Old League of Legends: 10 Things the Game Used to Have

Half the things that defined League for its first six years aren't in the game any more, and a lot of players have never seen any of them.

Some of these got cut because they were bad. Some got cut because almost nobody played them. And a couple got cut despite being genuinely good (that's the category that still comes up every time someone asks what the game used to be like).

Old League of Legends

10 Things the Game Used to Have

League History

Half the things that defined League for its first six years aren't in the game any more, and a lot of players have never seen any of them.

Some of these got cut because they were bad. Some got cut because almost nobody played them. And a couple got cut despite being genuinely good (that's the category that still comes up every time someone asks what the game used to be like).

Counting down from the ones you'd only notice if you were there, to the system that shaped how everybody built every champion for the better part of a decade.

#10: The Old Client

Before the current client there was an older one (written in Adobe Air), and it's remembered mostly as a punchline. It was slow, it crashed, and the store, the profile and the queue all felt like separate programs stapled together.

To be fair, it also did a couple of things the replacement took years to match. Nobody misses the load times. Plenty of players miss being able to see a full match history without the client deciding it needed a moment.

#9: Team Builder

Team Builder let you declare exactly what you wanted to play, right down to champion, role and position, and then waited until four other people wanted a lineup that fit around it. No arguing in champion select, no calling a role first, no dodging.

It worked, and that's what killed it. The queue times were brutal (it was solving a matching problem five times harder than a normal queue), and the modern position-select system does most of the same job in a fraction of the time.

#8: Buying Wards by the Handful

Vision used to be a purchase. Wards were an item you bought with gold and carried in your inventory, so your support spent a chunk of every back on them (and a chunk of every inventory slot holding them). Running out of vision was a gold problem, and there was no cooldown to wait out.

Trinkets changed the whole shape of the role. Vision stopped being something you had to be rich enough to afford and became something everyone on the team was expected to contribute. It's a straightforwardly better system, and it also permanently retired the sight of a support with five items and no slot left for anything else.

#7: Clairvoyance and the Other Cut Summoner Spells

Clairvoyance revealed a small area anywhere on the map on a short cooldown. For years it was standard on supports. It made scouting an objective a button press rather than a walk, and it's the clearest example of a spell that was removed for making a problem too easy rather than for being weak.

It wasn't alone. The summoner spell list has lost several entries over the years, and the ones that survived are the ones that ask you to make a decision rather than the ones that hand you information. That's the direction the whole game has moved in.

#6: Influence Points

IP was the currency you earned every game and spent on champions and runes. It's now Blue Essence (which sounds like a rename), but the economy around it worked differently: IP was a steady drip you were always saving toward something, and most players had a running list in their head of what they were saving for.

The change came bundled with the removal of the thing most of that saving went into, which is why the currency swap felt bigger than a currency swap. Suddenly the long-term grind everyone had been doing for years pointed at nothing.

#5: Dominion and the Crystal Scar

Dominion was a five versus five capture-point mode on its own map, with permanent movement speed, no laning phase and short games (about fifteen minutes each). It was League's answer to the question of what the game looks like without farming, and the answer was: constant fighting, everywhere, immediately.

It never found a real player base, and it was retired in 2016. It's the most-cited example of the studio's problem with permanent alternate modes: a mode nobody queues for still needs balancing, and every champion added to the game has to be checked against it forever.

#4: Twisted Treeline

Three versus three, two lanes, one jungle and an altar system that rewarded the team willing to leave a fight to go stand somewhere. It had its own meta and tier list, plus a devoted set of players who barely touched Summoner's Rift. It survived a full rebuild before finally closing at the end of 2019.

It's the loss that comes up most often, and it has little to do with nostalgia for the map itself. Three versus three is a different game, short enough to play one of after work, and nothing has replaced it.

#3: The Old Summoner's Rift

The map got a full visual rebuild in 2014, and the version before it looked completely different: flatter, grayer, with a much less readable jungle and camps that were harder to tell apart at a glance. Baron was a different creature entirely, and the whole map read as a lot more cluttered.

The rebuild was an improvement by every measure that matters, and it's still a bit strange to go back and look at old footage, because the same game played on the old map looks like a different game. It's the single clearest marker of how long League has been running.

#2: Masteries

Masteries were a separate points tree you filled in before a game, spending a fixed pool across three branches to shave cooldowns, add a little damage or make yourself slightly harder to kill. They were free (unlike runes), so everybody had them and everybody had an opinion about them.

They were also where a lot of the game's build identity lived. The choice between a full offense page and something more defensive changed how a lane played out, and mastery guides were some of the most-read content on any League site for years. Runes Reforged folded the interesting parts into the current rune trees and cut the rest.

#1: Rune Pages You Had to Buy

The old rune system is at the top because it's the one that touched every single game you played, and because it was the most divisive thing in League for years. Runes were small stat bonuses you bought with IP and slotted into pages, and a full set of the good ones cost a serious amount of grinding. They were also close to mandatory, which meant a new account was measurably weaker than an old one for reasons that had nothing to do with skill.

Defenders liked the depth. You built a page for a champion, a matchup, sometimes a specific lane, and the good players had pages nobody else thought of. Critics pointed out that most of those pages were the same handful of correct answers, that the cost was a wall in front of new players, and that a system where the right choice is usually obvious isn't really a choice.

Runes Reforged replaced the whole thing in the 2018 preseason with the keystone trees the game uses now (free for everyone, chosen in champion select). Almost nobody wants the old economy back. A lot of people still miss having a page that was theirs.

Conclusions

There's a pattern in what survived. Every system on this list that got cut was one where the correct answer was mostly known in advance: the right runes, the right masteries, the ward you always bought, the spell that always revealed the pit. What replaced them asks you to choose in the moment instead, in champion select or during the game, where the choice can actually be wrong.

That's a better game and a less personal one. Nobody had a favorite trinket. Plenty of people had a favorite rune page.

If you want more of the game as it used to be, our Formerly OP series covers champions who were feared in a specific season and lost that identity to a rework, one at a time.

Every ranking we've argued about is collected on the Top Ten Thursdays hub.