Riot Games has announced a plethora of news about the League of Legends LoL Season 2024, including new champions, Arcane Season 2, esports Worlds locations and more.
In 2024, Riot has promised players ‘a wide range of updates including Arcane-inspired gameplay and characters, changes to the Champion Mastery system, the return of Arena, a brand new game mode and more’.
This follows the summoner’s rift map changes for 2024 and item changes announced a few weeks ago.
“Season Start is a moment to set the stage for the weeks and months ahead and provide a sneak peek at some of the content the team has been working on,” said Andrei van Roon, aka Riot Meddler, Head of League Studio.
“We hope you’re excited about what you’ve seen so far for 2024. This year is also extra special because we’ll be celebrating League’s 15th birthday in October. Best of luck on your climbs, and welcome to Season 2024.”
A cinematic in the style of The Call, Ruination and Warriors will commence the new LoL Season 2024 on January 10th.
Worlds 2024 EU locations and MSI/esports changes
The 14th season of LoL esports is upon us: LoL Season 2024.
As we already know, as first broken by Esports News UK, the Worlds 2024 finals will take place in London’s O2 Arena.
Now Riot has announced the other locations in Europe for Worlds. Riot’s Berlin studio, the recently revamped and renamed Riot Games Arena, will host the Worlds 2024 play-ins and swiss stages.
Paris will then host the quarter-finals and semi-finals at the Adidas Arena.
Worlds 2024 will be held from September 24th to November 2nd 2024.
Looking at the Mid-Season Invitational (MSI) running from May 1st to 19th in Chengdu, China, this year, the winning team at MSI 2024 will be awarded a guaranteed spot at Worlds, which also counts as an additional slot for their region.
The second best performing region will secure an additional seed for their region as well.
MSI will keep its double elimination format.
This LoL Season 2024, there will be a base of three Worlds slots for the LEC, LCS, LCK and LPL. The PCS and VCS will each retain two Worlds slots, and the LLA and CBLOL will each retain one Worlds slot.
Regional esports leagues including the European LEC kick off on January 13th 2024.
New LoL Esports Hall of Legends announced
For LoL Season 2024, to celebrate ‘those who have made a lasting impact on the game, the sport, and the community, LoL Esports is proud to introduce the LoL Esports Hall of Legends, League’s version of a Hall of Fame’.
Riot said: “An independent voting panel of esports industry veterans and experts from every region will vote to select the very first inductee.
“Those inducted will be celebrated both in-and out-of-game.”
More details will be shared at a later date.
LoL Season 2024 game modes
Arena will becoming back in the first half of the year with more improvements.
The number of teams in a game of Arena will increase from four teams of two, to eight (for a total of 16 players), creating a conundrum for content creators like Scotland’s RossBoomsocks.
Changes to the UI will be made and there will be new augments, maps and other improvements.
URF will also be back for Lunar Revel in patch 14.3 and 14.4, and One-For-All after that.
A new game mode coming later in LoL Season 2024 this year promises to be ‘a different take on core League gameplay and will be a more relaxed way to spend time with friends’.
System changes in LoL Season 2024 include Vanguard anti-cheat, with LP to be refunded to players against bots and smurfs, plus ranked changes
Valorant’s Vanguard anti-cheat system is coming to League this year ‘as a response to the feedback around high number of bots in games, disruptive smurfs in Ranked and an increase in scripting’, Riot said.
It’ll run at a kernel level and Riot says it expects to see similar results in League as it’s seen in Valorant. Both collect user data.
It hopes to allow for live match termination and will refund LP to players in games with or against detected cheaters and bots.
Some in the community are upset that Vanguard may make custom skins unusable, and that it could spell the end of League of Legends on Linux.
Elsewhere in LoL Season 2024, Riot will also focus on making improvements to how the Ranked system evaluates player skill, reducing situations where a player is matched up with someone in a vastly different rank, and how much LP a player loses LP in relation to how much they gain in the new season.
LoL design director Riot Iksar said: “We’re moving to a different proprietary (Riot-made) system at the start of the new year (ish) and then tentatively planning on moving to a new system later in the year called Trueskill 2. We’re still evaluating on Trueskill for now but it sounds promising.
“We’ll share more info when we have it – there are already some changes in place for the start of the new split that should help put new accounts at an appropriate ranked placement, and also some other changes that should make getting into a negative LP state much more difficult (think -30, +20). We’ll have to see what actually happens in practice, though. I suspect there will be many adjustments/corrections/bugfixes over the course of the year. I am confident we’ll be in a better spot regardless.”
Phroxzon, the lead gameplay designer for League, added more detail in this tweet:
Additionally, there will be changes coming to the Champion Mastery system in the first half of the year.
