The League of Legends devs have announced that the limited-time Arena mode will be receiving double the amount of bans in Patch 14.12, going from eight to sixteen.
League of Legends‘ Arena game mode will be receiving a massive quality-of-life buff in Patch 14.12. Instead of the usual eight blind bans, players will be given 16 blind bans instead. The reasoning behind this change is that the devs want to prevent the meta from becoming too “stagnant”, and believe many of the bans will double up anyhow.
Arena’s most recent iteration sees eight teams of two fight it out against each other, with new items, augments, and a new map to fight in, it’s clear the devs have put in a lot of effort in revamping the mode.
Riot has continued to balance the mode even further, with Patch 14.12 introducing a set of changes that includes item reverts, various buffs and nerfs as well as double the amount of bans per team.
Arena 14.12 Preview!Overall– After the sustain oriented nerfs last patch, we're feeling pretty good about class balance across the board and are at the point where we're relatively happy with the systems and start chipping down outliers on both the buff and nerf sides– Would…
— Matt Leung-Harrison (@RiotPhroxzon) June 5, 2024
Lead gameplay designer Riot Phroxzon took to Twitter to explain the changes.
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“After reviewing Live behavior, we think we can go up to 16 bans as we suspect a bunch of these will be duplicates and it’s a feature that’s been widely requested from the community.”
This means that each team will have two bans, allowing them to cut down the champion pool significantly, removing powerful characters like Illaoi and Brand. The devs have not stated if one ban will go to each teammate, or if only one player on the team will decide both bans.
With Arena’s sheer popularity as a mode, Riot’s willingness to continually balance it may indicate good signs for the game mode’s permanency, which is still being tossed up depending on how it performs. You can expect these new changes to drop on 12 June 2024, with Patch 14.12.