Riot Games has brought back one of League of Legends’ most famous game modes: URF. The game mode that’s also known as Ultra Rapid-Fire Mode and consists of champions using their abilities at super speeds thanks to drastically lowered cooldowns is now back on the PBE servers for testing. This version of URF is also known as “Pick URF,” for those wondering, which means that unlike the All-Random URF mode, you actually get to pick who you want to play as.
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The URF mode where people get to pick their champions as opposed to them being randomly selected is currently live on the test servers. This means that it’ll spend some time there before it heads to the live servers to give everyone a change to play it for a while before the mode rotates out. Riot Games’ Reina Sweet, lead game designer of modes within League, confirmed on Twitter that the mode was indeed back and would be going live within the next update.
The modes lead also confirmed in a follow-up tweet that this was indeed the Pick URF version which was the classic take on the mode.
For those who haven’t played URF in a long time or at all, this mode’s always been a point of contention in League for a number of reasons. For players, it often became a mode where people would use the same champions over and over again because, as it turns out, some champions are still more broken than others when everybody’s overpowered to a similar degree in URF. This meant that even if you wanted to just have fun with your favorite champion in URF, there’s a good chance you’d get stomped by a team of the top picks before you even got the chance.
Enter ARURF, the randomized solution to that problem. This mode randomly assigned players a champion as if they were playing an ARAM match. You could still re-roll and trade champions to get a more desirable one, but there was no more picking involved beyond that.
On top of all this, Riot’s said in the past that URF actually resulted in players not continuing to play League at all after the mode gets rotated out which is another factor in the mode’s scarcity in League.
Players have had their grievances with both modes, but regardless of which you prefer, they’re at least both breaks from the traditional Summoner’s Rift experience. You’ll get that break soon whenever URF releases in the next update, the same one that’s adding Vex to the game.
