Why ARAM makes you a better League of Legends player.
And why it may not, a complex in-between…
I. Introduction and stakes
ARAM players are a part of the League of Legends community that may be incredibly diverse, playing for various reasons. The decreased competition, which has been the object of a game design study [1], “designed to introduce casualness into competitive gaming”, is thought to reduce toxicity. And veterans themselves recognize to still play the game through this game mode [2] — meaning for Riot Games, they’re still customers the skins and other microtransaction services may attract.
There are actually two ARAM (All Random All Mid) versions currently playable, but Riot Games often mixes things up, including the free champion pool every player has access to, changing the metagame ever so slightly.
Mayhem is more casual and removes the need to learn how runes function at the cost of random augments, privileging tactics over strategy, favoring emerging builds. There’s a keen breakdown of League’s ARAM random number generation, showing its weighted nature [3, thought experiment!]:
“In the case of ARAM, the population is the set of champions that a player owns, and uniform random selection only holds if the probability of choosing any champion from that pool is equal.”
Still, there are reasons playing ARAM will increase your League skills, making you grow transferrable competences.
Addendum: in Mayhem specifically, you get to draw mostly 2 champions, one you can pick and the other going to the bench, but there’s a 5%+(0,15*owned champions) chance to get the third blessed card. [7]
“This means if you own all 172 champions, you have a 30,8% chance of pulling the third blessed card.”
- Not only for making impressive plays.
- Or to secure kills.
- But also to master different kits!
- And finally get team composition matchups.
So without more ado, here’s a breakdown of how ARAM will actually make you thrive in League.
II. ARAM alone won’t cut it
First off, you won’t. More specifically, League of Legends is like chess, and ARAM is bullet chess. It goes faster, optimizes regenerations and gold rates, and reduces greatly the cognitive load of each games by having a single lane — therefore it’s not a concrete simulation of Summoner’s Rift!
At the same time, do you really want to play the entire game? There is a time investment to the OG experience, as another study shows [4]:
“For instance, in the ARAM game […], closer combats begin to take place right from the start of a game due to its compact setting, and it tends to take longer time to create a opportunity to fight through. On the contrary, since the classic maps require distribution of teammates […] a kill becomes easier as it is done through a one-on-one combat”
To keep up this analogy, ARAM makes you good at gauging simplified dynamics of a game state (ie. we should push to the inhibitor… I should temporize under turret…, such standardized calls).
Furthermore, ARAM strengthens the need to fight together as a team, and therefore to understand the fundamentals of team fights. That to each role in the tank-DPS-support trinity may be mapped characters (NOT accounting for hybrid champions/emergent builds), and focusing squishies is a strong strategy.
Thus, it is instinctive neuron pathways that are reinforced. Something like mechanics, or gauging the squishies or tankies before engaging, things of the nature that are applicable in a sanitized midlane 5v5 teamfight.
However, what you won’t learn is all the rest:
- How to perform in your lane or jungle;
- Where to ward and at what timing;
- Teamfights with terrain, champ-specific interactions with it (Mordekaiser for instance, but also Poppy with her stun);
- How to counter-jungle, to position to pressure a gank;
- Or steal objectives and snowball from there.
There’s a lot of facets to League and some are inherent to the format associated with Summoner’s Rift.
III. Adapting to ARAM is itself a transferrable skill
I mentioned that some skills were specific to Summoner’s Rift, and thus that you couldn’t get better at all of League from ARAM alone. There’s people out there talking about bronze players with Faker mechanics…
But ARAM isn’t monolithic, and has a surprising amount of variety. Adapting to it is part of learning League of Legends as a system. Cracking this code lets you gain a new perspective on the game, an approach to expand on for any meta-shaping patch like Atakhan brought about…
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There’s rhythm to the madness. You’re not meant to take it all at once. Actually, a paper [5] shows spaced learning is better:
“Research has shown that one […] aspect of effective skill learning is the temporal distribution of practice episodes (i.e., distributed practice). Using a large […] sample of players (n = 162,417) […] we analysed the relationship between practice distribution and performance through time. We compared groups of players who exhibited different play schedules […] to show that players who cluster gameplay into shorter time frames ultimately achieve lower performance levels than those who space their games across longer time windows. [… The] timing of intensive play periods does not affect final performance [… it’s] spacing that matters.”
But some of the specificities of ARAM include: “executing” after 15–20 seconds out of a fight, to back without giving opponents gold or experience; hiding in specific spots to reduce your own visibility to ambush enemies; familiarizing yourself with your available champion pool; expanding it strategically…
Here’s a way you can learn to think of ARAM as several parts, as tiny steps to climb to become a better-rounded player. “ARAM God” is the best title you can have, but to unlock it you will need to succeed at intermediary steps, that will give you tokens and titles along the way. This can be a good thing to aim at, not to mention the chance to complete global achievements that may be possible to achieve through focusing on ARAM, such as possession of champions thanks to new unlocks.
Consider the following argument. Admitting you’ve unlocked either Sylas or Viego, or they wind up being champions in the free pool. The ultimate Sylas has allows him to steal other champions’ ultimates. Viego’s passive lets dead enemies become champions he can control, stealing health, items and the basic kit with the exception of the ultimate, gaining a free own ultimate.
Both champions’ total value is very dependent on your enemies’ team composition, your ability to read it and see what good champions can be stolen from. For Viego specifically, as a bruiser/assassin type you may need to kill enemies to steal their kits, adding to the skill ceiling. They’re both strong cases emphasizing the way the sanitized ARAM environment may help you better learn their kits, along the kits of other champions. They do allow interesting emergent behaviors and interactions at a far higher rate.
