With every January comes a new League of Legends season and with that Riot have released a video outlining their plans for the coming year, filled with gameplay changes, teasers and more. In this article, I will do a deep dive into what's coming down the line.

Ranked

The 2024 Ranked Season starts on January 10th with the release of patch 14.1.

Presented by Riot Phroxzon, he mentions that post adding of the Emerald tier and increased general LP gains, and while he acknowledged this was generally a good change, he mentions a side effect of much larger rank discrepancies in games e.g. a Platinum player in a Silver game. To combat this, Phroxzon mentions that changes have been implemented around how the ranked system evaluates player skill, and that these changes will be live at season start.

Champions

New season means new champions and new reworks, season 14 will be no different. In this portion of the video, Riot Lexical and Sopebox initially talk about the Skarner VGU, they mention showing the gameplay in the previous dev log, but not really talking about his lore, which this dev log teases, but that's beyond the scope of this summary. 

After Skarner, Lexical mentions 2 more champion updates, the first being a vague teaser of an Arance champion receiving a VGU, mentioning that we can expect to see them early next year.

The next champion update mentioned is a long awaited update for Shyvana, this time a refinement and tuning of her current gameplay instead of a full gameplay update alongside her visuals, but they mention that this won’t release until 2025, after the aforementioned Arcane VGU.

Previously teased a few days ago, Smolder, The Fiery Fledgeling has been announced as League of Legends’ newest champion, he is a small dragon ADC who has been designed as a more straightforward ADC as opposed to more mechanically demanding marksmen like Apehlios or Samira. In the video was a gameplay teaser, he will be released in patch 14.3 in line with the events surrounding Chinese New Year.

Following on from Smolder, Sopebox teased a new Vastayan solo laner, however only teaser art was shown, but it was stated by Riot Lexical that they are a mid-ranged mage.

Arcane

A convenient segue for the next section, it has been confirmed that Ambessa Medarda from Arcane is to join the League of Legends roster as a tie-in with the next major piece of news.

Following on from the announcement of Ambessa Medarda, a teaser for Arcane Season 2, set to be released in November 2024, this will undoubtedly create a lot of hype among LoL fans and fans that haven’t played LoL alike, as Arcane Season 1 transcended gaming and received critical acclaim from many who watched it.

There was also an announcement of Arcane themed skins and gameplay, among other things in celebration of Arcane’s new season.

Champion Mastery

Riot Revenancer announces that Champion Mastery is going to be uncapped from the current maximum of 7, with new mastery emotes from masteries 7-10 and then a progression system that shows your total mastery from mastery 11 and above.

It was confirmed that current mastery accumulation will not be lost and that people with a lot of mastery points will be at even higher levels. Finally the launch of this system is slated for the first half of 2024 with new information released closer to the time.

Game Modes

Riot Cadmus and ChooChoo Trainnnn have given us an update on Arena, confirming they’re happy with its progress and to confirm that it will return for a 3rd time in the first half of 2024 with more improvements with the goal to increase champion diversity, and encourage experimentation and game-to-game variance.

The biggest change is Arena becoming a 16 player game mode, instead of 4 teams of 2, there will be 8 teams of 2, making Arena even more chaotic.

Other game modes have also been announced to be returning, with URF being back for Lunar New Year, followed by One For All.

One last announcement, is a brand new mode, a totally different take on League of Legends, but it will be a more chill game mode that will be good to experience with friends.

Anti-Cheat

Meddler and Brightmoon return to talk about League of Legends’ anti-cheat, which they acknowledge has caused a lot of pain for players, compounded by a security breach which made bots and scripts a lot more problematic.

To combat this Riot are bringing over their Proprietary Vanguard Anti-Cheat from Valorant, Vanguard runs at the kernel level which is extremely deep, which has been a sore spot for some players who are security minded, however, Brightmoon assures that it doesn’t collect or process personal information different from the current League of Legends anti-cheat software.

This allows for Riot to hardware ban offending players and even terminate games, refunding innocent parties’ LP and not making people take a loss because of a cheater.

If you already play Valorant, you already have Vanguard, but if you don’t, in the next few weeks, installation of Vanguard will be mandatory to play League of Legends.

ASUs

2 ASUs (Art & Sustainability Updates) have been shown, Lee Sin and Teemo. Their appearances are getting a facelift.

Lee Sin’s is first and his extensive skin catalogue has been updated, with his release slated for early May.

Teemo, however, hit a roadblock in his ASU, so he has been delayed and his release is TBD with an update later this year.

Skins

Many skinlines have been announced and teased, the first being this year's Lunar New Year event, Heavenscale, this skinline is a new take on Lunar New Year skins and goes for more of an ancient theme than previous Lunar New Year skinlines like Lunar Beasts and Firecracker yet goes very mystical with its emphasis on gods and deities.

Another brand new thematic is Primal Ambush, drawing heavy inspiration from the skill of martial arts and the primal instinct of tigers, as well as paying homage to League’s South East Asian players, where Tigers hold a lot of cultural significance.

Other teased skinlines include: Porcelain, Faerie Court, Project and Blood Moon, all of which are due for release before summer.

Old legendary skins are going to receive borders to significantly differentiate themselves from skin tiers below them.

Champions who haven’t received skins in a while have been confirmed to be getting a new skin, with examples of Rammus and Olaf. with art of Rammus looking like a durian being teased.

The early year’s prestige skins have also been announced, in order of release date, these are Rakan, Ezreal, Kindred, Evelynn and Kayle.

Esports

Last but not least, updates about plans for the 2024 LoL Esports season. It has been confirmed that the LCK, LPL, LCS and LEC have 3 base seeds at Worlds 2024, while the LLA, CBLOL, PCS and VCS will retain their slots.

MSI 2024’s format is staying the same double elimination format from 2023, but the biggest change is that the winner of MSI will get automatic qualification to Worlds for the first time ever, giving their region an additional seed as well as the next best performing region.

MSI 2024 is to be held in Chengdu, China from May 1st through 19th. With the venue TBD

Worlds is returning to Europe with the Final to be held in the O2 Arena, London, United Kingdom, with world kicking off at the LEC studio in Berlin, Germany for the play-ins and swiss stages, with the Quarter and Semi-finals being held at the Adidas Arena in Paris, France. Worlds will run from September 24th till November 2nd.

A Hall of Fame called the “LoL Esports Hall of Legends” has been established, with the goal of celebrating the pro-players who have left their mark on League of Legends throughout its history, with an independent voting panel made up of Esports industry veterans and experts to select the very first inductee. These inductee’s achievements will be celebrated in and out of game.

One final announcement is that League of Legends turns 15 years old in 2024, with a celebration in October, which coincides with Worlds.