Rotating Game Mode update

The League of Legends community has enjoyed the new Rotating Game Mode queue for three weekends now.

It started off fairly tame with Ascension and Legend of the Poro King, but the last weekend gave us the most anticipated game mode that League has to offer: Ultra Rapid Fire (URF).

However, something as glorified as URF doesn’t come without a lot of criticism. That’s just what people are going to do when they are passionate about something. The weekend of URF was filled with criticisms and complaints, and the people at Riot couldn’t help but notice.

Yesterday, Riot L4T3NCY – the game’s Lead Designer of Featured Game Modes – took to the League of Legends boards to answer some of that criticism and give an update on the Rotating Game Mode in general.

The first thing he addressed was the balancing of the queue. He mentioned how they aren’t wanting to have these fun game modes really competitive, but they will make changes to champs in extreme cases that absolutely call for it (he gave Tahm Kench in URF and Brand in One For All as examples). While they will make changes to champs so they can better live in a specific game mode, they aren’t going to make actual balance changes just because something is overpowered. “In RGMs, there”ll usually be a few over- or under-performers, and we’re comfortable with that given the rotating nature of the queue,” explained L4T3NCY.

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If Riot doesn’t want to balance champions for URF, they could always make the game mode like ARAM so that everyone gets a random champion. The game mode would have more variety and be much healthier if that were the case. Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like the people in charge care for that idea too much. L4T3NCY responded to that idea by saying, “We’re not sure if it would be quite the same to come home on Friday Night, ‘Ok, I just wanna chill with some Udyr in Hexakill,’ but the game keeps throwing squishy mages at you. Part of the fun each mode offers should be a new way to engage with your favorite champ. Losing champ pick agency would remove this.”

This is a fair statement on L4T3NCY’s part, but the pros of giving random champions seem greater than the cons of doing it.

He said that he noticed three specific URF suggestions more than anything else over the weekend: towers should do more damage, death timers should be lower and homeguards should switch on quicker. His stance on that was simple, all three of those things could potentially increase the average game length of the mode by a lot, and that’s not something they are interested in.

L4T3NCY addressed everyone’s displeasure of only having the mode on the weekends, and he said that they want to extends its opening as soon as they can. As of right now, having it on the weekends gives them the best environment to work on it. He ended the topic by saying, “…Our goal remains unchanged to increase your guy’s facetime with more modes, more of the time, each week.”

He didn’t give us the name of any new game modes that would be in the queue, but he did mention that it is going in a loop and they will consider other game modes once the first loop is complete. Ascension is returning after this weekend, so that means we should expect URF four weekends from now.

“…Our goal remains unchanged to increase your guy’s facetime with more modes, more of the time, each week.”

No one is going to complain about getting URF again that fast.

Doom Bots is usually the game mode people mention when they are asked what other modes they want thrown into the queue, and L4T3NCY responded to that with: “We really enjoyed making Doom Bots. Once RGM has been running for a while it’s one we might consider.” So it is a possibility that we’ll get the game mode in the next loop.

That was all the information he gave, but it’s really nice to get these updates. Riot doesn’t have to give them to us, but they usually always do a good job at keeping us in the loop.

The Rotating Game Mode is a fantastic feature that everyone should be able to enjoy. Hexakill will be the featured mode this weekend.

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