League of Legends Is Reworking ARAM
The ARAM mode in League of Legends is a blast for players looking to try on different champions [...]
The ARAM mode in League of Legends is a blast for players looking to try on different champions with a little less pressure from the team. It's a great way to test out new champs, while also developing that play style a bit more. The limited re-rolls provided in this mode forces players to really dig deep to understand how certain champions play, and though the mode is enjoyable, it doesn't mean there aren't improvements that can be made.
The team over at Riot Games took to their blog to discuss the new quality-of-life features being added to ARAM, including a smoother champion selection process. " These features are intended to resolve some pain points we've seen crop up around ARAM, and as such, the plan is to keep them around for good."
Riot hilariously addressed those re-roll frustrations and notated how they are changing up the request pool:
"Ever watched someone reroll your favorite champion with a trade request pending? What about rerolling one champion, only to end up with something worse? Tired of having to type "rr" in chat and sit back and wait, just in case someone wants to play Bard?
Starting in 8.11, whenever you reroll a champion, that champion is sent to the Available Champions Pool (or as we like to call it, the Bench), where your teammates (or you) can freely trade for it."
They added, "Our hope is that this will smooth out "Champion Select" and ensure that spending a reroll won't make your team composition worse. And speaking of rerolls, we're slightly increasing the rate at which you earn them. If you have no champions unlocked, you'll earn a reroll about once every 2 games, increasing based on the number of champions owned. If you own every champion, you'll earn one reroll each game, up to a max of two."
The Free to Play pool will also be seeing vast improvements, including widening said pool to keep it "true to form."
"The new ARAM Free to Play pool will consist of Summoner's Rift's last three Free to Play pools, which means it'll usually contain 42 champions. Also, to celebrate Bilgewater and the launch of League's newest champion, Pyke will be in the ARAM Free to Play pool for the duration of the upcoming event!"
Changes to the Champion Mastery AND how to make the experience a bit smoother for players were also addressed, mentioning:
"We're making some improvements to Champion Mastery on ARAM. Mastery scoring was designed primarily for Summoner's Rift, and the algorithm it uses to calculate a score on ARAM underestimates mastery by quite a bit. As a result, it's been pretty tough to get an S on ARAM. We're adjusting this formula in 8.11, so the performance required to get an S will be more consistent with Summoner's Rift."
In addition to the below changes to make things a bit more efficient:
- There are now Base Gates at the beginning of the game, like there are on Summoner's Rift, to give players a fair start regardless of how quickly they can finish loading or buying their first items. Like SR, these gates will go down 15 seconds into the game.
- You'll now begin ARAM games with 662 experience, which is the normal amount for Level 3, instead of no experience. This means that it won't take nearly as long to go from Level 3 to Level 4 on ARAM in the future.
- We've also changed the surrender time to 8 minutes for a unanimous early surrender vote and 12 minutes for a normal surrender vote, which is partially to make getting out of a game with a disconnected player faster. We considered enabling Remake for ARAM, but it's likely that enabling Remake would lead to more early-disconnects and AFKs, resulting in an experience that's worse for everybody.
To see the full list of changes, including those that are event-specific, you can check out the full blog post here.
