With the third season of 2025 rapidly approaching, League of Legends continues to evolve and grow more complex. During Sheep Esports’ visit to Vancouver, we had the opportunity to sit down with Matthew “Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison for an exclusive interview covering all things League of Legends—from the impact of the seasonal system to Riot’s plans for game modes, the Shyvana rework, Clash, and a potential engine overhaul.

What is your overall impression of the new three-season format so far? How do you think this change has impacted League of Legends, and has it helped improve the way you deliver content to players?

Matthew “Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison: "Definitely, it’s been a very exciting change. It kind of harkens back to what we were trying to do back in 2020 with Spirit Blossom—making it more of a cohesive experience across the entire ecosystem. Getting esports narrative, lore, gameplay content, new modes—having all of that integrated together just feels like a much more cohesive and explosive moment for players. That’s something we’ve been pretty excited about, both the concept itself and how players have been receiving it.

The Noxus season had some rough edges and received a lot of criticism. What do you think Riot learned from those seasons? How were those lessons applied in Spirit Blossom, and will we see even more changes in the third season to reflect what you learned at the start of the year?

Phroxzon: Definitely. In retrospect, I would say that the Noxus season, while well positioned in terms of lore and narrative, is definitely a very polarizing thematic—it’s a little dark and quite gritty. Because of the story we wanted to tell and how it dovetailed out of Arcane, we just had to go that route. But there was definitely a learning there: it wasn’t as bright a thematic as Spirit Blossom would be, which made it feel a lot more polarizing than it possibly could or should have been.

The other thing was how much change players wanted to experience, especially on Summoner’s Rift. We went into the seasonal model thinking that each set of seasons should bring its own set of Summoner’s Rift gameplay changes, integrated with the season’s theme. For Noxus, that meant the map with Atakhan and the Feats of Strength being narratively tied together, and we considered doing the same for Spirit Blossom. But we discovered along the way that players didn’t necessarily want that level of change season after season. That’s one of the learnings we’ll take into future seasons—using more of that novelty budget on other things like modes, metagames, narrative, and esports, rather than large-scale SR changes. We’ve found SR players generally don’t want that much change throughout the course of the year.

Do you wish you could make bigger changes each season?

Phroxzon: It just depends on what type of player you are. I’m a player who plays the game a lot—very experienced, obviously. People who stream the game every minute of the day are, on average, going to want more changes, right? But the way the average player consumes League of Legends is not to that degree. They have jobs, families, obligations. So having that degree of change, even though it would be great for streamers who might say, “Oh yeah, the game is stale” or whatever—that’s really just a very small subset of the population, even if they’re very vocal. We need to make sure we don’t over-cater to those groups at the cost of other populations that make up the larger chunk of our player base.

Arena is now semi-permanent, set to stay around for a full year. How will that affect how you balance and schedule game modes each season? For example, Brawl stayed for most of Act 1, and now Arena is back but still Noxus-branded. Will you try to rebrand Arena for future seasons? Will you continue introducing other new modes alongside it?

Phroxzon: There’s definitely a desire to do new things while also maintaining old things. Of course, the more old things we keep as permanent fixtures, the more challenging it becomes to maintain them—not just from a pure work output perspective, but also from a quality standpoint. There are only so many senior designers to go around. If Arena is going to be permanent or stick around for a long time, that needs a senior designer dedicated to that project—just like new modes development does, or Summoner’s Rift balance, or champions.

That said, we know it’s something players have expressed interest in, and we want to fulfill those desires as best we can. So yes, we’re still excited about developing new, novel content—because that’s what players want—while also striking the right balance between maintaining existing things and keeping them at the quality bar players expect.

Some people felt Spirit Blossom, despite its lore ties, was branded more to sell skins compared to Noxus. Earlier this year you said 2025 would focus more on lore, with future years possibly exploring alternate universes like skin lines. Given the feedback, is that still the plan? How far in advance are seasons planned?

Phroxzon: Seasons in general are planned pretty far in advance. We’re already thinking about season two and three of next year—and even further. It’s definitely not our intent to position them as “skins forward,” but more as “experience forward.” We want to approach each season from the perspective of what experience we’re trying to deliver for players.

Sometimes that might naturally be very skin forward—like if it’s a beloved thematic returning and people want more skins for it. Other times, it might be about something else, like a brand-new game mode we’re releasing. For example, in the Spirit Blossom season, our focus was more on improving our existing offerings—ARAM, Arena—and making that ecosystem more durable.

A different season might instead have an XL-sized new game mode as the main focus. But regardless, we always want to start from the question of what experience the season is trying to deliver, and make sure all its elements come together to create something compelling that players want.

