Blue Essence Emporium is coming back to LoL soon, but players don't really seem excited about the so-called updates to the Emporium.
In their July dev update, Rioters Andrei "Meddler" van Roon and Jeremy "Brightmoon" Lee revealed that the Blue Essence Emporium will be returning very soon, and by very soon they mean extremely soon.
The Blue Essence Emporium will be returning during patch 13.17, but players aren't really excited about its return.
Why Fans Are Disappointed With The Blue Essence Emporium
For those of you that don't know already, the Blue Essence Emporium is a chance to spend all your blue essence on chromas, emotes, mystery chests and skins, instead of having to buy them with Riot Points (RP) like you normally do.
Originally the Essence Emporium was planned to happen twice a year, ever since it was introduced in 2018, once sometime around mid-year and once at the end of the year in December.
This didn't go as planned, it seems, since the last Essence Emporium was in July 2022.
Luckily, we already know which chromas will be available in the Essence Emporium 2023, thanks to the League Of Legends Leaks & News Twitter page.
But why are fans so upset that we can buy chromas and skins with Blue Essence instead of having to spend real money to buy them with RP?
Well, the problem isn't so much the Essence Emporium itself, fans are excited that this idea exists! The problem is the lack of "update" that Riot promised, compared to last year's Emporium.
Summer Emporium And Winter Emporium
Since the Essence Emporium was originally designed to happen twice a year, Riot created a Summer Emporium and a Winter Emporium. The upcoming Emporium with patch 13.17 is a Summer Emporium, just like it was last year.
The difference between the two Emporiums is what skins and chromas you can get from these events.
Summer Emporiums offer skins and chromas that were released from July-December, no matter what year. Winter Emporiums on the other hand offer skins and chromas that were released from January-June, again regardless of which year.
Blue Essence Emporium 2023
You've probably noticed this, but we're already past mid-year. The first Blue Essence Emporium of 2023 will be happening sometime between the end of August and the beginning of September, so quite a bit later in the year than most people had expected and hoped for.
From the current PBE, it seems as though the next Emporium will be a regular Summer Emporium, meaning we will be getting the same chromas as we did in 2022, plus the chromas from the new skinlines that were released in the meantime.
For those players that already bought all chromas that they wanted last year, this year's Essence Emporium will turn out to be quite a disappointment.
This also sparked quite the discussion over on Reddit, with one user commenting:
Absolutely insane if we get the same chromas as last year and skip the rest.If this Emporium will be the only one this year, at least put all chromas in there. Otherwise by the time the other half finally appears in Emporium it would be close to 3 years since they went there.
Since this Essence Emporium is so late in the year, many worry that this will also be the only Essence Emporium this year, just like we only had one last year.
If that is the case, fans of winter skins and chromas will have to wait three years in total in order to buy their wishlist items with Blue Essence, since the last Winter Emporium was in December 2021.
As shown by MattyLoveGaming over on YouTube, it seems as though the PBE completely removed the Blue Essence price tags from all the chromas that were previously shown.
This could mean that Riot is rethinking their Essence Emporium for this year of possibly lowing the prices for chromas at least, to compensate for the lack of another Essence Emporium this year. This gives us a lot of room to speculate, but we'll only actually know once Riot re-uploads the chromas to the PBE and then eventually to our regular LoL client.
What do you think? Is this Essence Emporium a bust, or are you excited to buy new chromas that you didn't care about last year?
Speaking of coming soon to LoL, check out this unique champ concept!