Arena is making a comeback in LoL Patch 14.9. Ahead of the release players have given ample feedback and Riot is listening to the community to make changes accordingly.
League of Legends is bringing Arena back in LoL Patch 14.9. This run is going to have quite a lot of changes from the preivous two runs, with Riot Phroxzon revealing some of the design decisions behind the changes they're making this time around.
While Arena was meant to be a "for fun" mode, it seemed that it has gathered the same player base as ranked and by introducing some more RNG and luck into the game, Riot hopes that more casual players will also have a chance to excel at the game, other than just those who want to win-max every match.
League of Legends: Arena Devs Reveal Major Thought Process Behind Changes
With Arena returning to the League of Legends client, this time for an entire ranked split, Riot is making sure that the mode is fun and unique for players to continuously come back to it. To do so, they want to add more random-features to the mode which will make each game feel different and unqiue, even when playing the same duos.
Riot Phroxzon recently went on Twitter/X revealing some of the design decisions that have been made for Arena 2.0. He also explained that the team has made some adjustments already according to players feedback on the Public Beta Environment (PBE).
Early Eliminations Switched With Second Augment Round
ARENA!!We've been having a lot of discussions about Arena over the last few days.Thank you for all of your passionate feedback. We've been testing on this general shape of changes for months now, but at best, we've had 100 tests and it's been really great to see what the...
— Matt Leung-Harrison (@RiotPhroxzon) April 24, 2024
Some players complained about early eliminations, which is why the devs have decided to switch the earliest possible elimination to come at Round 6 — it was previously in Round 5. This means that they're also switched the Augment round for the second augment to be in Round 5 now.
Riot Phroxzon explained that with Arena increasing player size to 16, they want to keep the game length short, with long games lasting around 30-minutes. The intended purpose is to have players log on and play a round during their breaks. Therefore, the first elimination has to happen pretty early on in comparison to the previous Arena run.
More Random Features To Create Unique Games
The previous runs of Arena were filled with people try-harding and working towards the number spot every time. Once they found a combo that worked they would abuse this over and over. The player base was also filled with the same people that grind ranked, which is something Riot wanted to get away from.
While Phroxzon revealed that the game mode should benefit players who play well, the team also wanted to bring in some more "random" elements to make each game more unique. He compared this in a way to poker, where there is always a random element and yet professional poker players can still end up on top even "with a bad hand".
We still want Arena to be skill testing enough that a better Arena player will be both higher rated and have higher average lobby placements than a weaker player in the same situation. Apt comparison here would be Poker, making the best out of the circumstances that you're presented rather than being fully in control of them. Even the best Poker player in the world cannot guarantee they're going to win in a session against even beginners, but in the long run, they will win out.
Riot is also going to look into adding more prismatic items to the game to bring more variety to it all. Not only that, but 500G will be added to each Stat Shard round to make the item system more engaging and Prismatic Anvils will be more costly going forward.
Over the course of the official run of Arena, we will likely be seeing some more major changes and adjustments. Arena is going live in LoL Patch 14.9 so get ready!