Summary
- Riot deleted Grand Reckoning Alistar because it “wasn’t very good”.
- Patch 25.05 rolls back several of the controversial changes Riot has made over the past couple of months.
- Lane swaps have now been eradicated from professional play.
Riot Games has released patch notes for League of Legends‘ upcoming 25.05 patch. This patch is notable for restoring Hextech Chests to the game and rolling back some of Riot’s controversial monetisation changes.
Last week, a player noticed that Grand Reckoning Alistar had been deleted from League’s Public Beta Environment (PBE), Riot’s testing ground for upcoming balance changes and cosmetics. Skins added to the PBE are almost always ready to ship – their addition to the testing environment is mostly to test for any obvious bugs or visual errors that the developers may have missed.
Grand Deletion
This is why it was especially surprising to see Grand Reckoning Alistar deleted from the PBE without a trace. The last time Riot outright deleted skins was in 2017, when Sewn Chaos Blitzcrank and Sewn Chaos Amumu were deleted from the PBE, never to be seen again. In these patch notes, Riot addresses the deletion of Grand Reckoning Alistar, which was intended to be a reward for players who advanced the free Battle Pass.
“Frankly the Alistar skin in particular just wasn’t very good. We’re learning towards just putting more time into another skin that Alistar has coming later this year instead of trying to improve this one given the starting point isn’t that strong,” the patch notes read. While it’s good that Riot isn’t releasing a sub-par skin, the company likely would have released a skin that was obviously “not very good” if the community hadn’t objected strongly.
As mentioned previously, Riot is rolling back several other controversial changes: Hextech Chests are returning to the game, the price of champions is being cut in half, Battle Passes are being reworked and Clash will once again be a monthly occurrence.
Balance-wise, Riot is adding several ‘Lane Swap Detection’ mechanics to eradicate the practice in professional play. If two non-junglers are detected in any lane except the bottom lane for an extended period in the early game, they’ll be subject to “strong income penalties.” The drawbacks to lane swapping are now so severe that the strategy is no longer viable. Other than that, Riot is nerfing some of the meta’s best performers like Ambessa, Aurora and Skarner.
- Released
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October 27, 2009
- ESRB
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T for Teen: Blood, Fantasy Violence, Mild Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco