Riot Says URF Makes Some People Stop Playing League of Legends

URF is the rotating game mode that many League of Legends players have been begging for and now [...]

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URF is the rotating game mode that many League of Legends players have been begging for and now Riot is answering the question on many minds: Why can't we have regular URF, instead of alternating variations? Riot Games took the time to answer just that - but long story short, they say it makes people want to stop playing the game all together.

"URF launched a long time ago, way before we ever started doing RGM. It was basically a crazy April Fool's gag that ended up becoming hugely popular. Given how popular it is, lots of players want to know why we don't bring back regular URF more often. There's one reason that we haven't really talked about before now:

URF makes some people stop playing League."

According to the developing team, URF has become somewhat of a taboo whenever it is brought up. According to Riot, every time they ran the regular version, the numbers of actual players dropped down exponentially. When looking at the numbers on the NA side, they said over twice as many longtime players actually left the game - which was a much bigger drop than they initially planned for.

Though the numbers aren't looking good, they do assure fans that they are experimenting ways to bring it back without hurting the overall community:

"In other words, some people binged on URF, and then suddenly stopped playing League. And the size of the dropoff indicates that it's not just people coming back for URF and then leaving afterwards. Despite spending a lot of time investigating the reasons, we aren't actually sure whether URF causes some sort of "hangover" effect or if it makes regular games feel slow by comparison—maybe it's because URF feels like playing League with cheats turned on. Regardless, after we turn on URF, total games played go down, as do overall game hours. And they don't recover for a long time, if ever.

We've been trying to wrap our heads around a way to solve this problem for a while, and that's one of the biggest reasons you see us experimenting with variations on the mode like ARURF and Snow Battle ARURF. Although these modes still suffer a bit from the "binge-then-churn" effect that regular URF has, it's not nearly as bad (probably because you're not seeing the same OP champs every game).

URF causes some people to stop playing League, but a lot of you really love it. So instead of killing URF altogether, we're just gonna keep experimenting to find some healthier version of the mode. Tell us your thoughts about Snow Battle ARURF—we'll listen and apply what we learn to ARURF's next appearance."

It's interesting to see how this particular aspect affects the popular MOBA player base so much. They are more than aware of the demand however, so hopefully this means good things for those wanting a truly organic URF experience.

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