Can confirm this confirmation. Consider it extra confirmed.
From Song of Nunu into Bandle Tale, we coming at you with the one-two adorable punch <3
Do you remember that time that they released "advanced bots" as an april fools prank but it was actually secretly matching you with other players with the names replaced with "X champ bot" XD
I remember when we had that idea over a lunch. We locked eyes and just knew immediately THIS IS GONNA HAPPEN :D
Good times makin' game modes back in the day ♬
To make - Doom Bots
To play - Ascension
No more chains. No more cages.
“Hope will not make them pay for what we’ve lost. I will.”
I really like the varying styles they're taking the games in, helps keep things feel fresh.
Mageseeker and continuing the Demacia story is probably my favorite of the bunch. I definitely like all 3 though.
Here we co～ome! ♬
Gigantic evil Tibbers was the best! The promo game for Doom Bots had the casters, etc playing against the doom bots and at one point Giant Tibbers looks up at the overhead view "camera" and growls - just awesome!
I remember that filming. The build was still pretty early, and we were battling bugs right up until the record. The broadcast team did cool little things like stacking the poro toys on a chair and shaking it for "crowd ambience". :D Zirene DC'd halfway through and we frantically were trying to get him to reconnect in the background. Crazy times. Good times on old League :D
Is there any chance of it coming back???
It's been many years since I worked on LoL, so I have no idea sorry!
I sure do. :D
Easily my most fun mode to make. Ascension was my most fun to play, but Doom Bots was most fun to make for sure. First PvE mode that gave us learnings for Star Guardian in later years.
I remember hearing the first WIP version of this and was like YESSSSS! :D
Any chance we might see one for all or are the same problems exhibited. One for all games are some of the best times I have with friends.
OFA doesn't actually exhibit any of the problems URF does. It's in the clear!
I'm sad we couldn't get it working in the back half of this year while we were building Star Guardian and Project modes, but I'm hoping we'll have it running again soon.
I wanna play OFA Xayah.... XD
The truth finally released.
To be honest, we've been trying to figure out how to talk about it for a while. This is a pretty weird problem to have. Like, players love this mode, and also the mode makes players churn. That's sort of hilarious and terrible at the same time. So, before talking about it, we first wanted to really investigate the issue and make sure it wasn't just some sort of one time thing.
I've been personally battling for a long time to not have to kill URF altogether. Our team has been jamming on iterations over the years, and once we noticed that the first runs of ARURF didn't suffer from the problem to the same degree, we decided to keep experimenting with it. Since ARURF also tends to solve some of the other big design problems URF has (poor champion diversity), we now feel confident enough about the path we're taking to address it.
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You're a monster....
....no.. XD
I feel like all of these efforts to change URF are just to make it less fun and therefore less bingable so it exhibits less of the problems shown. The problem lies there; the devs are intentionally making the game less fun to help with the bottom line of retaining players.
Correct me if I am wrong but this is straight up what seems to be happening. Maybe adding it permanently in customs would remove people's need to play so much for the limited time it was out.
Making a game mode "less fun" is definitely not the goal. My expectation of any game designer would be to creatively solve the problem in a way that actually ends up being more fun than the original. Intentionally crippling something fun like URF would be a travesty.
ARURF speaks for itself. It beats out original URF easily in popularity, engagement, lower fatigue, etc, everywhere it counts.
EDIT RE URF being made permanent: We still don’t intend to make even a mode like ARURF permanent. Making another permanent competitive mode in League to rival Summoner’s Rift is dooming it to failure. We learned that lesson on Dominion the hard way (among many other flaws with how we handled Dominion in general). Even with our hard working Live Balance team, base SR is a monolithic job to keep as balanced and well oiled as they do. We wouldn’t be able to get even close to that level of commitment for a permanent ARURF, and it just wouldn’t hold up to the standard of competitive integrity we feel...
Read moreI just want to say thanks for your transparency on this subject.
Plenty of companies wouldn't even have considered sharing that info, the fact that you did shows the respect you have for your player-base.
Cheers dude. You have no idea how long I've wanted to come and jam with you guys about this.
Do you think these statistics might be skewed though?
A lot of my friends come back for break and that’s THE ONLY time they play league - and generally during those breaks/holidays is when urf comes out, which would mean the player rates decrease because the holidays are over not because of URF?
We considered the possible "URF tourist" effect too.
We use "net churn" to measure, which includes revivals, and are looking holistically at hours played as well, which regularly sees a drop after we run vanilla URF.
But isn't your sample size too small to make inferential claims on the effect of normal URF? How many times was it available? 2? It has never really been tested properly. For example, maybe data would be different if URF came back monthly instead of building up hype for years and then have one big burst of 2 weeks that makes people go all in on LoL. Or it would be different if URF was a permanent mode for which you have to earn tokens to play it by playing normal/ranked games.
I had that exact same "binge" hypothesis many years ago, and we tried running URF twice quickly back-to-back in succession when RGM first launched. We saw an even worse effect on the second run than the first. There's always a possibility that "it just needed more time to normalise, it wasn't enough!", but we felt there were better design alternatives than an existential game of chicken. :/
Alright my man we can jam a little. In another post you say you're not interested in balancing urf. But as a veteran who has played every version of urf hardcore, I see the little changes here and there like no more stacking BTs on zed/ezreal (original version), or brand can't permastun you at level 1 anymore (recent version).
So, be honest, are you indeed balancing it then? If so, why not run normal urf and balance it some more so there's not insanely OP champs?
The line we draw is usually "bugged or broken".
Bugged examples are usually perma-stuns like you mention. EG: Zilean and Brand. It's unacceptable for a champ make you literally unable to play the game.
Broken is basically Sona. We will exhaust every other avenue before resorting to "switching off a champion". In the case of Sona in URF over the years, we've tried everything from blanket hitting "shields and heals" holistically to actually reaching directly inside Sona's script and just dividing everything by 2. No joke. We did that. She still sat a full 10% above 2nd place with a mid 70's winrate.
We don't want to reach inside individual champs and fork SR for the sake of "balancing URF". As many players mentioned, that's part of the fun. But permastuns are lame and URF Sona is a cosmic deity sent to bring ruination on all our computers. She must die for the greater good.
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