League of Legends Is No Longer Aiming To Please The New Players

Over the holiday season, despite my best efforts to play more Hollow Knight: Silksong and Expedition 33, I felt the weird haunting pull of League of Legends again. There are so few five-player versus five-player competitive experiences with such a rich cast of characters that I’ve essentially grown up alongside.

League of Legends is entering its seventeenth year in gaming and it looks like it has no intention of slowing down yet. A new season starts in January, and Inverse got an early look at what Riot developers have planned to keep the game fresh and entertaining. From adding a new champion who’s supposed to be an old noble god, to rebalancing the competitive mode, League has a full list of complex patch notes that luckily I can help make sense of. As a returning player who started back in 2015, I’ve had the special experience of having to get used to League in 2025, and now, anticipating immediate changes in the new year.

While a bunch of changes are being made to the game, I couldn’t help but notice some of the updates look quite familiar. League seems to have a pattern of trying new things, and then rolling them back when they don’t turn out so well. Or of deleting old features, and then resurrecting them again, years later. If you’ve stuck with the game for long enough, some of the new announcements of 2026 will look oddly familiar.

League is many things to many different people. It is one of the few successful esports events, and it can also be a playground for friends to gather over stupid fictional duels. Sometimes those two purposes can be at odds with one another. In January of 2025, Riot added an extremely large monster, Atakhan, to the game, so that players would have another goal to take down in the mid-late game when they had little to do. But now, apparently, the pendulum has swung too much in the other direction, and that League is a too goal-oriented game at the moment, according to Riot, so as of January of 2026, Atakhan is getting deleted. I found this particular change a bit amusing, as I re-opened League in November of 2025, was surprised by this weird Atakhan monster, got used to him, and now we’re already having to say goodbye. What about my compensation for all the times I died to him in game, I asked jokingly.

“No, no ranked compensation,” says Riot lead game designer Bryan Salvatore, “Atakhan gets to keep that LP [League Points] forever.”

There are also some significant quality-of-life improvements that could arguably change the game for the better. If you’ve been holding out for some of these, you’ll be pleased to hear about them. For one thing, when players gather to select the champion they plan to play that game, your teammates could always easily do a cruel thing and ban the champion about to be selected. I’ve seen this happen a number of times, often if a player is hovering a pick that nobody has any faith in, like challenging-to-play samurai Yasuo in the hardest possible position, jungle. Well, now, players will no longer be allowed to ban their teammate’s champion, to cut down on toxicity and griefing.

Another update reminds me that League is ageing and perhaps maturing. During competitive ranked games, to keep queue times down, players are sometimes forced into a role that they didn’t usually play, in what’s called autofill. (Although Riot didn’t share current player numbers, its emphasis on this feature leads me to imagine queue times may have increased as players discover other games.) When forced into these roles they dislike, players often lose the game for their team either on purpose or by accident. To incentivize them to try harder, Riot is now making sure players don’t lose any ranked points as long as they got a C grade or higher for their performance that game. For players who already play these less popular roles by default — jungle and support players, that is — they’ll regularly get this benefit (nullifying some games into zero-point losses), though Riot declined to share how regularly, to avoid people starting to play more Yasuo jungle on purpose.

Finally, though I’m not aiming to be comprehensive in my summary of the changes, Riot is also bringing back a familiar item, the Hextech Gunblade. It’s an item that lets players shock enemies with a bolt of lightning and slows them. It was removed from the game a few years ago for being unfair, and causing certain assassin-type champions to feel too strong, but Riot is bringing it back with a longer cooldown timer on usage, and noting that those assassins are strong, regardless of this item.

“With Katarina and Akali using this item, it felt pretty oppressive at times,” Salvatore says, “It turns out Katarina and Akali not using this item can still feel pretty oppressive in the right hands.”

What’s also noteworthy is that League isn’t really trying to be all things to all people anymore. Instead of attempting to appeal to new players, Riot says it’s aiming at improvements to the game for existing players.

“I don't believe that the gameplay changes are going to make it easier for new players to get in,” Salvatore says, adding that the goal is to balance the game for existing players and not make League feel unfair or too difficult. “The goal with these changes is much more focused on people who already love the game.”