American League of Legends esports caster Clayton ‘CaptainFlowers’ Raines has asked Riot Games to ban third-party apps with in-game overlays.
This comes after Riot decided third-party apps can’t show advertisements to LoL players in loading screens, the client, and in-game.
CaptainFlowers then responded, asking for those types of apps to be banned for good: “Please just kill in-game overlays altogether.
“Tracking summoner spells, ults, and jungle camps is part of player skill and if automation of those things isn’t included in the base game, it shouldn’t be allowed at all.”
Currently, many apps add timers on screen, even on minimaps, to show things like how long until jungle camps respawn.
Riot responds to League of Legends third-party apps tracking timers
As CaptainFlowers mentioned, he and many others feel that these apps give players an unfair advantage in solo queue.
Some of this has already been directly addressed by Riot Games, as LoL’s head of product, Drew Lewin, pointed out.
Back in March, Riot forced third-party apps to remove any timers that could track enemy ultimate cooldowns.
This was ruled to be different to summoner spell and jungle camp timers as those examples have set cooldowns, whereas ultimates vary with each champion and with itemisation.
CaptainFlowers was happy to hear about this change, claiming it was a good move for competitive integrity.
However, Levin conceded LoL still has inconsistencies on this subject and internal conversations are ongoing at Riot to resolve this.
The game now has built-in tools to track certain things, like spawn timers for Dragons, Baron, and even blue buff.
Before skill pings, players would type in chat when an opponent burned flash and do the math themselves.
But the game has come a long way since then, with League of Legends Patch 25.11 recently releasing with updates to the new Brawl mode and automated behavioural system.
In my seven years of esports writing, I’ve introuduced esports coverage to newspapers, interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry, and driven viewers mad with the puns in my YouTube scripts. I’m most proud of the latter.
