The long awaited,ultra rapid fire game mode, known as URF, is live in League of Legends for a limited time.
League players were excited when Riot Games developers announced URF was coming back to the game. The limited game mode had been introduced during the 2014 April Fools event, but had since been altered to ARUF, a version that instead of letting players pick the champion they want would assign them a random one.
ARUF never received as much love as the original URF had, and players kept asking for it to come back, but Riot initially shared that the mode wouldn’t ever return due to supposed player burnout. However, the developer values players’ opinions and feedback, so they decided to bring URF back in celebration of League’s 10th birthday.
Even though it’s played on Summoner’s Rift, URF brings a whole different experience to League. Champions pay no mana or energy cost when using abilities, and all cooldowns are lowered by 80%. In addition, bases have catapults that quickly send players al around the map.
These changes result in fast-paced and chaotic games in which players, in contrast to the standard League game mode, don’t give much thought to the mechanics, but rather keep fighting each other by spamming their abilities with almost no cooldowns. URF makes for pure entertainment and players have been loving it ever since it first went live.
Their happiness won’t last for long, though, as Riot has stated that the rerun of the original URF is just an experiment and it’s not likely it will come back again. The reason why URF hasn’t been a regular thing is that it results in an overall loss of League players, even though the playerbase peaks when the mode goes live.
“We’ve been transparent in the past that URF seems to have a lot of detrimental effects on players in the long term—in particular, it makes people burn out and stop playing League altogether,” Riot shared in the developer notes. “If this becomes the case again, even with the changes, we’ll have no choice but to keep URF’s return as a one-time special event.”
URF went live on October 28 and will be available until November 8.
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