Feats of Strength and Atakhan launched in very different forms at the start of the year and were adjusted after complaints from players. How do you feel about their current state? Do you think they could remain in League long term? And how do you keep adding new content each year without creating feature bloat?

Phroxzon: That’s a great question, and honestly, it remains unsolved. If someone knows how to keep the experienced player base engaged without continually adding new stuff additively, please let me know—because we don’t know. It’s a tough design problem, and in very enfranchised games you tend to need more and more to excite the existing player base. Look at Magic cards today compared to five years ago—the complexity and number of mechanics have notably increased. We run into similar problems with League.

It’s still something we want to keep exploring; we’re not going to stop designing new things just because it’s difficult. But it does take a greater degree of skill and creativity to pull off. As for Atakhan and Feats of Strength, I’d say they’re in a pretty good, stable spot right now. Would I be super excited to make them permanent parts of the base game? Not necessarily. They justify their place for now, but that could easily change.

I don’t think Atakhan or Feats of Strength have hit the bar of feeling like they justify existing as a core “vanilla” League of Legends feature. The closest is Feats of Strength, since it adds more structure to the early game and helps people learn objective play. With months of focused iteration, it’s possible we could get it to that spot. But as it stands today, they’re justifying their place without being features I’d be excited to make permanent right now.

Do you think rotating out some features—like objectives such as Void Grubs—would be beneficial long term?

Phroxzon: Rotation as a concept is something we’ve been pretty excited about. The main downside is the production cost to create something that isn’t used all the time. If there’s something always in use, like items, I’d rather spend resources there than, say, make a seventh dragon that’s only around a third of the year. We could do that, but is it the best use of our resources? That’s not as clear.

There’s a lot of value in changing how the game plays out, and that can happen anywhere—from tuning changes to adding new items that let certain classes express strengths differently, or lightly changing objectives. For example, adjusting the power of topside objectives relative to dragons can cause big meta shifts without adding complexity. In the short term, that’s more where our focus is—improving game flow and strategy feel. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in the strategy layer we haven’t fully optimized yet, without needing to add tons of new content.

Do you believe that League in 2025 is in its best-ever state regarding season structure, gameplay, and content release pipelines?

Phroxzon: We’re definitely in one of the best versions we’ve had. We’ve had some of the best-balanced states ever, and some of the best esports environments, especially with Fearless and a pretty good balanced state. We’ve released some well-designed champions, like Yunara, who strike a good balance between providing simplicity and interesting gameplay. So I’d say we’re definitely in a very good spot right now.

Would I say it’s the best version yet? It’s close—I can’t really think of anything clearly better. That said, we’re juggling a lot of different projects and priorities. What could improve is how we focus our efforts, so we can tackle major issues like negative behavior and live balance more effectively. The problem is that expertise takes years to build, and when teams are spread across many tasks, it becomes harder to make big, meaningful progress in any one area.

Pu Liu (LoL Game Director) said that 2025 would change League forever. Do you think 2025 met players’ expectations in how it changed League? And do you expect even bigger changes in 2026 and beyond?

Phroxzon: 2025 has definitely been a major evolution of League of Legends, and that’s pretty clear across the ecosystem. It’s something we’re really proud of. All the devs get super excited when we look at the one- to two-year timeline and see what the seasonal model can deliver. Of course, there are always timeline and resource constraints, but I do believe we delivered something really awesome for players. There are things we could have done better—for example, I mentioned the grittiness of season one and stuff like that. But overall, we’re pretty proud of what we’ve achieved and very enthusiastic about what we can deliver moving forward. We took a good swing at creating something exciting for players, and we hope to keep doing more in the future.

When that quote came out, some expected a “League of Legends 2,” especially with VALORANT moving to Unreal Engine 5 recently. Could League ever get a major overhaul, particularly regarding its engine, given concerns about its “spaghetti code”?

Phroxzon: It’s definitely something that could happen. I’d say the engine is actually a lot better than people give it credit for. We can do a lot more now than we could in the past. For example, making changes to the Spirit Blossom or Noxus maps and delivering them just four months apart is insane—previously, one would have taken years because everything had to be hand-painted and wasn’t modular. So the engine is in a pretty good spot for us to deliver great experiences reliably. That said, some things, like free-for-all modes such as Arena, are tricky because the engine was built assuming there would only ever be two teams. It’s complicated and hard to work with, but that shouldn’t stop us from doing awesome stuff. And we still want to do awesome stuff.

Is there anything the engine currently can’t do that you wish it could?

