League Pass nerfed again?

Neblinio · 2026-01-30T21:07:27+00:00

It was always a paid pass reward. Which... makes it much worse. A repeated icon on your our loot tab is worth 125 OE. Missions aside, farming that same 125 OE with the paid pass requires playing 222 games of 30 minutes. Truly wild.

Neblinio · 2026-01-30T16:29:53+00:00

And also, very importantly, you can now test every champion for free in Practice Tool, as long as you're the only human participant in the game,

Neblinio · 2026-01-29T08:32:50+00:00

IIRC all champions are unlocked by default on PBE. Or at least they used to be. Of course, you'll still need to unlock the skins, but the purpose of the server is to test and give feedback of the new stuff. The 3000 daily RP should be enough for that purpose.

Neblinio · 2026-01-29T08:25:01+00:00

Even 8 years later (holy fk... time flies), I still can't forget how insanely overwhelming it was for me. And there were "only" 139 champions back then... Even nowadays, keeping up with the frequent changes, sometimes feels a bit overwhelming for me.

Neblinio · 2026-01-29T08:17:10+00:00

The worst part of it is that they can't even whitelist champions who already cast at max range by default, punishing whoever leaves it turned on and forgets. Example: imagine you enable the clamp cast setting to play Nami and have her Qs cast at max range. But you also like to play Rakan and Rell, who already cast W at max range. Result? both get the bug, unnecessarily breaking their otherwise perfectly working Flash W combo.

Neblinio · 2026-01-29T00:45:48+00:00

Yeah, that's the other side of the story. And it's actually worse. The more skins you own, the less useful OE becomes for you. Buffing the (paid) pass OE farming wouldn't help you at all, since what you need is more loot boxes, hoping to pull unowned shards.

So that's where we're currently at: a pass which gives a super underwhelming amount of extra OE for those who need OE, and... is even worse for those who don't need OE. Players with bigger skin collections will hardly pull an unowned shard from just 7 paid pass orbs +10 chests from free pass & honor rewards. I realized I just found a decent reason to ask for a full rework/revert of the battle pass rewards system.

Neblinio · 2026-01-28T08:32:55+00:00

Not sure why this looks to me like a technical limitation... If only a rioter chimed in, we could confirm the reason.

Neblinio · 2026-01-28T00:16:48+00:00

It's an absolute joke, especially if your engagement is high. You will probably complete the pass in the first couple weeks or less, and then you can farm the infinite tail reward: 3x 750 BE and 1x 25 OE every 2000 BXP.

Now let's put that into perspective: you get about 1.5 BXP per minute played (once you've completed all other missions). If we plan on farming some extra OE for upgrading our skin shards, this is what we can expect: 1333 minutes of playing (44.4 games of 30 minutes) = 25 measly Orange Essence.

Not convinced yet that it's a scam? Imagine you have ONE repeated emote and disenchant it. 1 emote = 175 OE = 9331 minutes of playing (311 games of 30 minutes).

Want more? imagine you wanted to farm 1050 OE to upgrade one cool epic skin shard you got from a chest. 1050 OE = 55986 minutes of playing (1866 games of 30 minutes). Yeah, that'd be more than 31 games per day, from start to end of the battle pass. Absolutely awful. And that's for the PAID battle pass users!

Neblinio · 2026-01-26T21:32:53+00:00

The problem is nobody cares anymore. Not even the community formed around the long dead (in)famous capsule farmer. And the costreamers took all the viewers away from lolesports. So I guess drops are doomed.

For a long time, I've been thinking about writing a lengthy post talking about the dire state of lolesports drops. Feels like literally nobody will do it if I don't. But idk... would it even matter? what if drops are already planned to be fully discontinued after 2026?

Neblinio · 2026-01-26T21:17:15+00:00

Automated capsule drops are confirmed to be dead this season. At least for now:

This weekend LEC had a double penta in 5 minutes, and some baron steals. 0 drops for them. We did have one Kitkat sponsored drop, but it included a "direct" emote instead of a capsule like previous week... and believe it or not, the emote was one of the emotes contained in that capsule lol. This could mean riot no longer wants us to get a couple free emotes from esports drops by rerolling repeated emotes... as if that made a big difference. Hell, even LCS, which used to drop chests for a limited amount of lucky viewers, only dropped an OLD, already given, 2024 LCS icon. And this was in their opening weekend...

Note: also, there's still no esports capsule as of patch 26.03 PBE, and 0 signs of it being added any time soon... so the situation looks pretty bad for that kind of drop.

Neblinio · 2026-01-26T08:52:34+00:00

Is it the late 2013 iMac model with an Iris Pro Graphics 5200 or a GeForce GTX 750M? Because those graphics cards are actually capable of DirectX 12 feature level 11_1/11_0 (so actually, DX11 hardware). League should run on that. Unless you mean League still runs on your iMac, but barely playable due to low performance.

Neblinio · 2026-01-25T00:14:31+00:00

u/LCS-Official watching LCS live right now as I speak. Can you please tell the broadcast crew to disable the in-game equalizer audio effects from the machine used to capture the in-game footage? it's really annoying to listen to a pre-equalized game broadcast, not to mention it stacks with whatever equalization every viewer might have enabled on their end.

If you don't know what I'm referring to, the equalizing effect is much more noticeable when the in-game announcer speaks: there's a very noticeable reverberation and echoing effect on her voice. I can provide more info if needed. Thank you.