Riot will be uncapping mastery levels, so you can keep levelling forever, and will add new mastery crests. Each split, every champion will have a four-milestone reward track. There’s more specifics in Riot’s dev blog on updating champion mastery in 2024.
Arcane Season 2 trailer, champ update and skins
A new trailer has dropped for Arcane Season 2, the latest season in Riot’s animated Netflix show, which will be released globally in November 2024.
On top of this, a champion featured in Arcane will be updated in-game ‘to better match their depiction in the show’.
Additionally, Arcane-inspired gameplay and new skins will also be released in League of Legends at the same time.
And on top of that, a character from Arcane Season 1 will become a playable character, as detailed below.
New playable champions in LoL Season 2024 include Ambessa Medarda from Arcane and Smolder
It’s official: the first character unique to Riot’s hit Netflix animated show Arcane is being turned into a playable League of Legends champion.
Ambessa Medarda, the tough Noxian warlord from Arcane Season 1, will be added to the game this year, with Riot saying she will ‘bring both strength and speed, sidestepping attacks with surprising agility’.
While Silco was added to TFT a couple of years ago, he didn’t hit summoner’s rift in LoL. Ambessa Medarda will be the first from Arcane to do so.
In addition, a brand new ADC champion is being added to the game for LoL Season 2024.
Smolder, The Fiery Fledgling, a cute little dragon akin to Spyro, will be hitting the rift in patch 14.3, which should drop around Wednesday February 7th 2024. He will also hit the PBE on January 9th.
His full name is actually ‘Ignacarious Gigantareno Rex Le Spes Offerentis’.
Lexi Gao, Riot’s lead producer on champions, said: “We wanted to create a cute creature ADC with a more accessible kit than most, especially with Hwei as our last champion release.
“We ultimately went with a dragon after testing a couple of other “cute creature” concepts, since it seemed to be the most compelling to the rest of the team!”
Smolder’s abilities are as follows:
- Passive: Dragon Practice: Hitting champions with abilities and killing enemies with SuperScorcher Breath grants Smolder a stack of Dragon Practice. Stacks increase the damage of Smolder’s basic abilities
- Q: Super Scorcher Breath: Smolder belches flame at his enemies. This ability evolves with stacks gaining the following: 25: Damages all enemies surrounding the target, 125: Sends explosions behind the target that deal 75% of this spell’s damage, 225: Burns the target dealing max health true damage over three seconds. Enemy champions that drop below a total health threshold while burning are killed instantly
- W: Achooo! Smolder lets out an adorable flaming sneeze, damaging and slowing enemies hit. Hitting champions causes an additional explosion
- E: Flap, Flap, Flap: Smolder takes flight, gaining move speed and ignoring terrain for 1.25 seconds.While flying, Smolder attacks the lowest health enemy
- R: MMOOOMMMM! Smolder’s mum breathes fire from above, dealing extra damage and slowing enemies in the center of her fire. Smolder’s mum also heals her son if she hits him
After Smolder, Riot said players can expect ‘a Vastayan, solo-laning, mid-range mage’ as the next champion.
Elsewhere, Skarner‘s visual gameplay update (VGU) will be finished in the first half of the year.
After Skarner, the team will work on two other champion updates: a champion featured in Arcane ‘who will be updated to better match their depiction in the show’ and Shyvana, whose VGU will be released in 2025, after the Arcane VGU.
League of Legends skins coming out in 2024
The first half of 2024’s Prestige skins will be for Rakan, Ezreal, Kindred, Evelynn (following her first Prestige KDA skin, above) and Kayle (in that order).
Other skinlines returning in the first half of 2024 are Porcelain, Faerie Court, Project and Blood Moon.
Older Legendary skins will also receive borders (Brolaf, Corporate Mundo and Dragon Trainer Tristana).
For LoL Season 2024, Rammus and Olaf will also be getting new skins.
Lunar Revel, the first event of the year, will feature new skinline Heavenscale and returning thematic Porcelain. Players can get the following skins in patch 14.3 and 14.4:
- Heavenscale Lee Sin
- Prestige Heavenscale Ezreal
- Heavenscale Ezreal
- Heavenscale Kai’Sa
- Heavenscale Master Yi
- Heavenscale Diana
- Heavenscale Janna
- Heavenscale Smolder
- Prestige Porcelain Kindred
- Porcelain Graves
- Porcelain Darius
- Porcelain MissFortune
- Porcelain Morgana
- Porcelain Irelia
- Porcelain Aurelion Sol
There will also be a new Primal Ambush skinline.
The team is working through Lee Sin’s skin catalogue now and his art and sustainability update (ASU) will be available to players in early May.
And Riot said that Teemo’s ASU is taking the team longer than intended and will have an updated timeline to be shared later this year.
Full LoL Season 2024 announcement video
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
