Nostalgia wasn’t enough to keep afloat one of the most anticipated returns for the LoL community. Riot Games announced that League of Legends Classic, the mode that revived the game as it was in 2013 will stop functioning in January 2027, when the current season ends, a decision that comes less than three months after its launch and that the company explained with a single line that sums it up, because according to a Riot spokesperson cited by PC Gamer, although many players enjoyed the mode, “the majority has returned to other parts of League.”
The mode was announced during the MSI 2026 grand final and arrived on July 29 alongside patch 26.15, with the promise of returning players to the early years of the MOBA. Its main reference was Season 3, as explained at the time by producer Paul “Riot Pabro” Bellezza, though Riot clarified that it was a reconstruction inspired by that era and not an exact copy of a specific version.
What League of Legends Classic offered
The proposal included the old version of the Summoner’s Rift, the return of runes and masteries with their rune pages, the items from those years, the Influence Points (IP) with its own store, and a level system independent of the rest of the game, along with several quality-of-life improvements.
It also debuted with nearly 60 champions in their original, pre‑rework versions, such as Skarner, Sion and Gangplank, alongside longtime favorites like Ahri, Ashe, Garen, Lee Sin, Teemo and Vayne, with the idea of adding new classic champions at a faster pace than in the original game.
What will happen to the mode and to what you spent
Even with the shutdown, the mode would continue receiving content until the end of the season, and in patch 26.21 Mordekaiser, Yorick, Hecarim and Lucian will arrive in their classic versions. Additionally, Riot confirmed it will reimburse what was spent on Classic content that becomes obsolete after the shutdown, though it has not yet detailed how that process will work.
That said, the door is not completely closed, because the company stated that for now it will “put Classic on the shelf” and that its intention is to bring it back later, probably as a temporary event mode with some changes compared to what we’ve seen during these months.
The result contrasts with the scenario many had in mind when this mode was announced—the case of World of Warcraft Classic. Blizzard released in August 2019 its version of the MMO as it was in its early days, and the comeback was an immediate success, with servers that faced two-hour queue lines and more than 1.1 million concurrent viewers on Twitch on its launch day, according to Fortune. Moreover, Activision Blizzard reported that WoW Classic sparked the largest quarterly increase in subscribers in the history of the franchise, which led the company to release later classic versions of expansions like The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm.
The difference may lie in the nature of each game, because while WoW Classic offers a complete world to explore and a long-term progression, a competitive MOBA depends on having enough players to find matches quickly and on a balance that is refreshed continually, something hard to sustain when the community is split between two versions of the same game.
Thus, League of Legends Classic ends as an experiment that initially sparked nostalgia for many veteran players, but failed to keep them engaged against the current version of the game, illustrating that the formula that worked for World of Warcraft does not guarantee the same success in other genres, and leaving open the question of whether a time-limited return could fare better than a permanent mode.