Riot Games has reversed its decision to sell chromas separately in League of Legends Classic. In an August 3 post on X, the studio said players who already own the modern version of a skin will be granted the Classic chroma for free.
Anyone who has already bought a Classic chroma and owns the modern skin will have their RP refunded, according to the same post.
What players were being asked to pay
League of Legends Classic launched with its own store, and chromas such as Tundra Hunter Warwick and Exiled Morgana sat behind a 300 RP price — roughly $4.99 or £4.50. Ownership did not carry across: a player who owned Tundra Hunter Warwick on their standard account did not have access to it in Classic, and had to buy it again.
That drew complaints on the League of Legends subreddit, where players objected to re-purchasing cosmetics they had bought years earlier. One player wrote that the argument against re-buying skins for Classic collapsed when the skins in question had been bought over a decade ago.
The reversal is retroactive in both directions: a player who bought Blast Zone Heimerdinger's Classic chroma while already owning the modern skin gets the RP back, and a player who held off gets the chroma at no cost.
Part of a broader walk-back
PCGamesN placed the episode against several years of expanding premium offerings at Riot, a run it traced from Dark Cosmic Erasure Jhin and the Mythic Variants through to the $450 Hall of Legends Ahri skin. Classic's store landing with paid cosmetics fit that pattern, which is part of why the reaction was as sharp as it was.
The chroma reversal follows an earlier one covering paid Classic skins, which had put the mode's original base character models behind a paywall. Riot has said it intends to develop League of Legends Classic alongside its players, drawing a comparison to how Old School RuneScape is run.
PCGamesN, which reported the change, framed it as part of a wider push toward developer visibility at Riot through 2026, including studio staff appearing publicly at events such as MSI and Valorant Masters London.
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