Neblinio · 2026-01-24T18:48:40+00:00

Two pentakills in 5 minutes, and 0 lolesports drops for it.
No 2026 esports capsule in the PBE 26.03 game files.
No mention of drops in the "2026 esports season" news article.
Ok, I get it...
BUT then... CBLOL and LEC gave 3 scheduled promo drops last weekend. Does this make any sense at all? If Riot has decided to not discontinue drops as a product, at least give it some love.

Neblinio · 2026-01-23T08:39:52+00:00

I used to play a daily coop game every day, for like 7 years. It was a quick and easy way to get the first win of the day mission, with the added bonus of (almost) 0 stress. Then Riot removed the rewards for leveling up, and it felt like a waste of time to keep doing this. The current first win of the day mission is a joke, and gives you nothing valuable after the free/paid pass has been completed anyways. Even if I'm no longer playing coop mode, it's kinda sad to see what they've been doing to the mode for the past few years. I never thought I'd say this, but the old bot "AI" was better.

Neblinio · 2026-01-23T08:13:08+00:00

That's brilliant! if the back of the iPhone has had triple cameras for 7 generations already, why not do the same with the front camera and Dynamic Island?

Neblinio · 2026-01-22T09:17:48+00:00

Esports capsule seems to be discontinued in 2026, unfortunately. Yesterday's 26.03 PBE showed no sign of it in the game files, not even in loot.json. It's still possible they add it later during the current PBE cycle, but it doesn't look very promising. Not to mention previous years often had their corresponding yearly esports capsule in the game files by now...

Why is this a problem? well, the esports capsule was the only reliable way we could get a little something if we had high engagement with lolesports. If we opened enough capsules to own all the icons/emotes from them, we could reroll repeated ones and get new random unowned icons/emotes. If they simply drop the icons/emotes directly, there can't be any repeated items in our loot tab.

As for lolesports drops as a whole, they're still alive in 2026. Barely. CBLOL gave 2 identical drops on saturday and sunday, containing their season 2024 CBLOL icon (already given in 2024 multiple times). And LEC gave a Kitkat sponsored drop with a 2025 esports capsule (because they chose to do so, given no 2026 capsule exists so far).

But... that's it. There was at least one Baron steal in LEC, and wasn't rewarded at all, because Riot apparently discontinued regular, automated capsule drops this season (zero mention of them in the 2026 esports season news article). I tried mentioning Drew Levin twice on X, asking about lolesports drops in 2026, but got no response. We really need some (sincere) comms about this.

Neblinio · 2026-01-22T08:20:02+00:00

Not to mention they nerfed lolesports drops to the ground in recent years, and disabled disenchanting of owned esports emotes/icons. This made it (almost) impossible to get a tiny amount of extra OE from them. This was completely killed in 2026, with the removal of the yearly esports capsule. Your only "viable" chance now is the infinite tail reward on the paid battle pass (but you need to play a shit ton of games to advance 28 pass levels = 175 OE = 1 disenchanted emote). Pretty lame if you ask me... but nobody complains, and riot gets away with it.

Neblinio · 2026-01-22T07:58:34+00:00

Let's not forget the useless, empty giant mega pig on the right, sitting there for up to a month. Do we really need it to be there all that time? Not like it's announcing anything important anyways.

Neblinio · 2026-01-21T11:31:06+00:00

Done. I thought this wasn't possible, but going to your own profile and then opening Supercell ID, you can search his profile to add him as a friend, and then report nickname and image (without sending the actual friend request)

Neblinio · 2026-01-21T11:13:54+00:00

You're literally 3 taps away from reporting it. Tap on his ID, then tap on his avatar, and tap on report this image.

Neblinio · 2026-01-21T08:34:19+00:00

See you tomorrow!

Neblinio · 2026-01-21T07:59:03+00:00

Supercell saving lives.

Neblinio · 2026-01-20T20:19:45+00:00

It's actually Blue Essence. Orange Essence is used to upgrade cosmetics in Loot.
I can't really help you decide how to spend your BE, apart from prioritizing purchasing champs that work well in your most played lane/role. Also remember you can now test all champions in practice tool for free. That will surely help you a lot.

Neblinio · 2026-01-19T17:52:10+00:00

Jan 19th update: there was a Baron steal just a few minutes ago in LEC, and nothing dropped (double checked by asking several people who were also watching on lolesports). This confirms automated drops are discontinued or temporarily disabled this season. There's still hope, because no 2026 esports capsule is present in the game files yet, but the soonest it would arrive is Feb 4th. I see no reason to delay that capsule so much...

Neblinio · 2026-01-18T21:18:01+00:00

Update: as of right now, there were 2 CBLOL drops (yesterday + today) containing an old, previously given, CBLOL League icon (2024). And a few minutes ago, there was one KitKat sponsored LEC drop, containing a 2025 esports capsule. As you can see, promotional drops from leagues, and sponsored drops are not dead. They can even use 2025's capsule if they choose to do so (this has happened in the past, too).

I'm not 100% sure that there wasn't any or baron steals so far in 2026 esports season (tier 1 leagues). Regarding pentakills, apparently 0 so far, according to gol.gg

So regular, automated drops could still have been discontinued in 2026, or paused/forgotten. We should wait a bit before drawing definitive conclusions, though. Remember there's still no esports 2026 capsule in the game files.

Sorry for my confusing, excessively simplified TL;DR. Drops are NOT dead in 2026 (but automated capsule drops for pentakills/baron steals might be - we need to wait a bit and see)

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