League of Legends’ Arena mode has improved significantly with its return, but it still fails miserably.

2023 has been very special for League of Legends due to all the new features that Riot Games has introduced throughout these months, although for 2024 some very important surprises are also prepared. One of the best that this year left us was the arrival of Arena mode giving the MOBA a much-needed breath of fresh air.

This temporary game mode was surprisingly received by the community. Users didn’t stop playing games incessantly and wanted to keep playing more and more. This is why the company has heard the wave of requests asking for 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 turned out to be successful, but others could not prevent them from continuing to fail on the same negative aspects.

The essential news

During these months the team behind League of Legends examined and studied the comments and proposals that the community left 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 gameplay of the different rounds.

Some of these pillars were criticized in the previous version, which is why Riot Games wanted to focus on them to optimize them even more and it must partly be recognized that they succeeded in this. Before, you could only bring 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 isn’t as important as, say, changes to the battlefield itself. Now offers greater mobility thanks to the hexportals like those that appear in ARAM, since each of them is located at each end of the map so that it is easier to flee from opponents in case you have to run away, which is undoubtedly appreciated by those champions who have less good mobility.

Also, so they don’t get caught while chasing them, the portals have a cooldown so they can’t be used for a few seconds. On the other hand, so that the fights do not drag on, the ring of fire is still present as in Battle Royale, but now the central point where it ends is completely random, to also guarantee that no one starts camping in the 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 pick one in particular, it would be The resurrection . When I played Arena mode with a friend, it sometimes felt like 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 he is reborn, being able to do so once per person per turn.

Of course, this addition is brutal and the best of all so that the games can be closer, because in some it seemed impossible to win in 2 against 1, but when I revived my partner, the scales tipped in our favor , which was clear. that all is not lost until both are defeated.

Additionally, they have also been implemented new powers to create the most varied combinations . Among them there are some very fun ones, like a lightning bolt that unites the two companions damaging everything in its path, another with which you can resurrect up to three times becoming smaller and smaller, another also with in 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 extremely useful, although that does not mean that there are others that it is okay to completely ignore.

Changes that require a thorough overhaul

Precisely, the fact that there are still augmentations that neither work nor fail is what sometimes makes games not very balanced. Obviously not all the powers that can appear between turns can be great, because otherwise it wouldn’t be fun. In addition, it is a way to try different combinations with the same character, but sometimes among the three that they offer you to choose there are usually one or more 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 negatives of Arena mode and, unfortunately, it hasn’t been fixed. Actually, I would dare say that the situation has even gotten worse. . Besides the issue of augmentations, 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 meant to be unbiased and in at least one of them I noticed a change, like the fact that Pyke now attacks each team once instead of randomly. However, with Sylas, one of the new additions, this doesn’t seem to apply. Its power implies that each of the actors randomly receive an ultimate ability from one of the existing champions. Not among the more than 160 existing, but among a smaller selection.

Here we return to the annoying factor of randomness, as not all ultimate abilities are equally good. This 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 few examples. It turns out that when I played a round in which Sylas was the cameo, it was decided who would win by ultimate abilities rather than players’ hands.

I understand that the beauty of this game is that sometimes you don’t know what will happen or how certain factors can change events. Despite this, I consider that individual keyboard and mouse skills should predominate above all, because it is not pleasant to lose knowing that it was by 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 so that certain champions were not so broken, since there were many who were never or almost never chosen. Well, it seems that didn’t work very well, because at the start of each game, during the champion lock phase, I always tend to see the same faces . Likewise, in the character selection phase, some are usually present most of the time.

In this sense, I have not once seen three-quarters of the champions exist. On the one hand we can understand that making the mode balanced for everyone is crazy, but from that to the fact that the same ones tend to appear almost always goes a long way. For this same reason, I often have no choice but to play the same characters, because many of my favorites are not suitable for this mode either because of their mobility, their abilities, or because they are not suitable for certain scenarios.

For all this, at first I was grateful for the return of Arena because during the summer I was having a great time playing countless games and I thought that with the improvements introduced things would get better, which is partly true because there are some very interesting new features that demonstrate that Riot Games is doing its homework well. However, that doesn’t mean 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 rest well provided that when it is reintroduced, it is because its serious defects have been corrected.