unopened. You can still purchase or acquire Hextech Keys to open your chests in the future and receive rewards from the chests.

Hextech Chests will still be available and will be the lowest cost way to obtain skin shards.

Champion Mastery Rewards

The rewards experience for Champ Mastery has felt disconnected from League. It’s another thing to track and follow, without a great reason for that added complexity. Another problem that we also wanted to solve in this space is that not every way of playing League is rewarded in equitable ways. If you’re an ARAM player, you’re just rewarded less because so many of our systems like Mastery are built around Summoner’s Rift. This wasn’t intentional, but it’s something we want to fix.

Instead, in 2025 we’re incorporating Champion Mastery into the Battle Pass to improve the experience of playing ARAM and its contributions to the pass, re-enforce the pass as a central rewards experience, and make mastery itself bolster your progression. You’ll no longer receive chests from Mastery, but instead be rewarded in Pass Experience, bringing Champion Mastery into the fold for Battle Pass progression.

You’ll still obtain Mastery levels and points like normal, just now you’ll see Champion Mastery missions appear in your new objective modal that we showed above. You’ll have an always active mission for completing a Mastery milestone for what is equivalent to a daily objective in pass exp, and a few others for completing various sets of Mastery ranging up to large amounts of pass exp (essentially multiple levels).

There will be three main missions, and two “bonus” missions each Act:

Mission 1: Complete a Mastery milestone on any champion (infinite mission)

Mission 2: Complete Mastery milestone 4 on any champion (once per Act)

Mission 3: Complete 12 milestones in your Mastery Set (once per Act)

Bonus Mission 1: Complete 24 milestones in your Mastery Set (once per Act)

Bonus Mission 2: Complete 40 milestones in your Mastery Set (once per Act)

Event, Showcase, and Mythic Variant Capsules

Let’s be honest. These systems were super-confusing—at points we literally had three capsules up at the same time.

So, in 2025 we’re moving Mythic Variants into The Sanctum as their own tiered reward you can roll for with Ancient Sparks; capsules are going away. This also means Mythic Variants will have their own bad luck protection that carries over to future Mythic Variants, guaranteed at 40 attempts. Showcase capsules are going away entirely because they weren’t very popular, felt out of place, and don’t fit into the new Seasonal Battle Pass system. So, moving forward Event Orbs will be the sole “capsule,” or “orb” in 2025 and beyond.

We know that these are a ton of changes, but we’re really excited for what Seasons unlocks for League and the overall experience we’re driving to create in 2025. From how it’s expressed in gameplay, to the new Battle Pass, and the client theming, we feel like it’ll create a cohesive, thematic, and exciting version of League. We hope you enjoy it and we’ll see you next year in Season One.