Sadly, this week has started off with a sad goodbye, as the extremely popular April Fool’s mode for League of Legends, Ultra Rapid Fire, has been taken offline. Initially aimed to be featured for a few days, the mode has been online for an extended period of time, due to positive community feedback and a hefty dose of petitions, begging and a considerable amount of forum pleas. Despite the community’s attempt to keep Ultra Rapid Fire as a permanent League of Legends mode, Riot has decided to remove it, according to initial plans.
The League of Legends developers weren’t immune to the community pleas however, and have vowed to bring back URF at some point in the future, in one form or another. “U.R.F. was never meant to be more than an April Fool’s gag, but the community’s response has been anything but a joke, so goodbyes need not be final. Ultra Rapid Fire will come back in one form or another, but like all Featured Game Modes it wasn’t designed to live forever.” stated Riot in an official post, hinting at the return of URF. Interestingly, Riot has started adding temporary new game modes for awhile now, mentioning late last year that the most popular and successful modes will eventually make it to permanent status.
Will Ultra Rapid Fire be the mode to stay? It certainly seemed to be the most popular one, but let’s not forget about the One-For-All mode or the 1 vs 1 Howling Abyss mode either. Their All-Random-All-Mid (ARAM) mode is definitely unconventional for MOBAs, yet it’s been a permanent mode for a long time now. We see no reason why URF or other similar modes couldn’t make it to the same status too. The only difficulties with implementing permanent modes like this come with server stability and queue times, which are likely to increase for the regular and ranked game modes. Some hardcore ranked players have also been complaining that modes like URF take away from the tactical beauty of League of Legends and result in a drop of player performance and gameplay quality in the more tactical competitive modes. This is a valid argument, certainly, although it’s also worth noting that Ultra Rapid Fire provided a great environment for newer players to practice skill-shots, and the rapid pace of dodging and constant fighting certainly made for some epic plays too.
There are still on-going petitions for keeping URF permanently and bringing it back online. LoL fans have been vocal about it, that much is obvious. With more and more competition coming into the MOBA genre, Riot will definitely have to provide some interesting new features to keep players interested. League of Legends is no longer facing competition from DOTA 2 alone, it will soon have to compete with Blizzard’s upcoming Heroes of the Storm, as well as other titles that are gaining popularity fast, such as Infinite Crisis or Smite. At least we know know that URF will be making a come-back sometime, the only questions left unanswered are when, and for how long?