LoL players agree even the new Premium pass ‘sucks’

January is coming to a close, but that doesn’t mean the disgruntled League of Legends player base will let go of its grudges. In a new discussion, players have now expressed that even the premium battle pass is bad after Riot Games introduced a wave of changes to the ecosystem.

“Finished the new premium pass and I’m never buying it again,” the title of a Jan. 30 Reddit thread reads, where players expressed their dissatisfaction with Riot’s new battle pass model introduced to League with the 2025 season. The thread’s creator felt that they were lied to since Riot promised they would earn more skins from this new model than before, only to earn fewer and worse ones at that. “The pass skins are simply horrible, not even the Katarina one is worth it. There are almost no orbs, the ‘random skin’ it’s also not worth it,” they said. The premium “Welcome to Noxus” pass nets you about seven orbs and a few skins, or about the equivalent of what one could have earned by playing the game casually pre-2025.

And it also costs about 17 bucks in its base non-bundled form. Naturally, those replying to the thread had nothing good to say about the pass, premium or otherwise. In fact, they even felt the pass being bad is not as horrible as Riot “actively marketing the changes as positive” and claiming that players would only see the upside following these changes.

Another player wrote that “2025 changed League forever, only for the worse,” as you cannot earn free chests or orbs anymore. “The old pass system offered two to three times more value than the current pass,” yet another player said, adding that this would go up even more if you loved to grind for repeatable rewards, which often included whole orbs containing exciting skins.

Now, those repeatable rewards only grant you… drum roll, please—Blue Essence. Not a pair of words that get you excited enough to spend money on a battle pass. These changes are so mind-boggling to players that one said, “It’s like they went to extra effort to make the skins in the pass complete garbage.”

Riot has already remedied how its passes and new system work earlier in January, but it appears it still managed to miss the mark and cause extra outrage among the players, many of whom have since stopped spending money on the MOBA, perhaps indefinitely.