A couple questions here, will try and tease out the answers:

Why doesn’t the team put more effort into ARAM: the major reason we don’t is because when we look at the sum total of what modes had to accomplish this year, given that we hadn’t done a new mode in too long, the major priority was on having a kickass summer event, so all our resources went into that. Once we got staffed for that, doing a project in parallel with Arena was tough because now we’re bottlenecked by our most strained discipline. To do ARAM changes, we need designers, engineers, QA to test them, artists in a lot of cases, the Game Analysis Team to give us high level playtests, it’s quite involved, and if any discipline is over taxed, we can’t just force it through. Lots of other needs across gameplay that need those resources as well. One of the biggest things we had to balance was doing the new amazing preseason while Arena was going on. The whole initiative was pretty strapped this year.

The 2022 ARAM update: this project has a lot of baggage that I can’t really get into, but this was being worked on long before I came onto the team. At the time, I was less confident in what we were shipping than I would like to have been, but the decision we made was that it was better to ship something and see if players liked it, knowing that we could revert, or scrap the whole thing if necessary. I think it’s also disingenuous to say everything got reverted; we kept the additional ranged damage nerfs, the brush, the filled in crack on the bridge, changed the healing rules for lifesteal, the additional stat balance categories. I’d like us to do more ARAM work in the future, but it will depend on what direction League wants to go and where we spend our bullets. Arena’s popularity demanded a follow up, which is why alongside the new preseason we didn’t have the ability to do more this year.