Riot admits that League of Legends' new jungle timers make the game too easy

League of Legends has a long old history with third-party applications. I remember the days of Curse Voice, before Riot eventually went on to develop League's in-client voice chat system. As time's gone on, these external services became more sophisticated, feeding you all the information you could ever need to dominate the Rift. The long-running point of contention here has been the advantage players get for using the likes of Porofessor and Blitz over those who don't, creating an environment where it was almost a necessity to download a tool to ensure parity. With the latest LoL patch, 25.17, Riot sought to level the playing field by introducing native jungle timers. However, its own iteration of the feature appears to have overshot the mark.

Jungling is arguably the most information-heavy role in League of Legends. The further up the LoL ranks you get, concepts like jungle tracking become crucial for getting the upper hand on your opposing PvE enjoyer. As is endemic to many of the best MOBAs, League is already a tough game to learn the intricacies of, let alone master.

Of the litany of features made available by third-party apps, jungle timers are possibly the most helpful, as they make jungling a far more approachable role. In my mind, jungle diff shouldn't be decided based on who can store the most information in their brain mid-match. Rather, it should be based on who makes better decisions with the info they have when it comes to clear pathing, gank timing, and setting up for objectives.

Though I greatly appreciate Riot's approach to the third-party conundrum, opting to give everyone timers rather than overloading our mental bandwidth by outlawing them, the launch version of the feature is a bit overzealous in its execution. This is because, in its current iteration, you can get full-length enemy jungle camp timers, even if you didn't see the camp get taken.

This is perfectly illustrated by League stalwart Nick 'LS' De Cesare in an X post criticizing the system. Here, we see LS and his allied Ryze invade the enemy jungle. Though Ryze never saw enemy Raptors get taken, the game still provides an exact cooldown time. From this, LS is able to easily extrapolate his opponent's whereabouts, eventually disrupting their clear. As LS acknowledges, this particular instance likely would've happened without the timer, and he likely would've checked enemy Red Buff regardless. It highlights that the issue isn't so much in the existence of the timer. Rather, the problem lies in how long it is.

A couple of minutes is a long time in League. The difference between a two-minute timer, which accurately pinpoints that a jungler was recently there, and a thirty-second timer in terms of tracking precision is substantial. Between these baselines, the jungler may have opted to skip camps to set up a lane gank, counter-invade, or base for items. League of Legends' balance team lead Matt 'Phroxzon' Leung-Harrison understands this, and, responding to LS, notes that the team is already planning to tweak its approach.

"In 25.18, we will be dramatically reducing the information that you get from spotting dead camps," Phroxzon says. "It's possible we might hotfix it, but the team's engineering resources are currently very tied up, and the number of players who take extreme advantage of this info is quite small (will at least discuss with the team).

"We're still deliberating on the right level of information to show for this. Pre-25.17, many overlays showed up to one minute pre-spawn, whereas our native overlay showed up to ten seconds. We'll probably end up somewhere in the middle."

Though there's an initial worry that cutting down the timers will simply see players rush back to third-party apps, Riot stated in the 25.17 patch notes that it's updating its third-party app policy to put a leash on external tools. "Exposing information that's intentionally obfuscated" is already a violation as part of the ToS, so once Riot cements its approach to timers, I'm expecting that to become the standard across the board.

If you're looking for that competitive edge out on the Rift, consult our LoL tier list to see who's dominating the meta. Additionally, peep the latest LoL Mythic shop rotation to see which shiny cosmetics you can currently add to your collection.

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