Official statement on "One for All" Mode

Update: Added in some more relevant discussion! Enjoy.
Brackhar has posted a statement regarding the recent wave of custom games allowing summoner's to use 5 of the same champion vs 5 of another champion, named "One for All" mode internally.

While early access to it will be disabled later this week, he notes that it will be the first of many experimental game modes that will cycle in and out of availability as part of a new initiative to make "unique short-lived experiences that we'll release regularly". He also notes we'll see it along with other new features again before the end of the year.

Continue reading for more information!


Here's Brackhar with the details:

"Hey All! 

By this point many of you have likely heard about the craziness of duplicate champions going on in custom games right now (and for those that haven't, check this video: http://youtu.be/fES4xl2namY). While we weren't expecting players to be able to play this yet, the response has been pretty awesome so I wanted to pull the curtain back and chat about what this means. 

For the past few months, there's been a team at Riot creating original, experimental game modes for players to check out. The duplicate champion mode - we call it One For All internally - is the first mode from that effort we'll be sharing with you in the future. Featured game modes are intended to be unique short-lived experiences that we'll release regularly, and we're really excited by the possibilities. Cycling new modes will let us work with you guys to create new experiences that would have been difficult to do as permanent game features, and it gives us free reign to go mildly crazy. Also, cycling new modes in and out will allow us to keep these things fresh and focused from a gameplay perspective. 

One For All will be a great launch mode and, as a designer, my mind's already looking to future possibilities. What types of game modes would you like to see? Our team wants to make this a very open development process, and your feedback will be incredibly important in informing what modes we should pursue and what others should be shelved. We're extremely excited to work with you guys over the coming months, and I can't wait to see what fun, unique experiences we'll be able to create together. 

As for One For All... if you couldn't tell, it's currently incomplete and still has a number of bugs associated with it, so we'll be disabling the workaround that allows access to it later this week. That said, if you got the chance to try it (or if you've got some ideas on it), feel free to give us some feedback - and let me know who the OP champions are, so my team can finally win some of our internal playtests! 

Contrary to earlier implications, no one has been banned for playing this game mode nor will anyone be banned for playing during the remainder of the time it is accessible. One For All will be making its reappearance before the new year with a bunch of new features (including matchmaking!), so you won't have to wait too long before you see it again. 

In the meantime, have fun! Try out Fiddlesticks if you haven't: five Fiddles is one of the scariest things I think I've ever seen. It's just... birds all day."

He continued, responding to someone requesting more custom game options rather than  these new modes:

"It's definitely something we considered, but for the moment we thought that focusing the team around singular, bigger game modes would be more of a win in the end. One For All has taken a lot of work for us to get up and running, especially on the scripting side, and without focused effort like that it may never have happened. "

He continued on that point, comparing the "worth" of being able to tinker with settings vs a new mode to enjoy:

"It's mostly a question of cost versus the size of our team, and our team currently doesn't have the resources to do both of these at the same. I'd love to do both, but for now we decided that things like One For All would be more exciting for you guys than being able to adjust the starting gold in the game."

He also reiterated that no one has been banned for things relating to the "One for All" mode:

"I talked with every lead I could find and we've not banned anyone in relation to this issue."

While I won't share each of them, he also gave a few nods to other game mode ideas and encouraged summoners to share more.

On all these idea, he noted Riot's intent to find these fun game modes not something permanent:

"We're definitely open to that for sure. Our goal with these isn't to find the next permanent game mode for LoL, but if we do find something opportunistically awesome then I see a possible path where that could happen."

He continued:

"Yeah, I'm just speaking for what my team is capable of doing.

As for more broadly, one of the things we pride ourselves here at Riot is listening to player feedback and responding to it. If "custom custom" games are something that you're interested in I'd encourage you to keep discussing them here on the forum and elsewhere. There's ultimately no guarantee that we'd do it, but letting it be known this is a popular and in high demand feature would be a great first step."

As for requests to allow community membersr to create these modes, he noted:

"It'd be a bit of work before we'd be able to get that far. Allowing the community to create something as hugely divergent as AoS was for Starcraft would require figuring out how to let players use a map editor and then get other people to play with said map. Given that we use a split client/server architecture that's an extremely challenging issue - keep in mind that W3 shipped the code for both client and server to everyone, so that was a different problem space."

He also agreed with the comparison tot the mutation queue in Left for Dead 2:

"Yeah, the L4D2 mutation queue is a good analogy for what we're doing. The big difference is we want to generally do some bigger game modes than happened there, and that'll in turn mean the cycle will be a bit slower to bring games in and out."