ARAM is a weird beast. If you imagine a game of SR or even TT, the hope is that your individual skill has a big impact on the outcome of the game. There are factors other than your skill at play however, including things like the somewhat random effect of who you’ll get as teammates and how well you gel as a team. In ARAM, these “other factors” have a huge impact on your success rate because which champion you and the other players get can massively affect the outcome. This is the part of ARAM that some ARAM enthusiasts find really fun—you never really know what’s going to happen.

Additionally, we spend far less effort balancing champions for ARAM than we do for SR. Part of this is just a question of focus. We view SR as the core League of Legends experience and spend most our bandwidth on balancing it. But it is also an acknowledgement that in ARAM, whether you succeed or fail is often a lot more out of your control, so even achieving a high degree of game balance can only improve the game so much.

For these two reasons, we worry that ranked ARAM just asks players to take ARAM more seriously, which could be a really frustrating experience. The urge to dodge might go through the roof for example.

All of that said, while we’re focused a lot on improving the ranked experience this year, one of the questions we’re exploring for the future is whether League needs to offer more of a sense of progression for players who don’t play a lot of ranked. While leveling is uncapped now, and we have features like champion mastery, overall there isn’t much that a player who plays mostly Normals (including ARAM) can choose to focus on. They don’t really have a journey the way a ranked player can shoot for ending the season with a higher rank. Maybe that’s okay—maybe Normal players don’t need and aren’t looking for an end game in the same way. But the requests we get for things like competitive ARAM (or “look, this player is good at this mode” from the original question) maybe suggests that some players are.