I only played one game of ARSR, where I rerolled into a champion I have mastery 7 on and then steamrolled a bunch of people that had absolutely no idea how to play their champions, and could not find anything about ARSR that would make me play it over blind pick if I am in the mood to experiment with a new champion. I'm not going to sit here and flame the devs because I love playing league and I want it to continue its success so that the community stays fresh and exciting. That being said, a little more transparency on the purpose of this game-mode would be nice. From the outside, it just looks lazy, it's literally just a regular game with a random champion, and with so many rerolls, like somebody else stated, at least one team will end up with a fairly meta team.
Not that I want to (ever) see another weekend of Nexus Siege, but I feel like that is a solid pick over ARSR. Obviously it was a mistake, but the mastery token thing was a huge bummer as well, since ARSR is literally just a normal game. As I was in the load screen I was talking to the friends that I was playing with and I said that surely there will be some kind of increased or equalized gold income, otherwise there'd be no point. I feel like I was not wrong.
My main frustration is that I feel like too much work is put into the player's hands to derive enjoyment or satisfaction from the gamemode. Do you reroll and trade with your friends until you mostly get your preferred champions then dumpster a bunch of scrubs, or legitimately try new champions and then risk getting penta'd by mastery 7 riven? Is it still fun when either of these things happen three times in a row?
That is why urf was such a success, in my opinion. There are less consequences, you always have income even if you are getting slaughtered, tp is always up, you don't have to worry about mana costs, and the CDR is insanely fun. Urf is an all-inclusive package, it is inherently fun. Maybe I am wrong, I have no idea what the statistics are on number of people playing URF vs any of the other game modes.
Someone else posted about Black Market Brawlers never coming back, and that seems like such a good point. It seemed like so much effort went into that gamemode, and it came out great. The special items were insanely fun, the customized minion waves were neat but not ridiculous, and winning or losing felt enjoyable. Playing Annie and walking at people disguised as a quarter-health Kalista was some of the most pure fun I think I've had in league of legends. I don't even have the faintest clue how much work would go in to updating that to work with the current patch, but I am sure it would be a lot or you guys would've brought that bad boy back around already.
Obviously you guys are trying to capture the wholesome satisfaction of a regular game of league, but spice it up a bit, and I think this might've been the ticket if there was some kind of extra gold income or splitting all gold team-wide, so mastery 7 riven going 13-0-0 isn't the end of the world, because 0-7-2 AD bard with 24 CS gets a cut of the pie. This would make playing a random champion feel safer and less stressful, and would've made the whole experience way less confusing.
I don't know why I've spent so much time on this post.
