URF just isn’t very fun
There is a special, solitary syllable which is occasionally whispered by League of Legends players. Its utterance perks the ears of Yasuo mains across the internet as they open their Avengers lunchboxes in the middle school cafeteria. The softness of its fading sound tickles the heart of chat-restricted players typing angry messages to their teammates. As John Green once wrote, this syllable descends upon League of Legends the same way in which one falls in love: slowly, then all at once.
URF.
Constantly anticipated by the game’s large playerbase, “URF” in League of Legends stands for “Ultra Rapid Fire,” a temporary game mode during which Champions have little-to-no cooldowns on their abilities and are able to dish out immense amounts of damage in very little time. It represents a dramatic change of pace for the often methodical, dense team strategy game that one Riot Games designer described as “playing League with cheat codes on.”
URF, which is currently available to play as of Jan. 28, is usually turned on by developer Riot Games once or twice per year, much to the excitement of its playerbase who clamor for its return when they feel the game’s meta has reached a point of stagnation.
Just one month ago, I was one such player.
When it finally departs on March 4, URF will have been around for more than one month, a length of time that feels greater than any previous iteration of the mode. That’s a whole lot of time spent playing League with the fast-forward button held down.
Too much time, in fact. Though I have had fun playing URF, it has provided a clear window through which to see the things I dislike about it — and from there, the things I dislike about League of Legends as a whole.
On paper, URF presents the ultimate opportunity for players to express themselves and their mastery of their Champion, as all the tools before them are constantly available. The perfect URF match wouldn’t look too different from a fast-paced game of League, albeit with far more fighting and players roaming around the map much more easily. Players would dance around each other in grand displays of mechanical skill with the best man coming out on top as a result of constant split-second decisions.
In practice, though, few URF matches turn out like this. This is due to a couple of different factors. Firstly, most versions of URF that are turned on nowadays are called ARURF — “All Random Ultra Rapid Fire.” In this version of URF, players cannot choose their Champions like they can in the standard League game mode. Instead, they are randomly assigned a Champion upon entering a lobby, are given one or two ‘re-rolls’ to be given a different random Champion and are free to swap amongst teammates and the team’s pool of ‘re-rolled’ Champions. This is for the best, as it prevents the same strong champions from being picked over and over again, creating increased variety and helping balance the game mode.
The problem here is that not all Champions are created equal in URF, and with 143 available in the game, there’s a good chance you and your teammates will run into some good old-fashioned bad luck and end up with a team that just isn’t that strong.
You could end up landing a Champion like Morgana, who is able to keep enemies in place with little time in between thanks to her rapid-fire Dark Bindings — but you’re just as likely to land on a Champion like Zilean, whose cooldowns, despite being reduced by 80 percent, are still too long to consistently drop two Time Bombs on an enemy to stun them. You’ll end up whiffing your abilities as you get pummelled either from a great distance or up close by one of the various champions who are ungodly powerful in URF. And that just isn’t very fun.
Second, while some Champions are incredibly powerful in URF, they are not always powerful at level 1. You may be lucky enough to get Jayce, a Champion whose long-range Shockblasts deal so much damage, it should be outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. But since pulling off a Jayce Shockblast requires two abilities — both the projectile and the Accelleration Gate which catapults the projectile a great distance— you may find yourself feeling utterly useless until level 2 if you’re matched up against a Champion like Ezreal, who is strong at all stages of URF but has access to his long-range and highest-damage ability the moment he steps onto Summoner’s Rift.
It’s true, it doesn’t take long to reach level 2 in League, but since fighting happens so early and often in URF, you may find yourself significantly behind an opponent only a few minutes into the game.
From there, they will snowball into a fearsome enemy who can delete you in a fraction of a second, and you will never reach the point at which you can play your Champion to its full potential.
This leads into the next problem with URF: almost every game is a one-sided stomp. For every competitive game of URF, there are 100 unwinnable matches during which only five of the 10 players in the game are allowed to have fun. Whether a match spirals out of control because the other team simply has better Champions or because the wrong (or one too many) enemy champions get ahead early, playing URF feels like a roll of the dice: Will you get to have fun for the next 10–20 minutes, or do you have to suffer another unwinnable mess?
In short, it’s frustrating to have the carrot of expression and fun dangled before you only to have it ripped away most games due to no fault of your own.