Phroxzon: Hmm, that’s interesting. I’d say the main weakness right now is around the game flow—like the systems involved in getting into the game. Our in-game capabilities are pretty strong, but things like re-queuing are still a work in progress. It’s not necessarily bad, but it is an area that’s notably behind compared to in-game tech. There are plenty of technology improvements on the table to address that.

Do you think it’s possible that someday we’ll get a new client where the game is integrated into the launcher, similar to how VALORANT functions?

Phroxzon: There’s always the question of whether the effort to build a new client is worth improving what we already have. There’s still a lot of opportunity in the client space. Even within the current client, the technological advancements we’ve made—especially around metagames and in-client experiences—are pretty extreme. If you’d asked me five years ago whether we could have a metagame inside the client, I’d have said, “What are you talking about? That’s impossible.” Honestly, with the client’s current state, I have a lot of hope for delivering experiences like Soul Fighter or Demon’s Hand. While there’s room for improvement, it’s not in a bad spot. We can build and deliver these types of experiences quickly—like releasing back-to-back metagames within four months. So overall, it’s in a good place.

If there’s one thing you’d like to improve about League of Legends that isn’t already in development, what would it be?

Phroxzon: That’s a great question. There’s a lot of potential to create the best version of Flex Queue. I don’t exactly know what that looks like yet. I don’t think it’s necessarily Clash, since that’s more tournament-based. But it’s something that combines Flex Queue, Clash, ranked teams—like just showing up to a LAN and playing. There’s something in that space we haven’t fully tapped into, whether it’s a different kind of progression system or just something that appeals to the social competitor. Basically, what’s the thing people will log on every day to play with a group? Flex Queue is the best we have now, but it lacks prestige. I feel like there’s an opportunity there that’s just out of reach. If we could capture it, it would be massive for players—they’ve been wanting something that scratches that social competitive itch for a long time.

Many players feel Riot has abandoned Clash. Are there plans for bigger changes to Clash and how Riot supports the social competitive side of League?

Phroxzon: There’s definitely a strong desire to support social competitors. We’re not scaling back Clash development or investment—in fact, we’re putting a lot of resources into figuring out how to test at scale. That’s one of the main challenges for Clash: testing a tournament launch requires so many QA testers with multiple clients running simultaneously. It’s a very challenging technical problem.

Add to that the complexity of security, anti-smurf measures, two-factor authentication, and all the moving parts—it makes the project’s technical complexity skyrocket. It’s not necessarily bad code, but there’s a lot of technical debt since it was built a while ago with the best tech at the time. Refactoring it can cause hard-to-find issues, especially given the testing difficulties.

So, the fact that Clash tournaments don’t run perfectly isn’t due to lack of effort. Actually, Clash runs better than people think—we have error rates below 5% or even 1%. Of course, it’s disappointing when players don’t get the experience they signed up for, and we regret that deeply. We really want to make it work well, aspiring to zero failure rates.

This will take trial and error to fix all technical gaps, but we’ve made many improvements recently, which is why fewer tournaments are canceled now. When cancellations happen, we run makeup Clash events. The social competitive itch is something we know players want, so we’re putting a lot of effort into making it work correctly.

Is there a dedicated team working on Clash, or is it mostly maintenance handled by network engineers and similar staff?

Phroxzon: Yeah, there’s a dedicated team that works on Clash as one of their projects. They also handle a lot of client-related and social features, but Clash is one of their primary focuses. We have people with direct experience running Clash who are focused on fixing technical problems, planning future improvements, and developing better testing strategies to handle tournaments at scale. It’s a very complicated and challenging problem, and I want to be clear it’s not due to a lack of effort.

Are there any updates coming soon on the Shyvana VGU?

Phroxzon: We’re still working on Shyvana. I don’t really have anything to announce for her yet.

Will Shyvana’s update be tied to the seasonal model, as previously hinted at? How does Riot balance releasing VGUs within seasonal themes, considering costs and thematic fit?

Phroxzon: Maybe. The seasonal model is a good platform for releasing champions and VGUs, but we don’t want to fully tie ourselves down—like saying, “we have to do this thematic because we committed to a VGU two years ago.” That would be too restrictive. There are definitely benefits to releasing VGUs alongside seasonal themes. But we wouldn’t completely change a season’s strategy just because of a VGU, like for Shyvana. If the season fits well for other reasons, we probably won’t pivot for that.

In general, VGUs are a lot more expensive than making a new champion because we have to update all their skins and related assets. That’s a big factor we consider when deciding whether to do a VGU. That said, cost isn’t the main driver—if it were, we wouldn’t do many things we do. We know players want VGUs, so we weigh each case carefully. Right now, our focus is more on new champions than VGUs. Shyvana is in the works, and there’s still a lot of room for new champions, so that’s where we’re focusing for now."