/dev: Looking Forward for Arena and Swarm

Heeeeeellooooooooooo! I’m Eduardo “Riot Cadmus” Cortejoso, Product Lead for Modes. Since our last dev blog update on modes, a lot has happened. We’ve launched Arena and supported it for four(!) months while Swarm took League by storm as everyone saved Final City from the looming threat of the Primordians. Today, we’re going to talk a bit about what we’ve learned from Arena and Swarm’s recent releases and go over our general thinking towards how we can continue to support League alternate mode content moving forward!

How’d Arena do?

So let’s get some quick hits on how Arena performed in it’s four-month run before we dive into details:

• Arena performed very well for the first two months of its run, but then engagement started to dip significantly. We believe this is due to a lack of novelty and progression systems that would keep Arena players coming back.
• The content refresh (a batch of new augments and items) didn’t meaningfully change how you all played Arena.
• Arena saw a noticeable dip in engagement during Swarm’s first patch, which was to be expected given the new mode HOTNESS.
• Overall, gameplay changes landed well with most players, with a few exceptions:
  • The Koi Pond map did not meet player expectations as a unique map that would create fun and interesting game states.
  • Game complexity increased with the introduction of Prismatic Items, meaning players that weren’t motivated theorycrafters had a hard time getting into Arena.
  • Players weren’t fans of a few cameos (hi Jhin) when they were too powerful and influential over the outcome of a game
  • The leaderboard system did not hold up well with the increased run time of Arena.
• Arena managed to carve out a small-yet-dedicated player base, but still didn’t come close to ARAM in terms of total players.

Given the performance and amount of player engagement during Arena’s most recent run, we’ve decided to support Arena as a regularly recurring rotating game mode and not to make it permanent.

Why can’t Arena be permanent?

Now, let me dive a bit further into that decision. This context is important whenever we evaluate the potential of a new, permanent queue in League, which traditionally hasn’t been sustainable outside of Summoner’s Rift or ARAM.

Arena, as it exists today, would need pretty regular injections of big updates for players to consider re-investing their time in the mode. Simply put, a new batch of augments and items just isn’t enough to get players excited enough to jump into the Rings of Wrath. And while that might seem like a solution to keep Arena around, it isn’t that simple for a number of reasons, but it all boils down to what we’d be giving up to support Arena.

There’s a large opportunity cost for us to consider when investing in Arena. Should the team continue working on Arena more, or could we put our time and energy into new modes instead? What about the entire catalog of game modes people haven’t seen in years? What if we wanted to work on bringing one of those back?

Unlike ARAM, Arena doesn’t cleanly inherit gameplay, champion, and item changes from Summoner’s Rift. This means that Arena requires a dedicated team to keep the mode on week to week.

We’re the Modes team with an S, so we want to make sure we’re creating a variety of game modes for players to enjoy.

What’s Next for Arena?

Now, I understand that might read as a disappointment for a lot of players (particularly our dedicated Arena mains, shoutout to /r/LeagueArena), but we’re committed to making Arena part of our rotating game modes and using re-releases as an opportunity for more content updates - including an update you’ll see next year!

Some of the primary improvements we’d like to make to Arena are:

• Progression - the leaderboard is simply not meeting expectations on what players would like. The Arena God title was a step in the right direction, but expect the team to rethink this experience for the future of Arena.

• Experimentation - reward players for choosing to experiment and make it a more enticing option as opposed to “forced” variance and experimentation for the sake of it.

• Novelty - how can we introduce more “novelty” into Arena, how can Arena feel unique as part of whatever event it is part of? 

That’s it for Arena! I know we aren’t making it permanent, but it’s still one of our two most successful mode releases ever, and we’re incredibly excited for what the future holds for Arena. With that said, let’s talk about one of the other most successful modes releases ever… SWARM!

How’d Swarm do?

To put it bluntly,  Swarm did really well, particularly since we were a bit hesitant about how a PvE game mode could appeal to League players based on our previous modes. One immediate conclusion was loud and clear: Y'all are interested in PvE, with the disclaimer that we match your expectations on what it COULD look like in League, so consider that a lesson learned.

Relative to previous PvE experiences, you can see how Swarm stacks up (note that these don’t capture TOTAL hours played, just a percent since given the amount of time between releases our player hours have changed quite a bit).

Weekly player hours for Swarm compared to previous PvE game modes. Swarm (Pink) had more initial engagement than Doom Bots in 2016 (Dark Orange), Star Guardian in 2017 (Green), and Odyssey in 2018 (Bright Orange). Initial engagement was only surpassed by Doom Bots in 2014 (Red), but Swarm still maintained better long term engagement.

We have three primary takeaways from Swarm’s initial run that will help us think about future projects for game modes in League.

• Novelty (unsurprisingly) is a big deal
  • Swarm pushed league into a new genre and players were ultimately very receptive to a brand new experience. This followed a similar trend to Arena in which player sentiment and satisfaction were directly correlated to a fun and novel game experience for League players.
• Progression helps
  • Swarm had a progression track created specifically for the Anima Squad event. This was a step in the right direction for PvE, as while we expected a drop off, progression gave players a lot more to strive towards than in previous modes. This meant players who got invested in Swarm could set objectives for themselves to accomplish which led them to stick around for longer, so we’ll be looking for ways to replicate this going forward.
• In PvE: Content is king
  • Part of what makes ongoing PvE support challenging is designing a pipeline of content that can keep players sustainably engaged (assuming that’s the goal). For Swarm, we always knew it was only going to run for four weeks… but if we were interested in something that can last players longer we need to think more about how content updates get scheduled and released to players. 

We’re really excited about Swarm’s reception as a game mode and what it means for the future of modes.  We’re excited to start applying what we’ve learned to upcoming projects. We don’t have anything to share about our next steps with Swarm for the time being, but we are looking into how Swarm will fit into our ecosystem and what we can do to improve the mode for future events.

ARAM

I’ll keep this section shorter… for now. I know it’s been a quiet year on the Howling Abyss, so for you ARAM mains I wanted to let you all know that we DO have some plans for ARAM that we’ve been playing around with. Expect to hear more about ARAM a bit later this year as we’ll have some exciting news to share!

Rotating Game Modes

So, one last thing you may have noticed is that since the launch of URF at the start of this year, we’ve never gone more than a patch without an alternate way to enjoy League. Whether it’s the release of Swarm, Arena, or the re-release of OFA earlier this year. We’ll be continuing this trend by re-releasing Ultimate Spellbook at the start of Split 3 once Arena goes offline. 

Generally speaking, we’d like for players to always have a game mode they can play at any given time in the year. 

We still have one planned update for the end of this year and will be sharing our 2025 RGM roadmap as well as updates to our rotating mode strategy in early 2025, so please look forward to that!

Aaaand that’s it! I hope you enjoyed seeing behind the curtains on how our most recent game modes have gone and we hope to continue to deliver exciting experiences for all League players for the rest of this year and beyond. For our 2025 info, please look forward to our season start info dump in early 2025 where you’ll hear more about game modes again! Toodaloo!