Recently, Riot introduced a multitude of changes to the ARAM League of Legends map, but it seems that a part of the community feels like these updates only make ARAM more competitive rather than more fun.
ARAM is one of the few game modes we still have in League of Legends. No more Twisted Treeline or Dominion, and it seems that Riot is finally paying some attention to the map and the mode to try and improve it, but are they going about it the right way?
Multiple players on Reddit and Twitter have spoken out against the new changes implemented in the ARAM map, stating that it's taking the fun out of the game mode and making it more competitive, something they don't want.
LoL ARAM: Have the Changes Hurt the Game Mode?
With the update in LoL Patch 12.23, we received some major ARAM changes as well. The map now has falling towers which obscure part of the path. Also, death timers have increased due to the implementation of hexgates onto the map which teleport you from the base to the furthest tower.
While these changes are all fun on paper, it seems that the community feels a little differently. Some players suggest that Riot should make the rubble fall at different angles, with the current fallen towers being more annoying than anything else.
Though, Riot Maxw3ll did explain that making towers fall at different angles wouldn't change much in terms of gameplay.
We tried it falling at various angles but unless it restricted player movement in this way the terrain just wasn't changing up the game. Most of the movement on howling abyss is towards or away from the Nexuses (Nexii?). Falling in the middle or at an angle didn't really create cool vision plays you could make.
The long death timers have also become an annoyance for most who feel that having the hexgates added brings nothing to the game due to the long death timers.
A lot of players also think that these changes feel more like 'changes for the sake of making changes' rather than trying to bring something new and exciting to the game. Some even wonder why the changes were made since there hadn't been too many complaints about the map before.
Suggestions to Improve ARAM
Adding things like small alcoves could improve the map and the game as one Reddit user suggested. This would add more than the simple bush that Riot has added in the middle of the map. Whether this is feasible though has not been revealed yet.
A lot of players would like to have the death timers changed back to pre-update levels since they feel that the game has become too much of a snowball game mode where one lost team fight could mean you lose the entire match. These are the main changes in ARAM, but Riot likely won't be reverting any of them.