Champions like Shaco and Neeko also contribute to the chaos ARAM means, with clones for one and hiding passive for the other, participating to emerging behaviors and interactions. In their ways, they let you explore the game in deconstructed, fragmented ways, to reshape a cohesive ensemble.
IV. The bad habits of ARAM
If you thought we were done, not yet. We’ve seen some of the pros and cons of ARAM, but only what you don’t train for when you do choose to go All Random All Mid. Not the bad habits… That is to say, negative traits you may develop if you try to bring a mindset shaped by specific conditions into other systems, hoping the translation will perfectly map.
Think about it. Timingwise everything’s streamlined! You start ARAM, at least Mayhem with a hefty sum, all three skills unlocked. This means you get to be able to poke, fight, get out of difficult situations quite fast. Whereas laning can get excruciating.
- Depending on the match-up, you can end up alone with no gank (even in botlane);
- Losing due to slow-scaling;
- Lower range than the enemy;
- Them receiving jungler attention (attractive squishie target alone)…
This makes players want to engage in battling right away, not consider mechanics like wave-clearing or management. Not to mention being mixed with casual players that don’t share your dedication to the cause. People may ping less, assuming that everyone being on a lane and having no structuring, timed objectives like Drakes, the aforementioned and gone Atakhan, Baron, Voidgrubs means there’s suddenly no need to call shots — or be receptive to that of others. When you’re running down nexus alley, people start to… just stop pushing.
Your champion pooling instincts (those you unlock for a potential teammate you often play with, or for roles in Summoner’s Rift you don’t play, but that are quite fun in ARAM) get desynchronized from traditional game roles. Laners and junglers evolved with the game to be constructed specifically for Summoner’s Rift. Instead you only think compositions for teamfights. Out of terrain complexity! And game rhythms! Such as when a tower is gone botlane, and there’s a rotation for the ADC to midlane.
For instance, going into ARAM I was primarily a support player, notably because I prefer to play League with other people, like my girlfriend. My level is not the best out there, being level 37, but I did obtain the Lady of Luminosity Lux-specific title for a level of 10 in the mastery of the champion. I also liked playing Sona. Shield is apparently reduced for Sona, not to mention healing that’s halved for everyone.
But ARAM has no place for warding, therefore it’s one skill I’m not working on. Same goes for vision with one skill in Ashe’s kit that’s almost useless… Or is it? Don’t you need visibility sometimes to check on a brush, that going directly into as a squishie would be normally be akin to suicide? Well, the chaotic nature of ARAM lets you be creative and emergent…
But it is true that ARAM is more casual [1, 2] and another article [6] puts it differently (wherein you’re supposed to show sports(wo)manship):
“The custom game space offered no means of enforcing the player created rules onto players and instead relied upon a tacit agreement between players or ‘honour rules’ (2) in upholding the player generated rules. Reminiscent of the exploratory play Jenkins (2004) describes whereby play is a test of limitations through the act of exploring the surroundings; the creation of these games is in many ways a digital equivalent.”
V. Concluding
We’ve seen in the introduction that there are several reasons people play League of Legends, whether Summoner’s Rift, ARAM or other modes. Some want reduced toxicity, others lower stakes, and you, if you’re still there, you want a way to progress at the game. In the first part, it was why using ARAM to get better at Summoner’s Rift couldn’t work entirely, due to being streamlined for a faster pacing, and reducing the game’s complexity. Then in the second part, we took a look at how learning ARAM — as its own subset of the League experience — could make you a better player due to adaptation (trying out different kits, basic positioning, gauging team compositions…). The third part was about adding nuance, by explaining that some habits could happen, out of playing exclusively ARAM, dissociating your knowledge of League of Legends from specificities like found in Summoner’s Rift (warding, objectives, lanes…).
VI. References
[1] Conference proceedings. “Casual Competition by Design: A Study of the All Random All Mid (ARAM) Mode in League of Legends”, Zinan Zhang and Yubo Kou, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 8, Issue CSCW2: CSCW, November 8th, 2024. https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3686992
[2] Thread. “Aram is what keeps me quitting from this game”, u/3mastercpo5, r/ARAM, Reddit, August 23rd, 2025. https://www.reddit.com/r/ARAM/comments/1mxywjt/aram_is_what_keeps_me_quitting_from_this_game/
[3] Article. “Is Riot’s “Random” ARAM Algorithm Giving You Worse Champions in League of Legends?”, Riley Howsden, Medium, April 5th, 2021. https://deceitfuldata.medium.com/is-riots-random-aram-algorithm-giving-you-worse-champions-in-league-of-legends-c7e5b2a8f152
[4] Article. “Game Time:” Not Too Much, Nor Too Little””, Xuemeng Yao, Macalester College, Sociology Honors Projects. 58, May 1st, 2019. https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/soci_honors/58/
[5] Article. “Mind the gap: Distributed practice enhances performance in a MOBA game”, Ozan Vardal, Valerio Bonometti, Anders Drachen, Alex Wade, Tom Stafford, PLoS ONE 17(10): e0275843, October 14th, 2022. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0275843
[6] Article. “Custom rules, custom content: Zombies, ARAM and paidiac innovation”, Josh Jarrett, Jjarr, October 15th, 2014. https://jjarr.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/custom-rules-custom-content/
[7] Video. “How to play ARAM Mayhem (How do augments work?) — League of Legends”, Jeeker, YouTube, February 21th, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts9l8xjkRZE
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