League of Legends Classic Update Discussion

Hey folks, FeralPony here back for our first Classic update.

First off, I want to thank everyone for the feedback.

Now let's talk about the elephant on the rift, Classic skins.

Feedback received.

If you're on PBE,

you probably already noticed that all Classic skins are unlocked for

all Champions that have one.

They will also be the default option soon, and they're going to be

replacing the modern base skins.

For Champions who don't have one yet, we're working on those too.

We'll also be re adding as much of the old VO as we can.

Some of that will be very soon,

some of that will be soon, and some of that will be soon TM.

Another big topic we've been seeing is the time era of Classic.

Why is Classic a best of as opposed to a specific snapshot in time?

We knew immediately that the

2009 launch was probably a little too old,

but stuff like Season 6 was probably too new, despite being 10 years ago.

When we started this project,

we surveyed and talked to players all around the world about what Classic

means to them. We asked what was too old,

what was Classic, and when was League its greatest?

We thought there would be a lot of disagreement, but the answers were

almost identical.

League was classic the year they started playing.

League was best the year after they started.

And League was too old before they started.

The other main answer was people really

wanted to relive those classic experiences that they can't have today.

That means we can capture things from all eras of League past,

like champions, weird off builds, items, summoner spells, and gameplay.

Any single snapshot in time would

fall really short here and miss the mark for the overwhelming majority of you.

So our goal is to make the best game with the best pieces of classic League.

That still remains true.

But based on your feedback,

we're now shifting our approach to make classic a little bit older.

We're gonna be pulling much more of our content back from Season 5,

which was our previous cutoff to Season 3.

We may still occasionally dip forward if, and only if,

we believe it's a sizable improvement to the game and

that it falls within our original design philosophy of League.

This is where you'll see some changes around stuff like Baron buff that can help

close out a long stalled game.

However, we're going to be scaling back the power level of those changes to

the minimum amount that we think we can achieve to goals and deliver a great play

classic feeling game experience.

One of the areas we are changing our approach relative to old League is our values

around usability and game clarity.

So League has always had these goals, but the bar has risen a

lot over the last 15 years.

One example of usability is

that we want to keep the ping system largely the same as on Modern League.

We don't want to mess with people's hotkeys, their muscle memory,

especially if you're playing back and forth between multiple modes.

In terms of game clarity, an example of this is champion bounties.

We saw a lot of conversation about this after the MSI showmatch.

The classic bounty system is the one that's in Classic right now.

We just added a UI indicator to make

it more understandable when somebody has a bounty and how big it is.

And finally, let's talk about champions.

Our goal is to have what makes each champion unique versus Modern League

and what exemplifies their most memorable classic designs.

Things like toggle abilities, higher mana costs, global buffs, simpler kits,

and sometimes a fun bit of jank. So originally,

we tried to get the best version of these champions from the first five seasons.

But like with gameplay,

we're going to tighten that window to seasons 1 to 3 while still preserving the

standout mechanics and whatever makes the most classic sense for that champion.

An example of this is Twisted Fate.

Season 3 TF is basically the same as Modern,

so we went further back to capture his more unique gameplay and identity including

his global passive and ability to teleport at level 1. For Katarina,

we followed the same logic and initially went for an earlier version of her kit

as we felt that that would be more iconic,

but many of you overwhelmingly said that you preferred her 2012 design in Season 3,

which, side note, as the designer of that update, that frickin' rules, thank you.

But feedback received,

and we're rewinding her Rewind a little bit,

and you should see that version on PBE soon.

That said, we know a lot of this is subjective,

but we won't be putting champion kits up to a direct vote, since that would

probably just end in every champion getting trolled or nerfed into the ground.

But we are listening to your feedback, and we'll make adjustments so champions feel

healthy, fun, and most importantly, classic.

That's all we've got for now.

We're going to continue to keep an eye on your feedback, thoughts,

make adjustments, and we'll be back to check in when we have more updates.