[2023] [AMA] We’re the team behind the new game mode, Arena. Ask us ANYTHING!

The mode started with the premise of getting to play League without a lot of the internal friction caused by Summoner's Rift's core mechanics. How could we let people play with champions and explore those fantasies without worrying about a resource competition among your own team? Or without getting your lane frozen on you. From there we got to the concept of early exit, where you could be eliminated if you're having a bad game rather than having having to eke out small advantages from a losing position. The rest fell in after that. Augments were to provide variety of experience and give you new things to try every game, and the map + cameo design was built around making the 2v2 experience as smooth as possible.

A lot of the fun of this mode is trying out combos and synergizing with your partner. I think that random champs or pseudo random is a pitch that solves a lot of the 'always see the same champ' problems when the meta settles. It's a problem that I want us to address in the future of the mode, but I don't think we have a clean solve yet.

Our initial prototypes were pretty close to this, but just heads-up combat in a field gets old very fast - we're pretty confident that it wouldn't hold an audience for long, so we opted to pursue a version that had a better chance of being replayable instead.

Exploring a 3v3v3v3 mode is something we're interested in doing, as having an extra champion on each side goes a long way in spicing up combat, and a lot of champions are designed to be interesting with 3 (or more) champions on a side in fights - teamfighting is a big part of League of Legends after all. That said, there are a whole other set of difficulties, ranging from very different balance needs to concerns about setting up 2 players to blame the third random when the game goes badly, to needing to rethink how Augments are designed because fights are inherently a lot noisier. I expect we'll explore it internally, but we'll see how it actually plays out when we do, it might not be something we ever try to bring live.

For 1v1s, we don't believe this is likely to have enough replay value, and a huge portion of the champion roster is designed around being interesting with teammates - I won't rule out ever trying it, but I think it's pretty unlikely that we'd pursue that.

There were two major classes of items that we added for the mode. The first is old items that players have a fondness for that we brought back. Zephyr is one of those. The other is items that we used to help bridge the gap on the Augments, like non ADCs needing Crit Chance. Rite of Ruin is one of those combining AP and Crit Chance. Generally we wanted there to be items that allowed you to build differently based on your augments, as well as just some items that people remembered fondly.

Ultimately, we want every champion to be viable, and every comp to have a good time playing. Some combos will be better than others, and that's okay, it just means there's more to discover. What we don't want to have happen is that one class composition becomes dominant and the only way to win the game, or to have two classes that just cannot win a match together. The augments are intended to help equalize things across the classes and allow the weirder ones to win, even if on paper they're less powerful.

My favorites are always the 'your auto attacks cast some kind of spell for some reason'. I think at some point some champion's auto attacks were firing shaco boxes? Technology is weird, yall.

The hats are made of the finest quality materials. You think Choncc should sell them at a LOSS!?

Definitely not perfect. I think the game cadence works for now, but in the future I'd like us to do a pass on what advantage being an early game champion gains you that isn't snowballing out of control. I suspect it would be very hard to fix this safely in a short timeframe, so I'm hesitant to do it for this run of the mode, but its something I'd like us to look at in the future.

Arena Rule #2: Fashion isn't free

The major intention was to add in replayability. The presence of a ranked system does encourage more tryharding, but you still see that in unraked queues as well, as evidenced by pick urf being fairly dominated by the OPs even though there is zero ranked. I think overall ranked systems adding a bit of stakes to the game increases fun, but it was an intentional design that this ranked system is less about maximizing every single little edge than the Ranked SR experience.

No current plans for new items. We did a bunch of rebalancing on the existing Grevious Wounds items to make them more competitive with other items for each class, so they're fairly reasonable options.

The timeline for sure. We wanted to get it out for Soul Fighter's summer event, which was already a VERY quick turnaround, but getting hacked early in the year really put our timeline further behind. The fact that we have a mode at all is incredible, and the amount of polish that the team got into it was truly magical. The team super overperformed on this one and I'm real happy with where it ended up.

We're excited about Arena's potential for the future, and we're already talking about what we want to do for next steps. We do intent to keep supporting our other modes, but having to go full bore on Arena precluded us from working on them so far this year. No timeline for when we'll be able to bring back existing modes, but you haven't seen the last of URF.

The original Warmup Routine triggered only off of using the explicit Dance emote until we sorted out our active augments. I think there's TONS of design space for cool augments that interact with different systems in League.

"Generally we handle it with team swapping. There are still only two teams in League, so you get moved around to different teams when you get paired against another team. The engine is fairly hardcoded to only accept two teams.
The different matches happen in different dimensions, like you said, although Engineering did a lot of work to change Arena's version of the mechanic to allow things like spectating + disallow things like pings.
The first prototype was very hamfisted. There was no dimension tech in there, so random Ashe arrows would definitely find their way into the wrong arena :^D. Karthus and Soraka were banned for quite a while in early playtests. We also had to content with a lot of champion's not interacting well with team swapping, leading to a lot of temporary bandaid fixes in prototyping until we could make the tech work correctly.
TFT is a very different game and handles their combat very differently, so there wasn't much we could draw from (to my knowledge, maybe there's a backend tech focused thing that we collaborated with them on.

yeah, we knew we were going to do the hotfix after the first day. The second hotfix was unexpected; the meta developed far quicker than we were hoping. The first hotfix was also way larger than we were expecting, since we chose to go with the champion specific nerfs instead of the ARAM balance percent buff/nerf style of change. We're hopeful we won't need to continue doing a ton of hotfixes, and can rely on the patch-to-patch balance updates once the largest balance outliers are dealt with

Nope. SRT did that on their own, and we stole made use of their work.

If it’s popular enough then it’s always possible it sticks around this time

No plans to add more ranks right now. In the future we're likely to take a look at the ranked system and see if we should make adjustments. We want to see how this first run goes so we can design the ranked experience that's right for Arena.

We're looking into resolving that "same champ every game" problem in multiple different ways. Right now there are several large balance outliers that we need to address which will help somewhat, but then we're going to try and look at better systemic solves that work long term.

Yes. Only apple though. Otherwise cake is better.

I love a good pie

We're glad you're enjoying it!

When will you buff Jinx?

The initial reception was awesome, but the important bit will be how players engage with it over time, so it's simply too early to assess that.

I’ve been playing it when I have time between meetings. This mode is so good it’s probably going to get me fired.

that means the item dealt 1600 damage per instance. We're not going to turn off healing entirely, but 1600 before you even count the stats of the item is a HUGE amount. There's no champion that's healing 4k per ability, that would be too much and we wouldn't try and solve that with an item.