New LoL champion Akshan will be disabled for Worlds 2021

The newest League of Legends champion Akshan won’t be available for play at the upcoming 2021 World Championship in October. 

After being released last month, Akshan has hit live servers after a long wait, but fans of professional League of Legends will have to wait quite a while to see him played at a top level. According to the head of LoL esports in Europe, Maximilian Peter Schmidt, Akshan will be disabled at Worlds 2021 even though it was originally expected that the Rogue Sentinel would be enabled. 

It was only a few days ago that it was announced that Akshan would be disabled during the LEC playoffs and in other big leagues around the world. This is due to the fact that Akshan was released on the playoffs patch, which according to the ruleset means that he can’t be enabled. 

Most fans would have expected Akshan to be available at Worlds instead, but that won’t be the case either because of Akshan’s limited time in pro play prior to the event. 

“These decisions are obviously always done in working closely together with the gameplay team,” Schmidt said. “If a champion only gets limited exposure in pro play, that makes balancing significantly harder,” Schmidt said.

As it looks right now, Akshan won’t appear on a professional stage until after Worlds 2021. The earliest possible appearance for Akshan on a pro stage would come at pre-season tournaments like the Demacia Cup.

So far, Akshan has been fairly hard for Riot to balance, even after a run on the Public Beta Environment (PBE). Since his release, Riot has released two micro patches to help buff Akshan and get him in a better spot. Akshan entered the live servers with horrible win rates which got Riot to act quickly and these two buffs have only started to help the champion turn things around. 

While Akshan will have to wait for his spotlight on the professional stage, all the major leagues will be heading into playoffs in the coming weeks to decide the competitors for Worlds 2021.