League Classic Ends January 6, One Day Before Worlds 2026 Opens

Riot Games will retire League Classic as a full game mode once Season 3 of 2026 wraps on January 6, 2027, developers Paul “Pabro” Bellezza and Andrei “Meddler” van Roon confirmed in a League of Legends /dev post on October 14. The two-month-old nostalgia mode is heading back to the box the day before the 2026 League of Legends World Championship opens at the Riot Games Arena in Los Angeles, three weeks after our Play-In Draw recap.

Pabro and Meddler framed the decision as a matter of where players actually spend their time. “We’ve seen a lot of players have fun revisiting the olden days with Classic. At this point though, most have gone back to other parts of League,” they wrote. “So Classic will be available through the rest of Season 3 and will then end its current run in January 2027. We’ll then put Classic back in the box for now, with the goal of bringing it back, likely as an event mode with adjustments and additions.”

Classic launched July 29 alongside Patch 26.15 as a way to play the original Summoner’s Rift with the older champion pool, item shop, and rune system, similar to how G2 Esports just booked its Lower Round 3 spot in the Valorant Champions 2026 bracket on the same weekend. Riot will keep shipping new old champions through Patch 26.23 (Mordekaiser, Yorick, Hecarim, and Lucian in 26.21; Volibear, Urgot, and Udyr in 26.23) and is refunding Classic-specific cosmetics players bought. Patch 26.21 on October 21 will also collapse the Act II Battle Pass to a free track and trim it down to runes, rune pages, and champions in the Classic store.

Lower-population regions will feel the change first. Korea, Latin America North, Latin America South, Taiwan, Vietnam, Turkey, Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Russia move to windowed queues starting in 26.21 (4:00 PM to 12:00 AM server time on weekdays, 10:00 AM to 1:00 AM server time on weekends). Japan and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) get classic custom matches only. Windowed queues are intended to keep match quality up in regions where most of the player base has migrated back to modern modes.

What Worlds looks like now

The /dev post landed a day before the play-in stage of Worlds 2026 at the Riot Games Arena in Los Angeles. Four teams start the tournament tomorrow: Cloud9 KIA, Karmine Corp, FURIA, and MVK Esports, in a double-elimination bracket that runs through October 18 and seeds the 16-team Swiss stage at the Credit Union of Texas Event Center in Allen, Texas, beginning October 23.

The four opening matches in US Central time:

• October 15, 1:00 PM CT: Cloud9 KIA vs Karmine Corp, FURIA vs MVK Esports
• October 16, 1:00 PM CT: Winners’ final
• October 16, 6:00 PM CT: Losers’ Round 1
• October 17, 1:00 PM CT: Losers’ Round 2
• October 18, 1:00 PM CT: Qualification match (winner joins the Swiss stage)

The Swiss stage runs October 23 to October 31 in Allen, with the first eight teams to reach three wins advancing to a single-elimination knockout bracket. Quarterfinals and semifinals are also in Allen; the final is November 14 (TBD) at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. T1 are the three-time defending champions; Hanwha Life Esports enter as the 2026 Mid-Season Invitational winners. Sixteen teams from LCK, LPL, LEC, LCS, LCP, and CBLOL compete in the Swiss stage once the play-in concludes.

Our read: League Classic’s launch was always framed as a “test drive” of the old game, and Riot is treating the shutdown the same way. The decision lands at an awkward moment for the community, with Worlds starting tomorrow and a League MMO Project reportedly still in development, but the player counts made the call for them. The bigger question is whether Riot will actually bring Classic back in any form beyond a one-off event mode, since the seven-year anniversary of Season 1 is still two years out.

League of Legends Worlds 2026 is/are the annual Riot Games world championship for League of Legends, with 19 teams qualifying across the LCK, LPL, LEC, LCS, LCP, and CBLOL. League Classic is/are the nostalgia game mode that launched July 29, 2026 in Patch 26.15, recreating Summoner’s Rift with the pre-Season 5 champion roster, gold-per-five economy, and original item shop. The play-in stage is/are the four-team double-elimination qualifying bracket that runs Oct 15-18 at the Riot Games Arena in LA and seeds the 16-team Swiss stage. The Swiss stage is/are the round-robin phase where the first eight teams to reach three wins advance to the single-elimination knockout bracket.

This is Riot’s second nostalgia experiment to end in the past six months; the studio shut down the League of Legends: Wrath of the Lich King-themed Clash variant in May 2026 after a single split. Pabro has hinted that a third nostalgia mode, themed around a different season, is in the concept stage for 2027. World ticket prices, which Riot warned about scalping risk in August, are already trading on the secondary market at 3-5x face value for the Barclays Center final.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report