LoL Season 2025 update secretly made free-to-play experience much worse

While League of Legends Season 2025 made a number of changes to the game that offer players more value for what they’re spending, the free-to-play side of the game has taken a huge hit.

The way that LoL’s Battle Pass works has been completely changed, with most of those changes being huge positives. Rather than just grinding for tokens and look capsules like before, players who buy the pass will get 5 skins by completing the pass.

Considering that skins usually cost more than $10 each when you can get the pass for around $15, this is a huge improvement. However, there’s one change in this patch 2025.S1.1 update that’s a huge negative.

Once you work through the pass, it’s incredibly difficult to get Blue Essence. People who are free-to-play and don’t already have all the champions in the game will have a hard time.

LoL Battle Pass change makes getting new champs a lot harder

To keep a free-to-play game running, Riot has to make money somehow. And, though most of that revenue is driven by cosmetic sales, the temptation to buy new champions is a part of it.

Sure, players can get Game Pass and get all LoL’s champions upfront, but the truly free-to-play experience has always been a difficult one for players who want to get all the champions. Sure, it’s possible to target a few characters you’d like to play, but it’s difficult after the new player Blue Essence bonuses are earned.

And, with the new Battle Pass system only having four champion capsules and 4750 Blue Essence, players can earn a total of 24 champion capsules and 28,500 BE a year according to Riot employee BarackProbama.

“Most champions are not 6300. Average BE cost of a champion is 3000, so this represents ~6 you get to choose (if you don’t disenchant permanents) and 24 you do not, which is 30 per year,” he explained.

That said, the 6300 champions tend to be the more recent releases that are more desirable to players.

So, if you wanted to get a character that costs 6300 BE and you have already exhausted all the currency that comes from past milestones, you’re left with the option to earn a measly 50 BE incrementally past level 50 on the pass.

The Battle Pass provides meager rewards once you hit level 50

You don’t even have daily win challenges to help anymore, those got removed and converted into daily quests that give progress on the BP. Leveling up doesn’t grant capsules anymore either, making this currency even harder to earn.

Getting a 6300 character through just grinding the drops at the end of the pass would take around 900 hours.

Riot Games

Newer champions like Aurora will cost players a lot of Blue Essence if they want to buy them.

However, that number assumes people craft the permanent shards they’re given. You can disenchant these to get a character you want, but new players may not know that doing this makes the process of getting other new champions take even longer.

This means that it’d take a new player, at best, almost 6 years to unlock everyone. But that doesn’t include new champions that’ll get added to the game over that time.

4-5 new champs a year is the current number, and those new champions will be expensive, so a purely free-to-play LoL player in 2025 would have to spend 7-8 years grinding to catch up.

A huge contributing factor to this is that the Battle Pass changes have extended to champion mastery milestones as well, making it much harder to earn Hextech Chests. This is another way players often unlocked new champions and got their hands on Blue Essence.

You’ll still get keys for free, ones that can be used if you decide to buy a chest from the in-game store using premium currency.

Intentional or otherwise, this new patch has made League of Legends a much more difficult free-to-play experience for new players.

Riot devs address free-to-play controversy

Riot developer Meddler has addressed this issue, as well as other problems with Season 2025 like Feats of Strength’s snowball issues, in a tweet.

He claims that this was unintentional and that the team didn’t want to make it harder to earn new champions than it was before with this update.

“Unlocking new champions via blue essence wasn’t meant to get harder. Digging in to understand whether something isn’t functioning as intended now,” Meddler explained.

With this in mind, there’s a possibility that some of the LoL Season 2025 changes get revised to make it so players can earn new champions at a consistent rate.

However, that isn’t the whole story.

Riot’s FAQ on Hextech Chests was updated when the Season 2025 update came out, clarifying that these chests can only be purchased with RP now and can’t be earned in game. So, while the process of getting new champions being made harder may have been unintended, taking away Hextech Chests wasn’t.

Though Meddler claims that making Blue Essence harder to get wasn’t intentional, opening Hextech Chests was a key part of how players earned BE in the past through drops and disenchanting champion shards earned from the chest. Or even crafting those shards into a new character.

It is not yet know how, if at all, Riot plans to address player backlash on the topic.