With a terribly customer-unfriendly Battle Pass, 2K has disappointed WWE fans all over the world this year. Now the pass has been defused.
I called the new WWE 2K26 Ringside Pass a Battle Pass from hell in a column on the release of the sports game. And I wasn’t alone in that. Many fans and content creators condemned the completely customer-unfriendly pass
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Now, however, the outcry has apparently become so great that even 2K and the WWE development studio Visual Conceptsno longer want to hold out. Instead, the controversial Ringside Passhas been massively toned down with the new update 1.07.
How 2K is now solving the big problem
The main problem with the Ringside Pass was that the paid pass replaced the DLC packs of the past. So if you wanted to buy new wrestlers or had already done so with the expensive special editions, you couldn’t simply use the characters you had bought.
Instead, it was absolutely necessary to first painstakingly unlock every single one of them. Depending on how you played, this could take up to 30 hours – just to get the wrestlers you had already paid for. The fans were not pleased.
The problem is now being massively counteracted in various ways:
- All players will automatically be granted so much XP that they are guaranteed to unlock 20 tiers of the pass immediately and therefore automatically unlock all DLC wrestlers, provided they have the Premium Pass.
- All players who have linked their 2K account and played WWE 2K26 before April 14 will also receive enough XP to unlock 20 tiers of the second Ringside Pass immediately.
- From Season 2 onwards, the XP required for each tier will be reduced from 800 to 625. On top of that, XP bonuses will give even more XP than before.
- From Season 2 onwards, all paid DLC wrestlers will always be unlocked at Tier 1 of the respective Ringside Pass. It is therefore no longer necessary to grind for the new wrestlers.
This means that the Ringside Pass is no longer an artificial blockade that massively restricts even solo players in their gameplay and blocks content that actually costs money.
From now on, the pass is only of interest if someone really enjoys playing the online modes MyFaction or The Island.
The change is not being sold by 2K as a concession to the fans, but as a chance to “create your own legendary Wrestlemania moments” before Wrestlemania 42.
The fans are satisfied
The changes were met with great relief in the community. There are several threads on Reddit in which fans praise the changes to the Ringside Pass and the extensive patch. One user happily captioned his thread: “Congratulations, WWE gaming community, we won today.”
However, there are also repeated voices of caution. 2K should not be praised for the changes. Although fans are pleased that the developers have listened and reacted in this case, many also agree that it should never have come to this. It will be exciting to see how 2K handles the Ringside Pass next year and whether they have really learned from the feedback.
