devtrackers.gg
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.
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.
[removed]
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 League needs to live up to.
Even when players say “but you could just leave it there as it is, I’d still have fun playing it”, we would eventually need to do balance, tuning, updates, etc or it would just die, the exact same way Dominion did. That’s not the quality of experience we want to repeat again in League of Legends. ARAM seems to be resilient though due to the low delta of match quality even with disparate skill levels. EG: A Diamond player amongst Bronzes in ARAM can still only snowball the game so much, as the rules mean they will inevitably die, they can't split push, take objectives, etc, meaning less requirement for fine tuned balance.
I 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.
Why is lethal tempo disabled in ARURF?
I get ult hat, but having crazy attack speed at times is the type of thing that can make URF fun, it's not like everything oneshots you anyway
I'll try to dig for a video of why (will have to be after winter break though).
If I can find a video, you'll understand why we turned it off lol. :P
The "dying poros" part of the post will be completely overlooked because of URF mode, but I still wanted to share this unused poro death animation that would have been used when they run into fountain turret. This animation got replaced with the "jump up and run away" animation. I don't know how the "crispy-black" charring plan mentioned in the article fits into either of these animations.
gif of animation
he was just playing...r-r-right?