Gamemode Feedback
I wanted to make this a forum post instead of just a comment because a forum post will actually help garner more attention from people and allow them to display their own opinions on things that I really want to see. I think there's been one big reason that alternative game modes had never really worked and I'm going to go into them one by one.
ARAM ARAM is a game I play every now and again when I just want a quick game just to get the first win of the day or something because it feels a lot less skill based and a lot more luck based with if you get a champion you can use very well or just generally works well on ARAM. Getting champs like Heimer or Nasus were the worst while getting Nidalee, Veigar, or Sona pretty much makes me think "easy win". Here's the first thing about it, I have an occasional reason to play ARAM but not a constant one. Playing ARAM doesn't really earn me a lot because if I just want to play a couple games and not just crank out easy missions like "Do this much damage to champs" or "earn this much gold". I play SR because I also get serious experience on champions for ranked, or I play ranked which gives me a chance for LP and free skins/chromas. I am disproportionately more incentivised to play SR over any other gamemode and that's the biggest issue with all of them which is why I bring it up with the mode who has the least issues currently.
Twisted Treeline There are like 20 viable champions and even ranked games, people feed and say they don't care because it's just TT even though it is still ranked. This gamemode had always been taken as kinda a joke, even by riot. Balancing is way off (they don't even try anymore), the games are way too long, even longer than SR games on average even though there's less people, the map is just as long and far as a walk, making every thing feel empty and just taking up space with massive walls for no reason. It's something that I feel could work with a redesigned premise and shorted game length. I already know they are just gonna scrape it at the end of the year. Kinda expecting it because that's just kinda what happens in this game. If it has problems, they ignore it until people don't care much about it and then they remove it so nobody really complains. The only thing they don't really do that with is champions because they really can't just remove them so instead they just slowly make progress instead of fixing a clear issue. Like how long was old Poppy completely gutted of any power before they FINALLY reworked her? It took forever man. And with stuff like Leblancs and Kog'maws reworks, it didn't work very well, didn't really wanna put more effort into it, so they just reverted it and left them in their low play rate and unpowered state. It's not like it was gonna be impossible, it just needed a bit of work but it was completely abandoned. Yoricks and Poppy are having that issue too but luckily their rework changed so much that they can't really just revert it. Someone made a really detailed forum post a good while back about reworking TT and it got 0 notice. The last patch that affected Twisted Treeline was 9.1 and that was for a cost reduction of Wooglet's Witchap being upgraded by Ornn. There has been no noticable attempt to make this game mode a played game mode other than to get the chroma at the end of the year but the players I have to sit through alone make me not want to play. Riot needs to take a game mode seriously if they want us to.
Teamfight Tactics Here is a good example of Riot really pushing to make a new gamemode one that's actually played. Biggest issue is lack of consistent rewards. If I had finished all of my weekly quests to get the battle pass points, I would just switch over to SR because I still actually get something. Supposedly there is some ranked reward for TFT but nothing is final and I have no idea what scale we are looking at, whether or not it's just an icon or if you get a special Little Legends and LL ward skin of that seasons LL so I just assume there's nothing because currently the plan is nothing so I play ranked as if the reward is nothing except bragging rights and I don't care that much. Additionally we still don't get xp from playing the damn thing. If I lose an SR game, I still make progress towards leveling up so no matter what, I'm still progressing. If I win a TFT match, that's it. I won. It's a victory that means nothing with no satisfaction other than winning so I really have no interest. Maybe if you guys have an issue with doing xp payouts, you can make it like 2 per round multiplied by the set and all added together. So like completing all three minion waves and dying in between (somehow) would net you 3(2x1) so a total of 6 but then getting through all 6 rounds of the next set would give you 6(2x2) which would be 24 and then plus your 6 from the earlier round so staying in and holding out really leaps you up as opposed to trying to be knocked out early to farm xp. This is however completely irrelavent to presenting the issues but I feel like it's nice to also try and offer some solutions, especially for a gamemode you are still set on attempting to improve.
Nexus Blitz It was really fun and novel but didn't have any long running incentivies. Just like I've stated before, doesn't give me experience with a champion to do well in ranked and is really just a gamemode to be fun that I actually played bits of inbetween doing ranked if I was getting heated. It was actually nice and was like a pool to cool down in when ranked wasn't going well. You really do have to have something to give players a reason to play the mode, if SR didn't have ranked and it was only TT, then almost no one would be playing SR because TT is where you can get free skins if you're good enough and is really the competition flame that draws any and all moths too it's bright glow in which they then proceed to get scorched by the very flame they seek. Honestly some times I think you just gotta deal with the fact that Nexus Blitz isn't gonna compete with SR for play rate. It's just something to dip into and cool down on before going back into the deep end and practicing your swimming.
The only way you're gonna make something that competes with SR's play rate is if you make a gamemode which plays nothing like a MOBA and is used to attract a totally different audience to the client as well as some people who might play SR as well, kinda like TFT. The only thing is hitting the right spot at the right time.