League of Legends Isn't Ruling Out Ranked ARAM

Earlier today, Riot Games addressed the many ways they are currently re-working ARAM in League of [...]

By Liana 'LiLi' Ruppert

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Earlier today, Riot Games addressed the many ways they are currently re-working ARAM in League of Legends to make the champion pool more accessible and the overall mode a lot smoother. Though Ranked ARAM isn't currently in place, that hasn't stopped League players from wishing really hard ... but has that wish finally come true? Riot is definitely thinking about it!

"With the new ranked system for the new year, are you thinking of implementing a ranked system for aram too," asked one player that prompted Riot Games to give a response infused with hope.

"ARAM is a weird beast," they began and already we were hoping for good news. "If you imagine a game of SR or even TT, the hope is that your individual skill has a big impact on the outcome of the game. There are factors other than your skill at play however, including things like the somewhat random effect of who you'll get as teammates and how well you gel as a team. In ARAM, these "other factors" have a huge impact on your success rate because which champion you and the other players get can massively affect the outcome. This is the part of ARAM that some ARAM enthusiasts find really fun—you never really know what's going to happen."

But then the news continued to dour a bit, spotlighting focus needed elsewhere. Though it doesn't look like Ranked is in the immediate future, it's not ruled out either:

"Additionally, we spend far less effort balancing champions for ARAM than we do for SR. Part of this is just a question of focus. We view SR as the core League of Legends experience and spend most our bandwidth on balancing it. But it is also an acknowledgement that in ARAM, whether you succeed or fail is often a lot more out of your control, so even achieving a high degree of game balance can only improve the game so much.

For these two reasons, we worry that ranked ARAM just asks players to take ARAM more seriously, which could be a really frustrating experience. The urge to dodge might go through the roof for example."

Cue the player-base crying.

"All of that said, while we're focused a lot on improving the ranked experience this year, one of the questions we're exploring for the future is whether League needs to offer more of a sense of progression for players who don't play a lot of ranked. While leveling is uncapped now, and we have features like champion mastery, overall there isn't much that a player who plays mostly Normals (including ARAM) can choose to focus on. They don't really have a journey the way a ranked player can shoot for ending the season with a higher rank. Maybe that's okay—maybe Normal players don't need and aren't looking for an end game in the same way. But the requests we get for things like competitive ARAM (or "look, this player is good at this mode" from the original question) maybe suggests that some players are."

All hope is not lost ... it's just not in the neighborhood at this time. That being said, bright side. The upcoming changes sound amazing and will definitely make the ARAM experience much smoother. You can check out those details right here.

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