Hey Dudes!

A little over a month ago, a number of developers and I participated in Riot’s first ever Thunderdome – a periodic, companywide event aimed at allowing developers to work on whatever they want. My team set out to make the Proving Grounds, our basic tutorial map, playable as full on 5v5. This is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I originally worked on the map, and with the help of some other devs (and a good bit of caffeine) we managed to get everything up and running. Everyone was pretty happy with how the effort turned out, and with the upcoming removal of Winter Summoner’s Rift we saw an opportunity to sneak the new map out by repurposing the same UI hooks.

In the next patch, the Proving Grounds map will be selectable in custom games. While we’ve been playtesting it internally as All Random (and lovin’ it) for quite some time now, all the pick options will be available – Blind Pick, Draft, and All Random – because we’re excited to see what variation you enjoy the most. We’d love to hear any feedback that you may have, as both RiotNome and myself will be providing support post release. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Fellow Rioters who helped me sneak this out:
Bigbadabruin
chunkface
Drevarius
Kilmourz
RiotNome
Ponts
positron7
Riot Taco Storm
RiotTroyzilla
subninja
Veigar

EDIT: Hey guys, I want to give you a quick update on this. While we still plan to ship the assets for the Proving Grounds custom game mode with the next patch, we will not have it enabled on patch day. Very late in the cycle some concerns with platform stability arose, so we're going to delay turning it on for a few days to iron that out. My apologies! It will still be playable on the PBE in the mean time.

WOW! Omg thank you!

Best team ever! Thanks for supporting the community!

neat

Gonna be exciting to test this feature out!
Btw, you're my favorite champion designer.

Best news I have heard in months, GG RIOT!!!!

This is amazing, I really hope that you guys are given the freedom to work on whatever else you guys feel like making in the future. Everyone always does their best working on things that are genuinely interesting to them.

On a side note, I would love it if this new map had an option to keep track of people who dodged at champ select. Would make ARAMs a lot more enjoyable.

Thank you guys

Good job on that, that might sound wrong, but i really do hope that you had fun making that map suit ARAM purposes. I am actually quite excited, as the ARAM game mode was always something i loved to play. Cheers for you and Riot team, you deserve to get drunk (or eat tons of sweets if you are more into it)