League of Legends has been out for almost four years, and there has been significant rebalancing over time, including completely redoing some champions. They have also given away champions and sold packs with many champions, such as their initial retail box. If you have played a meaningful amount of League of Legends, you probably own some champions you are not interested in playing. You do not pick them, but you may come back to them as the pendulum swings.
Cue ARAM. You now have a game mode where you will get a random champion from all the ones available to you.
This struck me as P2L (pay to lose). People buy packs or every champion as a way of paying Riot for the game, a de facto subscription fee (which reminds me of Kingdom of Loathing and monthly donations for prizes). If you get many champions, you probably have many you are not interested in playing, and you have only so many rerolls.
This has led to a new approach to P2W (pay to win) in creating accounts dedicated to ARAM. Buy only the champions that work well in ARAM. If you are willing to throw a little money at it, you can have most of the best quickly.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this. I also have the same question about low-level LoL accounts that I do about low-level WoW characters: how many of these folks around are actual new players, as opposed to smurfs/alts?
: Zubon
Regarding low level accounts, I tried to get a friend into LoL about 6 months ago so I made a low level account to play with him. The first few games it seemed at least half the other players in most games were veteran players, and sadly veterans with not much patience for newbies.
About people buying success in arams, I’m ok with that. I remember this being bought up when the howling abyss came out and one of the devs pointed out that if you do this and win a lot your hidden elo will rise and eventually make it so you’re matched with other people who have done the same thing. Have fun playing with/against exactly the same champions every single game!
ARAM balance is random-enough that I don’t think a ARAM smurf account would have that much impact. Take Nid for instance; 90% of the time she is a dominant ARAM champ, but put her against a dive bruiser team and she is fodder. Amumu is usually pretty meh in ARAM, but again on the right team can be great.
I also think most players view ARAM as a break from the ‘real’ game, so balance and winning take a back seat to playing a champ you normally don’t or playing one you know with a different build.
Edit: That said they need to add an option to sell back champs for IP, since sometimes you pick someone up and find out you just hate their playstyle.