So, What is Riot's stance on rotating gamemodes in custom games?
So, I probably missed an official statement, but I searched the boards and did a quick internet search and couldn't find one.
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Custom games take just as much effort to maintain as if it was a regular mode. They still have to do a ton of checking to make sure nothing will break from all the game updates since they last time they ran the mode.
This is a Riot response to a reddit thread about this question:
Suuuuuuuper late to the party, but hopefully this is still useful to folks. First, one misconception I want to clear up: having a mode available only in customs doesn't reduce the work needed to make it available. The main work involved in bringing a mode back is making sure it still works with everything we've put in the game since its last run, including everything from champs, VGUs, functional changes to abilities, items, runes, skins, underlying code changes like how damage is recorded or how textures are loaded into game or how game results are recorded in match history, etc. Even if we were willing to let rotating game modes be crazy buggy for the sake of only turning them on for customs (we aren't btw), some bugs are bad enough that they can crash entire game servers, meaning hundreds of matches would crash—not just customs—so even then we wouldn't be able to avoid that preventative QA work if we want to bring a mode back for custom lobbies.
Re: OP's other point about events feeling like battle passes with nothing else to do... a lot of Rioters agree, and we've been having discussions about how to fix this for the future. Things won't stay 'battle pass or bust' forever.
Riot doesn't want rotating game modes because it takes away from Summoners rift which they consider their gold mine.
They don't want to support anything else to maintain the competitive mentality in SR