2023 has been very special for League of Legends due to all the new features that Riot Games has been introducing throughout these months, although for 2024 it also has a few very important surprises prepared. One of the best that this year has left us has been the arrival of Arena modegiving the MOBA a much-needed breath of fresh air.
This temporary game mode was received amazingly by the community. Users did not stop playing games incessantly and were left wanting to continue playing more and more. That is why the company heard the wave of requests requesting its return, which is why it has been temporarily included again in recent weeks.
However, Riot Games was aware that Arena mode was not perfect, which is why it considered that changes needed to be made and other completely new additions. However, some have turned out to be a success, but others have not been able to prevent it from continuing to fail in the same negative aspects.
The much-needed news
During these months the team behind League of Legends has been reviewing and studying the comments and proposals that the community was leaving to make this mode even more attractive. Mainly, its objective was to optimize several sections: being able to play with more friends, adjusting certain champions and the playability of the different rounds.
Some of these pillars were criticized in the previous version, hence Riot Games wanted to focus on them to optimize them even further and in part it must be recognized that they have achieved this. Before you could only get two friends together to play together, nothing more, but now Eight people can participate in the same game. that they know each other, in which case it will become a private battle, while leaving any slot free allows another random person to join the group.
Even so, this detail is not as important as, for example, the changes that have been made to the battlefield itself. Now offers greater mobility thanks to the hexportalslike the ones that appear in ARAM, since each two of them are located at each end of the map so that it is easier to flee from opponents in the event that you have to run away, which those champions undoubtedly appreciate who have worse mobility.
In addition, so that they do not get caught when chasing them, the portals have a cooldown time so that they cannot be used for a few seconds. On the other hand, so that the battles do not drag on forever, the ring of fire is still present as in Battle Royale, but now the central point where it ends is completely random, in order to also guarantee that no one starts to camp in the same place and are forced to move.
After playing a good handful of games I deeply appreciate these new features, but if I had to choose one in particular it would be the resurrection. When I played Arena mode with a friend, sometimes we felt that the game was completely lost as soon as one of us died, but now the corpses leave a circle under them on which you have to position yourself for several seconds so that it is reborn, being able to Do it once per person and per round.
Of course this addition is brutal and the best of all so that the games can be closer, because in some it seemed that it was impossible to win in a 2vs1, but when I resurrected my partner the balance tipped in our favor, making it clear that All is not lost until both are defeated.
Furthermore, they have also been implemented new powers to make the most varied combinations. Among them there are some very fun ones, like a lightning bolt that unites both companions damaging everything in its path, another one with which you can resurrect up to three times becoming smaller and smaller, also another one with which you shoot some kind of missiles constantly and there is no shortage of them. those that recharge skills at full speed. In short, some are tremendously useful, although that does not mean that there are others that it is normal to ignore completely.
Changes that need a huge overhaul
Precisely, the fact that there are still some increases that neither work nor fail is what sometimes causes the games to not be very balanced. It is obvious that not all the powers that can appear between rounds can be excellent, because otherwise it would not be funny. In addition, it is a way to try different combinations with the same character, but sometimes, among the three that they give you to choose from, there are usually one or several that it is inevitable to reject them because they are not very useful with certain champions.
That said, the randomness factor was one of the main negative points of Arena mode and, unfortunately, it has not been corrected. In fact, I would dare say that it has even gotten worse.. Apart from the issue of increases, which have a great impact on the events of the games, also because of the so-called Cameos. These are participations of champions controlled by artificial intelligence who are on the battlefield simply to annoy.
These are supposed to be unbiased and in at least one of them I have noticed the change, such as the fact that Pyke now attacks each team once instead of randomly. However, with Sylas, one of the new additions, this does not seem to apply. Its power implies that each of the players randomly receive an ultimate ability from one of the existing champions. Not from the more than 160 existing ones, but from a smaller selection.
Here we return again to the annoying randomness factor, because not all ultimate abilities are equally good. It is an irrefutable fact, because hitting Lee Sin’s kick is not as effective as making opponents kill each other with Renata Glasc’s potions, to give a couple of examples. So it happens that when I played a round in which Sylas was the Cameo, it was decided who won by the ultimate abilities instead of by the players’ hands.
I understand that the beauty of this game is the fact that sometimes you don’t know what is going to happen or how certain factors can alter events. Even so, I consider that everyone’s keyboard and mouse skills should predominate above anything else, because it is not pleasant to lose knowing that it was due to luck and not because you played badly.
Likewise, when Riot Games presented the return of Arena mode, they assured that they had made an effort to ensure that certain champions were not so broken, since there were many that were never or almost never chosen. Well, it seems that it hasn’t worked very well, because at the beginning of each game, during the champion lock phase, I always tend to see the same faces. Similarly, in the character selection phase, there are some that are usually present on most occasions.
In this sense, I haven’t seen three-quarters of the champions in existence even once. On the one hand it can be understood that making the mode balanced for everyone is crazy, but from there to the fact that the same ones tend to appear almost always, it goes a long way. For that same reason, I often have no choice but to play the same characters, because many of my favorites are not suitable for this modeeither because of their mobility, their abilities or because they are not suitable in certain scenarios.
For all this, at first I was grateful for the return of Arena because in the summer I had a great time playing countless games and I thought that with the improvements introduced things would get better, something that is partly true because there are very interesting new features that demonstrate that Riot Games is doing its homework well. However, that doesn’t mean that you still have a lot of work ahead of you to want this temporary mode to return in a few months. Sincerely, I prefer to be given a good rest provided that when it is introduced again it is because its serious defects have been corrected.
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