For this week’s critical play I’ve played League of Legends – specifically, the ARAM: Mayhem mode on my mac. League of legends was developed and published by Riot games and released in 2009 – the ARAM: Mayhem mode is fairly new, released October last year. The game is available on Windows and Mac, and the game is intended for mature audiences of age over 13 due to its fantasy violence, mild language and online interactions.
[Figure 1. ARAM: Mayhem is a popular new mode in League!!]
In my first ARAM Mayhem game, I rolled Rumble — an AP champion whose ultimate (the Equalizer) hits hard but has a brutal cooldown. My first two augments spiked my damage to absurd levels (ADAPt – convert AD to AP and +15%; Phenomenal Evil – stack AP per skill hit). however, we kept losing teamfights because my Equalizer was on cooldown (over a minute). Then the third augment dropped: Eureka – Gain ability haste equal to 30% of your AP — and since my AP was skyrocketing, I got significant ability haste that dropped the cooldown of my ultimate by almost 70%. From that point on, I was spamming Equalizer every 20 seconds – and the game was basically unloseable. This was an interesting moment because it was kind of a “jackpot” feeling, in a game I don’t normally think of as a slot machine. League of Legends: ARAM Mayhem mode shows that use of chance in games is permissible only if the chance is non-deceptive and it isn’t weaponized as an extraction tool.
[Figure 2. My first game – I rolled rumble and carried with it.]
In ARAM Mayhem mode, chance is deeply embedded in the game’s central mechanics. To begin with, champion selection is itself a roll — you can’t pick a champion, only choose among a randomly drawn pool. As the game progresses, you’re offered four sets of three randomly drawn armaments, each with a single reroll. Every armament modifies your champion’s capabilities, and its value depends heavily on your role: Celestial Body, for example, grants 1500 health and 10% damage reduction, which suits tanks far better than damage-dealers. Most champion-armament pairings produce ordinary games, but certain combinations are absolutely game-breaking, and players quickly learn to scan their offerings for these synergies. The dynamic this creates mirrors a slot machine almost exactly: you’re pulling, hoping for something massive, and most of the time you don’t get it — but the rare hit is so dopaminergic that it reshapes the entire session around chasing it. What makes Mayhem more addictive than standard League is exactly this volatility. Regular Summoner’s Rift compresses variance — skill dominates, games trend toward your true level, highs are gradual. Mayhem inverts the architecture: high variance is the point. Most rolls produce noise, occasional jackpot games define the experience, and the asymmetry between forgettable losses and unforgettable wins is the same mechanism that gives slot machines their retention power.
[Figure 3. Screen capture of armament selection from another game – players can choose from 3 random armaments each with a single reroll.]
In this case, should ARAM Mayhem be criticized for its usage of chance in its mechanics just like how slot machines are criticized in the provided reading? Comparing Mayhem to other chance-based games reveals which design choices push chance into harmful territory. Two failure modes stand out. The first is deception — the hiding of real odds from players. Slot machines are the classic case: virtual reel mapping, near-miss clustering, and the carefully preserved feel of mechanical handles conceal a chance system calibrated against the player. The player sees spinning reels but not the weighted virtual reels behind them. Mayhem’s chance design is the opposite. You can see the full armament pool, know the rerolls are random, and the broken synergies players discover emerge from gameplay rather than engineered odds. Mayhem fails the deception test far less severely than slots. The second failure mode is extraction — using chance to siphon money. Gacha games like Genshin Impact are the cleanest example: chance is the purchase mechanism, and each roll directly extracts revenue. Mayhem doesn’t do this — no per-roll payment, no chance-gated content. A useful counterexample is friendly poker, where chance carries voluntary stakes between peers, no system designer profits, and chance functions as the medium of play rather than the mechanism of extraction. Chance plus stakes isn’t inherently corrupt. Even within LoL, Mayhem sits low on the stakes axis: no ranked ladder, no LP losses, no permanent record. You can drop in to play.
The complication is that Mayhem participates in indirect extraction. The mode itself is free, but its addictiveness extends time spent in League of Legends, which funnels into Riot’s skin monetization. The chance mechanic doesn’t take your money directly — it takes your time, and the time eventually meets a skin shop. This is the central tension in the defense of Mayhem: it avoids direct chance-based monetization but participates in an engagement architecture whose endpoint is monetary. Less extractive than gacha, but not fully clean.
[Figure 4. LoL’s skin shop – the more you play the game, the more you’re swayed to purchace one of these – which is exactly what Riot aims for.]
Returning to that Rumble game: the dopamine surge of rolling Eureka wasn’t accidental — it was the engineered payoff of a system tuned for high-variance moments, the same architecture casinos profit from. Mayhem just extracts time rather than money, and the time meets the skin shop one layer removed. Permissible? Yes. Blameless? Not quite.
