Legends of Runeterra: Challenging Friends will now grant more XP in patch 0.9.1

Due to the ‘Friend Challenge’ system, win-trading in Legends of Runeterra had become quite a problem for Riot in the earlier patches. So when patch 0.9.0 came around, the devs made sure that they adjusted the amount of XP that a Friend Challenge would grant.

However, a large part of the player base was against these changes, and they complained that the reduced XP was forcing them to play with strangers - which is something that they did not want to do.

Riot is taking their concerns into mind, and going back to the drawing board to address the issue. They are poised to bring about some positive changes in patch 0.9.1.

The Legends of Runeterra design director Andrew "Umbrage" Yip said the following on Twitter:

"We’re going to fix this in a couple of steps...Short term (next patch, 0.9.1) we’ll increase friend challenge XP for both wins and losses, but keep the cap on games, so players don’t feel compelled to trade again."

Last patch we made a change to friend challenge XP intended to curb surrender win trading. It accomplished that, but also caused a lot of unintended pain to players just looking to game with friends. We’re going to fix this in a couple steps.

— RiotUmbrage (@RiotUmbrage) February 21, 2020

For now, Riot is planning to increase the amount of XP that Friend Challenges will be providing players, but it will have a daily cap. If you want to spend an entire day playing with your buddy, then Riot is going to encourage that; however, the XP boost for each player will be restricted to 5-wins.

This will put a huge restriction on those who only want to win-trade, and make things more balanced for all players.

Patch 0.9.0 saw to it that the XP generation was completely removed from the Friend Challenge system, and capped the total amount of XP to 100. Moreover, in 0.9.0, these dueling matches did not count as daily PvP wins and hence did not provide players with the first win of the day bonus.