Riot has separated from the LoL mode URF because players stopped playing League of Legends (LoL). Everyone thought this mode would be the best.
It seems the community was mistaken about this fun mode. In a Q&A format, LoL developer Riot Games revealed interesting news about the URF (Ultra Rapid Fire) mode and explained that the mode is not as popular as many suspect.
The game mode regularly caused players to completely stop playing the popular MOBA.
What started as an April Fool’s joke became serious
The URF mode was first activated in April 2014 in League of Legends. It was originally supposed to be an April Fool’s joke, as the mode allows for
- abilities to cost no resources,
- cooldowns to be reduced by 80%,
- the movement speed of all champions to be increased,
- and a lot of gold to be earned so items could be bought faster.
In principle, League of Legends became an extremely fast faceroll adventure, where abilities were spammed as quickly as possible. Players apparently had a lot of fun with it and celebrated the mode. You can see the funny plays possible through this mode in the following highlight video:
URF is dead, long live ARURF
After its initial activation in 2014, the URF mode appeared two more times the following year. After that, URF appeared less frequently. The developers created the “ARURF” mode, which randomly selected champions for players to use in the match.
In 2017, the URF mode was released as a Christmas edition. Players wonder: What actually happened to the “normal” URF game mode? They wish for the regular URF mode to return.
Players stopped playing League of Legends because of URF
The Riot team provides an answer in a blog post to the question of why the seemingly popular URF mode is no longer returning in its original form.
“URF causes players to stop playing League of Legends”
In the blog post, it states: “Every time we activated the original URF, we saw a strong increase in played LoL matches. However, the player numbers fell below the level that was reached before the URF mode began.“
It is not unusual for long-term players to leave League of Legends and new summoners to find their way into the community. However, in this case, it’s something very special. After a URF event, the North American servers lost twice as many long-term players as usual.
And once these players have left, it takes a long time to get back to the regular player numbers (and that doesn’t always happen).
These declining player numbers are the reason Riot experiments with this mode and brings new variants into the game. They are trying to make the best of the mode. After all, many gamers love this crazy LoL mode. Which version of the URF mode did you enjoy the most?
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