Update, August 25: Riot have revealed the likelihood of acquiring various skins using its Hextech crafting loot system.

Riot Games have revealed that the chance of getting a rare Hextech crafting skin is one in 2,000, or 0.05%. The odds of acquiring items from the loot system, as well as from the Mystery gift function in the store, were released by Riot Games Korea. A tweet from Korean streamer Osevno contained screenshots of the information.

As we approach Worlds, check out the League of Legends 7.18 patch notes.

Riot KR revealed percentage of acquiring skin shard on Hextech Chest and champ/skin on Mystery Gift

sry for bad Eng!https://t.co/fGzP7L4Khy pic.twitter.com/bqX8g9AARq — SΞVΠ @ Japan (@osevno) August 25, 2017

There are currently seven rare, unsold item shards in the game. These are Hextech Annie, Dreadnought Darius, Soulstealer Vayne, and the Hextech, Dawnbringer and Nightbringer Ward skins. Lancer Zero Hecarim is also in that list, but for some reason wasn’t included in the screenshots. Neo PAX Sivir will also be available through Hextech crafting after PAX West, bringing the total up to eight.

Your odds of picking up common items (ones that can also be bought through the shop) are significantly better, but they do scale according to the cost of the item. You’ve got between a 10-22% chance of getting a normal skin shard, which drops to around 5-7% for an Epic or Legendary skin, and the likelihood of getting an Ultimate skin like Elementalist Lux or DJ Sona is just 0.6%

You’ve also got between a 6.5-9.25% chance of getting a Champion shard, or odds of between 3-5.5% for anything else, like ward skins, summoner’s icons, or gemstones.

This means that it’s likely to cost you £1,700 ($2,181) for one Rare shard, and you need three of them to actually craft a permanent skin (although at that point you can also use essence to make up for the shards you’re missing). It’s also worth noting that since there will soon be eight of these shards in the game, the cost of actually getting the one you want soars to more than £13,000, or nearly $17,000. Of course, if you spent that much money on the loot box system, you would also get every single champion and cosmetic currently existing in the game, whether directly or indirectly.

This means that you’re actually significantly better off farming for gemstones instead. Collecting ten of these lets you craft any Rare item you want, so it’s automatically a much better idea. It’s also cheaper to get hold of them – my calculations say that the odds on getting hold of ten gemstones should set you back somewhere in the region of £250. Gemstones also often drop alongside actual loot – the skin and champion shards mentioned above – so you’d be getting a lot more bang for your buck.

For mystery skins, the odds are a bit more difficult to calculate, because they change based on what you already own. For instance, the maths for buying your friend normal a mystery skin is “1/(number of skins available depending on champion possession – champions who cost less than 520 RP (including sale)).” For clarity, that sum has to take into account the number of champions you own, how manys skins you have for each of them, and what champions are on sale at that point.

Original Story, April, 28:The drop odds for League of Legends’ ‘hextech’ loot boxes have been published, ahead of new Chinese laws that come into force on May 1.

The early move followsCrossfire’s example earlier this week(the Chinese gaming giants Tencent publish Crossfire, and own League of Legends studio Riot).

The odds are in an image posted to League’s Chinese website, which we plugged into an OCR translator. As you can see, translating Chinese is imperfect without a human expert, so we’ve applied a bit of guesswork in mapping the odds of each Chinese drop to their equivalents in English.

Those guesses are also informed by the value of the stuff that we know can drop. In one or two cases, this has made us deviate from the literal translation, so we’ve left that in brackets.

Skin shards (“skin pieces”): 45.135%

Champion shards (“hero pieces”): 14.61%

Ward shards (“permanent skin husband month”): 29.255%

Summoner icons (“permanent hero”): 7%

Gemstone (“Call Call trainer shown”): 2%

Gemstone (“Shou-Wei skin husband month”): 2%

The community’s current understanding of the gemstone drop rate is that it’s around 4%, and they’re known to drop alongside other pieces of loot, so we’re guessing gemstone drops are split into two bundles as listed above. Obviously the two drops will differ from one another, but we’re not sure in what way.

But as we say, this is less than 100% concrete. If you happen to read Chinese, here’s the image. Did we get it right?

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Update:Since posting this article, alternate translations and information on the differences between the Chinese and NA/EU loot box systems have been provided. You can read about these in the comments below.

In case you missed all the fuss, here’s the original announcement of the new Chinese laws from back in December.