Eduardo “Riot Cadmus” Cortejoso, Modes Product Lead at Riot Games, answered some questions regarding League of Legends' most exciting (and most different) game mode to date – Arena.

Note that this interview was conducted in the middle of Arena's run on live servers.

Q: What are your thoughts and reactions to Arena being compared to other games like WoW Arena and Battlerite? Were there any systems that you intentionally tried to make similar or different from these titles?

Riot Cadmus: Our primary focus was on trying to make a faster and lower-friction version of League of Legends, and we ended up finding most of our inspiration from within the League ecosystem. In particular, we wanted to figure out how to create an experience that wasn’t as straightforward as “go butt heads for a while until someone wins”, which is how we landed on TFT-like structures like rounds and augments.

This seems to have hit the mark, as despite some comparisons being drawn from all of the “similar” games, League of Legends Arena retained its identity as “League of Legends” while offering players a low-commitment, condensed version of the experience. The TFT-like structure described here that implemented rounds and augments also made sure that games do not feel too similar to each other even if the same champions are being picked. This, however, could only do so much as the excitement from Arena fell off especially on the higher tier of play once players figured out the best champions and their respective best-in-slot augments.

Q: Do you still consider Arena as League of Legends, or is it something closer to a standalone game that simply shares assets like TFT? Necrit brought up that Arena is no longer a MOBA, hence no longer League of Legends. Do you agree?

Riot Cadmus: I would agree in saying that it is not a “classic” MOBA like our main Summoner’s Rift experience, rather it is something new that shares a lot of gameplay similarities. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena still feels like it describes LoL Arena though… My guess is that the right nomenclature will eventually emerge over time.

As for Arena being a more standalone experience, I don’t think we want to be in that same boat. Arena will benefit greatly from maintaining parity with League, since you get to control your champ in a similar manner to how you would in other modes. I don’t think we’ll be moving too far away from that.

This is to be expected, as the overlap of the playerbase between both Arena and the main League of Legends game is expected to be bigger than that of TFT and League of Legends. Teamfight Tactics having its own standalone client makes sense in this case, but not for Arena. Additionally, Arena is still a limited-time game mode at the end of the day, despite the great reception.

Q: What were your thoughts and reactions to the League community playing Arena?

Riot Cadmus: We’re excited about the reception to the mode across the board. It seems that even folks who have a more jaded view on LoL Modes in the past have at least seen Arena’s potential, and some are really enjoying their time with the mode. As with anything, there is also a lot of constructive feedback we’ve been keeping in mind to ensure the health of the mode. We really want to take this to heart to make sure we can learn from this as we think about future work!

Will Arena be a permanent game mode in the near future?

Riot Cadmus: Arena has been live for a pretty short amount of time so far, and while we’re really excited about its current performance, we’d like to see how the mode does over a longer period of time and learn what players would like to see for more playtime. Once we get a read on its longer-term performance, we’ll evaluate the future of Arena in LoL!

Even though it's no longer available, we know that Arena will be going back for another run this year according to the most recent dev update!

Lead Gameplay Designer Bryan “Riot CatchesAxes” Salvatore also chipped in on this via a Reddit comment during Arena's PBE run.

Riot CatchesAxes: Our current intention is to run it for the duration of the summer event, and hopefully be able to bring it back in the future. But at the end of the day, it's going to be about how you folks engage with it. If it has a huge and lasting appeal, I'm sure we'll be having those conversations about either leaving it up or bringing back an improved version to make permanent, if it doesn't, it doesn't.

What are the internal pain points for Arena right now? Were there any out-of-game features that didn't ship like queueing up with more than one other player?

Riot Cadmus: Custom Lobbies is the big one. Not having them has a lot of implications for us, it lessens the spectator experience while also limiting players’ ability to simply focus on a fun game with a group of friends without worrying about external factors. The decision to not have them came down to making sure we could hit the summer event date, but should the mode prove successful enough, you can expect us to spend time on figuring out the best way to allow players to play with multiple friends!

In the Arena run that will happen later this year, it was confirmed in the dev update that it will be possible to queue up with more than one other player in the lobby.

Were there any versions of Augments and Cameos that you liked but didn't make it to the final version of Arena?

Riot Cadmus: My favorite was one called “Shiitake Happens” (Description: A deadly mushroom spawns somewhere randomly in the arena each round. Anyone can detonate it. Only you can see it.).

Rounds with this on were incredibly hectic, but I don’t think I ever laughed more during a playtest than when I had that Augment on and stared down my opponent to jump onto me. I guess I felt like the average Teemo player…. Maybe I should play Teemo more.

Another favorite of mine was one called “Canon Bombardment” (Description: Fire a barrage of cannon shots for the first 10s of combat before launching yourself from the last shot.). It essentially felt like a Xerath ult into a normal cannon shot. We couldn’t quite make it work for now, but I had a blast poking enemies on a melee champ and then trying to clean up by landing on them.

Earlier this year, Riot Games released a list of Augments, only half of which made it to the final version of the game. Both “Shiitake Happens” and “Canon Bombardment” (shown as simply Bombardment) were on this list. Maybe this will be in Arena's comeback, but there's no way to say for sure.

Were there any champion mechanics that were troublesome to adapt? (e.g. Kindred stacks, Aurelion Sol stacks, Skarner spires, global ults like Twisted Fate, etc.)

Riot Cadmus: Ornn. Ornn is the easy winner. Ornn was disabled pretty early during PBE and we’ve had a lot of issues trying to solve his passive interactions with a lot of the new content in Arena. We definitely underestimated the work behind getting him to work as expected.

Kayn was another one that required some extra attention. For a while, you couldn’t even transform since there was no fountain! That made Kayn playtesters VERY sad, so we had to do some special casing to make sure he had a power curve that made sense in Arena.