Riot Games

April Fools’ Day is a time of pranks and laughs, but Riot Games is no longer laughing. Riot, the creator of League of Legends, released a new game mode called Ultra Rapid Fire (URF) as a joke on April 1, 2014. The joke backfired when people demanded the game mode remain permanently available.

Riot Games took away URF, which outraged the players, but it returned on April 1 of this year, and even faster paced.Riot Games

There are no mana or energy costs. You are free to use whatever abilities you like, and almost as rapidly as you would like, with cooldown reduction set automatically at 80%. Additionally, movement speed was increased, tenacity increased, critical strike damage upped by 25%, and attack speed doubled.

There are other surprises within URF, such as your health and damage being multiplied by 1,000. When you look at your death recap, or damage statistics, it refers to the damage done to you or others as “TONS OF DAMAGE.” Another is a ward skin that changes your sight wards to little manatees, or the 99,999 RP Icon featuring a golden spatula.

Since URF is a low-stakes game that was created for fun, people are much friendlier and play URF purely to have fun. There is no “you’re feeding,” or “y do u suk so bad omg” messages flying back and forth through the chat logs. People play the game to actually enjoy themselves.

Amidst the fun and games, there have been frustrations. Some champions such as Hecarim, Lux, and Sona have low cooldowns originally, so with the 80% cooldown reduction, it makes them very frustrating to play against. They are often banned during the champion select phase.

Though there have been hundreds of messages to Riot Games asking them to keep URF, Riot is putting their foot down and saying no, or at least not right now.

“… We’re investigating the potential of bringing them back on a shorter rotation cadence. We’re not sure what this could look like yet but, it’s something we’re considering,” L4T3NCY, a Riot designer, said.

Many players have made suggestions such as “URF Fridays,” and bringing it back every ten days. Another said to “punish” the nasty players with URF matches. Why? Because URF is so much fun that it is impossible to be angry while playing.

Unfortunately, URF was taken down on April 13th, at 2am PDT.

I hope you acquired your 99,999 RP Icon in time!