Arena has had an exploit that Riot has addressed by adjusting the Event Pass progress.
Since Arena has released in League of Legends, players have been partaking in this game mode. Tournament of Souls was also introduced to League of Legends, adding more to the Summer Events. Also, given we have so many fighting-themed introductions, we also got the Soul Fighter Skins.
Riot picked a theme and made cosmetics, a game mode, and a meta-game. We also got a Soul Fighter Summer Event with all events. This enticed players to participate in the game mode and events more, but there was a bigger problem.
As people started looking for more ways to farm tokens and get XP quicker, they came across an exploit that vastly impacted player experience in the Arena game mode. Thus, here is what we know so far.
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What Is The Exploit?
Let’s start with what the exploit is, as Matty Love Gaming explained it pretty well in the video below.
Essentially, you can queue in Arena and get a lot of points even if you are AFK, and there are a few reasons for that. Firstly, the game mode does not have AFK Detection and such, so there are no ramifications to being AFK.
However, the biggest thing is that you get points even if lost in Arena for every minute that specific match goes on. This is not an issue for the rest of the game modes as either AFK Detections penalizes you, or you don’t get points if you have lost already while the match is going on (such as in TFT).
So, with both situations in tandem, it created a situation where players would go AFK just to farm Event XP for every minute the game went on, regardless of whether they lost or not. Thus, Riot came out with an answer to put a band-aid on it.
Riot’s Changes to Arena Event Pass Progress
Some changes were made to Arena in Patch 13.15, along with an answer to the exploit. As per Riot, these are the exact changes listed in the patch note.
- Event Pass Mission progress for Arena has been adjusted from 6 points per minute for wins and 4 points per minute for losses to a placement-based system: 6 points for 1st, 4 points for 2nd, 3 points for 3rd, and 2 points for 4th place.
The philosophy behind the changes was to limit the amount of gains people were going for being AFK. Now, this will make players do more in order to earn more points.
However, the problem still exists as Riot has not fixed the AFK Detection system for Arena and probably does not intend to do it. In their eyes, given it is a limited-time game mode. Thus, they probably do not want to go through the effort of coding and technologically upgrading Arena when it’s only going to be available for a few more weeks.
So hopefully, the points system changes will be enough to deter players from stopping Arena to being the fun game mode it should be.
