I want to preface this by saying we have no immediate large-scale plans to change ARAM, so don’t look for this to show up in one of the next patches. But I can speak a little bit about the kinds of design discussions we have about ARAM.

Overall, the game mode is popular and the queue is healthy (meaning enough players are participating that the wait for a game isn’t long), so we don’t want to do too much that might have the risk of making ARAM less popular.

That said, we don’t think the way champion assignment is working out has aged well. We aren’t fans of the ARAM accounts that some players make in order to have a more limited champion pool, since that kind of defeats the purpose. So we do discuss whether we should have the pool apply not just to owned and free champions, but to all champions (or maybe even a large subset of all champions that we cycle through over time).

Additionally, ARAM really isn’t filling the player need of having a way to play League with a shorter game length. ARAM can be short, but it can also be very long, and I’m not sure those long games really feel epic as much as just endless. ARAM can lack decisive moments that can push the game to a close. We’d love to see ARAMs that more reliably last 20-30 minutes, if we can do that without compromising the game overall.

We know there are some champions whose mechanics don’t really port over to Howling Abyss since they are designed with the Summoner’s Rift map in mind. We’re generally okay with this, because the ARAM mode in general will probably always favor some champions over others, but we do try to take steps for champions that are just ridiculously broken – Bard for instance.

It’s because of the random element that I’m not sure it makes sense to ever offer a ranked mode of ARAM. It just might be really frustrating to keep coming up with champions with whom you aren’t really familiar and lose important games, like promos. On the other hand, if we add more reroll mechanics and other systems to let you get a champion you want, then that kind of undermines the whole idea of being dealt a champion at random. It may be that the heart of ARAM just isn’t suited for ranked play without compromising what ARAM is.