Will a Featured Game Mode ever stay for good? :(

John Berserk·Jul 22, 2014·2 votes·1,556 views

I am aware that the point of a featured game mode is to be something new that comes along to "freshen up the game", something smaller and enjoyable, but not as resource heavy as something like Dominion, TT, or ARAM. That's fine and all, and I do enjoy the rotation aspect of it, but honestly, while some of these modes are fun little experiments to play maybe once or twice or maybe a few times with some friends (Hexakill, Doom Bots...eh), others seem like they have a ton more "staying power" (ex: One for All, URF) and would only serve to make the game a lot more enjoyable overall by providing more options for relaxed play in between Normals and Ranked games.

So, my question to Riot (even though I probably already know the unfortunate answer), will we ever see a Featured Game Mode come and stay for good? And no, I don't mean rotate back in only to rotate out in two weeks. When I say stay for good, I mean stay for good, permanently.

5 Comments

RiotRoboLionsJul 23, 20146 votes

It could happen! The problem with game modes is that we do some specific one-off stuff in code, scripts, and other things to enable the alternative rules that are so fun. For example, to make Syndra work for OFA we had to work hard to make sure the game understood what to do with so many Sydras and balls that previously were considered to "belong" to other Syndras, etc. This works great inside a given patch but as things progress, are changed, balanced, etc, they have to be done such that it doesn't break any of our game modes. So in a world with permanent game modes there is a serious commitment to maintaining those modes patch over patch.

For now, we are focusing on making new fun game modes to keep things fresh, and iterating on older game modes to attempt to improve them when we bring them back. Eventually we may have a mode that is so well polished and popular that it's time to make it permanent, we're open to that possibility, but we aren't there yet.

John BerserkJul 23, 20141 votes

Thank you for the reply and for the insight. :)

That definitely makes sense. That reminds me of how there's always so many bugs within large open-world games like Skyrim and whatnot. There's just SO much in the game, so many things that could possibly go wrong, something is BOUND to fall through the cracks. Having to maintain all of those cracks that probably move all over the place with every patch would be a nightmare, I assume.

Hopefully as you said there comes a polished enough game mode that's both fun AND easy to maintain patch after patch. I just hope it's URF or OFA personally, some variation/combination of the two, or something just as crazy and non-serious. :)

Kao AtlantisJul 22, 20141 votes

I suspect it takes quite a bit of server resources to run the featured game modes and that the amount of people who play them drop of sharply a week or so after they have been featured. Probably they will all come back at random times, but I am not sure if they will ever be permanent.

MissFortune

dnsupJul 22, 20142 votes

Server resources aside (which you probably have no way of accurately predicting, and to my knowledge this information has never been released), URF (at least) did not experience a sharp drop in the number of people as time went on. How can I know this...? Queue times stayed the same the whole time.