Ranked ARAM

Vhan8765··3 votes·383 views

ARAM is a rather large part of LoL now'a days; many, such as myself, have leveled to 30 on ARAM and have made it our main game mode to play. However though, it is apparent that Riot seems to only have interest in the Rift. With the retire of Dom and TT not having been touched in forever (that I'm aware of at least), as well now as the Hextech Crafting excluding ARAM, all other game modes are being completely left behind. In fact, often in games people will question why others take ARAM so seriously, or just generally state their thoughts of ARAM as a joke almost. And honestly, I don't know exactly how far they are from the truth.

So here I am to suggest a step in the right direction! With Dom gone, we're left with Classic and ARAM; you ask me, I say Rift is perfectly fine for now. It plays smooth, it has a rhythm, things can't really change much from here on out. So why not start taking ARAM more seriously at this point, seeing as how it is the only other permanent game mode? Now, I admit, I don't play Ranked. Obviously, since I leveled to 30 on ARAM, my Rift isn't the best. In other words, I don't know how the system in Ranked works exactly, so I don't know how exactly it could be converted over to ARAM. However though, the way I see things, if ARAM wins are added to Hextech Crafting and a Ranked for ARAM is figured out, the game mode would be taken much more seriously based off those two factors alone.

So those are just my thoughts on the matter; thank you for taking the time to read through that all. [slayer-jinx-catface]

1 Comments

Minarde2 votes

It'd likely be difficult to enable ranked ARAM. Not because of the implementation itself, but because of the additional work required.

For one thing, there needs to be a solution to ARAM-optimized accounts. Particularly if there's going to be rewards and accolades/bragging rights, it doesn't fit with the rest of League for Alice to have a permanent advantage over Bob simply because Bob bought the "wrong champs." Whether it's unlocking all champs for ARAM play, sharing champ pools, or something else, being penalized for owning more content is counter-intuitive.

Furthermore, the League playerbase needs to shift its perception of ARAM. There's a relatively common idea that since ARAM's random nature means that some games are essentially lost at champ select, ARAM is inherently unbalanceable. The shift is that the community needs to understand that, similar to other RNG-heavy games (e.g. Hearthstone), ARAM is balanceable over the long run. With the aforementioned level playing field of champion pools, no player has an innate advantage, so skill trumps luck after a while. The main issue is getting players to accept that, as SR is less RNG-heavy, yet players sometimes don't accept it there either.

Finally, ARAM would need more frequent balance changes. It's reasonably obvious that some champion kits are more suited for ARAM than others. However, regular balance updates would help minimize the "lost at champ select" problem by limiting the advantage/disadvantage someone gets from rolling one of the outliers.

With that said, it doesn't seem likely that Riot's going to invest that much effort into non-SR game modes. Especially with LCS, Riot's gone all-in on SR, and diverting resources to other maps/modes instead would require a massive shift in business plans. Considering Dominion players continually asked for ranked from Dom's launch until its retirement, going straight for a ranked ARAM queue seems a little optimistic. It's probably more prudent to first convince Riot to provide regular updates for other modes (e.g. TT/ARAM). Y'know, baby steps.

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