LoL players slam flawed Arena mechanic: ‘What a huge oversight this is’

The newest iteration of Arena, a limited-time gamemode in League of Legends, has fans questioning why the developers forgot to add one of the game’s most important features: the ability to surrender early.

Arena got a fresh update this patch, transforming the beloved game mode into a Noxus-themed battleground complete with the latest augments, different featured cameos, and a new map. Despite this, one fan of the mode is fed up about the lack of such a basic feature.

“If my teammate is afk for 3~4 rounds, it should allow me to surrender early instead of waiting for my HP to completely run out,” the original poster commented on their Reddit thread after playing a game where their teammate left halfway through. Currently, you can’t trigger an immediate surrender in League unless your teammate loads into the game AFK.

This means that many players have teammates who suddenly disappear from their keyboards after the first round, forcing them to play out the game mode in a 1v2 scenario. One user on the thread shared a similar experience in a recent game: “I literally got a teammate named ‘I AFK Arena’. He lived up to his name.”

It seems like these players load into the game just fine, but then choose to stop playing after they roll bad augments or lose the first match. To counteract this issue, players in the thread are suggesting a plethora of different solutions to the conundrum.

The original poster would like to see a game-wide early surrender option that lets you dip out of games that aren’t going great. While this would certainly fix the AFK issue, other players think it could generate even more problems. “People would quit after getting a bad augment or item, and that would ruin the overall experience,” one gamer commented in response to the thread, adding yet another problem that the developers would have to contend with.

However, one user thought a viable solution would be for AFK players, making any non-vote from players count as a vote for surrender. This would mean that players who are actually AFK during a game would not input anything into the surrender vote, thus auto-triggering the surrender. While this solution would certainly fix most issues, there are still instances where people could pretend to be AFK just to throw games.

Overall, it seems like there isn’t one perfect solution that can fix all of these issues. Perhaps stricter punishments for players who throw Arena games are needed to dissuade players from ruining the experience for everyone else. Have people been AFKing in your Arena games? Let us know below.

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