League of Legends’ champions are set to undergo a Blue Essence (BE) pricing restructure. Game designer Tim ‘Truexy’ Jiang revealed the upcoming LoL champion pricing structure changes in a Reddit thread discussing the LoL patch 13.1b changes to Yuumi.
Redditor ‘PM_Cute_Ezreal_pics’ initially comments that Yuumi should be considerably cheaper when reworked, due to being marketed towards new players. Truexy responds in agreement with the sentiment, before announcing that not only is the magical cat being re-priced, but many of the MOBA game’s champions are too.
“I fully believe that our pricing model is outdated”, Truexy says. “August ‘August’ Browning and I are working on updating the BE pricing for a lot of champs to better fit modern standards, and to also address some of these things.”
Blue Essence is one of League’s free in-game currencies, which is acquired through completing certain in-game activities – be it chalking up the first win of the day, or completing missions. The currency can then be used for things like purchasing new champions, changing a player’s name, and purchasing additional rune pages.
Traditionally, new champions are priced at 7,800 BE for the first week of release, before dropping down to 6,300. Additionally, with each new release, some older champions are moved down a pricing tier – you can check out Riot’s current schedule here.
By the looks of things, champion age will no longer be the key metric for deciding pricing. Based on Truexy’s comment, difficulty and other factors could become core to the structure. Of course, it’s early days yet, and no official date has been confirmed, so it may not materialise for some time.