In my personal experience, I feel that URF has led to some of the most unpleasant experiences with other players I have ever had in League of Legends. Players seem to get angry and flame one another at a rate much higher than that of normal modes — outside of League’s ranked matches. And even if what they say isn’t as rude or vile as what might be said in a normal match, the fact that they’re being negative at all in this joke game mode makes it feel worse than usual. It’s understandable why they might get annoyed, but it’s rough to be on the receiving end of that pent up frustration.
So, why complain about a game mode which is clearly intended to be a joke? Isn’t the real value of URF comedic? Well, yes. But that’s the issue with League of Legends and the atmosphere it builds. It’s hard to laugh, even in a comedic game mode, at a game that puts so much in favor of winning. Here are just a few things that you get far more of when you win a game of League versus when you lose:
- In-game currency (used to purchase new Champions)
- Loot boxes (tied to your or your teammates performance, can contain Champions or cosmetic items)
- Performance grade (a letter grade ranging from D- to S+ rating your individual performance)
- Mastery Points (a measurement of skill and time spent playing a specific Champion)
- Experience points (used to ‘level up’ your profile which gives rewards like skins or Champions)
- Ranking (in ranked matches, determines your position on a ladder. Any loss, even if you perform well individually, leads to a drop in your position.)
There are probably other things I’m forgetting here, too. Just six things doesn’t sound too bad, but when matches can take up to 40 minutes or longer at times, resulting in nothing to show for it if you lose, it can feel like a complete waste of an hour. It is demoralizing.
The frustration and randomness that exists in URF is representative of what you will commonly experience in the normal game modes found in League of Legends, though whether its on a much larger or smaller, consistent scale, I’m not sure. It’s not uncommon to perform extremely well in a game, only to lose because your other teammates weren’t up to snuff or because a single team member made a single poor decision, or, not too uncommonly, gave up and decided to sabotage the game.
The reality is that situations like that are par for the course in any team game or sport. Sometimes you will have to carry teammates to victory, and sometimes you either won’t be good enough to or the load will be too heavy for one player to bear. Just as often, you yourself will be the weak link that brings on a loss, which will be made worse by the beratement you’ll receive for playing poorly. Losing will always feel bad. You can’t out-design these inevitabilities.
To be fair, Riot has made strides in finding solutions for the fixable issues, and losses now feel less like a waste of your time: in-game currency is now less tied to consistent victories, and more to your first victory on each day you play. Riot also made a concentrated effort during the recent preseason to decrease the length of matches and make comebacks feel more achievable. I’m happy to say they’ve successfuly accomplished both of those goals.
But the damage has been done. For so long, League of Legends and its community have become such a breeding ground for toxicity and profound gamer rage that it feels like nearly every game, bar those you play with real-life friends include some kind of beratement either at your expense or someone else’s.
The rich thing here is that so few of those incentives I mentioned above are relevant in URF. But the combination of the frustrating randomness of URF and the long relationship with toxicity this community has means that even comedic game modes are not free from the unpleasant atmosphere found elsewhere in the game. League has become a game that is un-fun to play because of the people who play it.
The really fascinating thing about URF, though, is that it burns players out on League of Legends. That’s not just my opinion, either — in a developer blog post last year, Riot game designers ‘Cactopus’ and ‘Ghostcrawler’ said that they see unusually high rates of players leaving the game after URF goes away.
“Every time we ran regular URF, we’d see a huge spike of games being played, and then the numbers actually dropped back down to a level that’s lower than it was just before we ran URF,” they wrote.
That’s right: After URF is turned off, player numbers in League of Legends drop below what they were before URF was turned on. The blog attributes part of the spike during URF to old players returning to try out the mode, but admits that they don’t yet understand why numbers drop so low afterwards, and are looking for ways to make the mode healthier for player growth.
Perhaps that’s why they’ve kept URF around so long this time — If they keep it up for over a month, the novelty will wear off and burnout will decrease. Alternatively, maybe returning players will be motivated to try out other game modes since URF is around for so long that they don’t have to worry about missing it.
So, the hypothesis I’m presenting in this piece is that the reason URF causes such burnout is because it is “Ultra Rapid Fire” in every sense of the word: Not only does it let you play the game in turbo mode, but it also hits you at top speed with all the latent problems League of Legends faces in both its game design and community.
In the end, URF has lost some of its charm, in my opinion. But I do appreciate it for the deeper look into the game it’s provided me. Despite this piece, I really do enjoy League of Legends. I love watching the pros play it each weekend at the LCS, and have led coverage on collegiate esports in Columbia, Missouri. I’ve dumped more hours into League of Legends than I have with any game I’ve ever played. But today, I find myself struggling to find motivation to open it up unless I can play it with my close friends.
