When I was a young League of Legends player, I used to be so excited by Blue Essence, clutching at my mouse every time I levelled up, hoping I’d have enough BE to pick up Janna, who had been on free rotation the previous week. Now, however, Blue Essence just sits in my little loot backpack, gathering dust, waiting for the next Blue Essence Emporium to come around. Not anymore, though, Riot is looking to make even more changes to the BE system.
With the highly-anticipated return with the Blue Essence Emporium, a lot of my shiny blue crystals have been plowed into various new chromas that make my favorite League of Legends champions look like they’ve walked straight out of Netflix’s Wednesday. There are still a whole lot left over, though, and I’ve already managed to earn back everything I spent at the MOBA‘s last Emporium over just a couple of months.
When you get to a higher level or, alternatively, have all of the champions unlocked with Xbox Game Pass, there’s no real use for Blue Essence anymore. It’s something Riot has been asked about many a time, and experience designer Jordan ‘BarackProbama’ Checkman has confirmed that the team is looking to make some changes to it.
“It’s actually something we’re pretty aware of,” they write, responding to claims that Blue Essence is “becoming less and less relevant.” They agree that it’s great for newer players, but that “its effectiveness as a motivator tapers off pretty strongly with account age.
“[The] Essence Emporium functions as a reasonably effective sink for it (way to use it) but isn’t a strong long-term solve IMO [in my opinion] and we’d like to find other ways of making it more meaningful.”
I’ve also wondered how Riot can go about giving the system some longevity, but it’s not an easy problem to solve. While I’d love to see a feature that lets you transform 100k BE into the highly coveted Mythic Essence, that would remove the rarity (and, in turn, the grind) from that currency.
Riot could go the route of the League of Legends Mythic shop skins, though, and create Blue Essence-specific looks to accompany good ol’ Urfwick. They’d be easier to grind for than Mythic items, so could be good collector’s items for both new and seasoned players. Riot, if you do make Blue Essence skins, go with Senna first, yeah? Asking for a friend.
There are a whole slew of new League of Legends skins that dropped with League of Legends patch 13.20, though, with personal favorites being Coven Nami and the gorgeous DRX Ashe. My bank balance hates me right now, but I’m kind of okay with it.