League of Legends Classic Mode Is Shutting Down in January 2027

Did you ever queue up for League Classic just to feel like it was 2010 again? Well, enjoy it while you can — Riot has confirmed the nostalgic mode is winding down.

According to a developer post, League Classic is set to wrap up when 2026 Season 3 ends, with the mode going offline for now in January 2027. Riot's support page points to January 6, 2027 as the shutdown date, though the dev blog itself didn't spell out an exact day. The team says Classic pulled in plenty of players eager to relive the early days, but over time most of them drifted back to the game's other modes.

Here's the good news: this isn't a permanent goodbye. Riot made it clear it wants to bring Classic back down the road as a limited-time event mode, complete with some tuning and fresh content. The devs also plan to look back at what worked — which designs genuinely recaptured that old-school fun — and what was maybe too faithful to the past, to the point where it got in the way of a good time.

If you're on the Taiwan or Korea servers, you've probably noticed queues getting rough. With players flooding back to the live version of the game, Classic has been hit with long wait times and big MMR gaps between teams. The fix? Limited queue windows. On weekdays you can hop in from 4 PM to midnight, and on weekends it's open from 10 AM until 1 AM the next day. Custom games, thankfully, stay available around the clock.

Even as the mode heads toward its hiatus, Riot isn't done adding champions. Patch 26.20 brought in Irelia, Karma, Quinn, Aatrox, and Caitlyn, and patch 26.21 is set to add Mordekaiser, Yorick, Hecarim, and Lucian. More champions will keep rolling in with each update all the way through patch 26.23.

Paid content is getting some attention too. Riot will refund Classic-exclusive items that players can no longer use, and the second-stage Classic Pass arriving in patch 26.21 is being reworked into a single-track, completely free reward system. Nice to see a little goodwill on the way out.

So if you've been meaning to squeeze in a few more Classic matches, the clock is ticking. Will you be jumping back in before January 2027, or are you ready to see what a revamped event version looks like?