In a blog post over the weekend, Riot Games confirmed that a single-player “practice tool” for League of Legends is in the works. Initial features will include infinite Gold, the ability to reset your own cooldowns, to lock your level, and to freeze minion spawns. More features may be added as Riot continue to tweak the new training mode.
This is going to change everything. Check out our own Matt Purslow’s struggle to learn League of Legends without a practice tool.
Riot say their priorities are to make the tool “inclusive to people at every level”, with practising map movement and learning each champion’s mechanics valuable to all players, regardless of skill. Multiplayer training and team drills, however, are not the focus – or at least, not at first. Once the first version is ready, Riot promise to iterate further.
That this mode will be added at all is a reversal of Riot’s position a year ago, when they insisted that a “sandbox mode is not the way to go.” However, the League community has been requesting a practice tool for some time now, and push-back against this view was firm. Riot changed their minds, and here we are.
The announcement has been received with a mixture of pleasure and wry humour by the community, with a tongue-in-cheek Reddit thread complaining that if Riot keep listening like this, players will soon run out of things to grouse about via memes:
Alas for Reddit, this meme-squashing is deliberate; Riot say “Season 2017 is about us getting good at delivering on long-awaited promises,” and Justin got the chance to sit down with Riot’s founderslast month to discuss exactly this process. Sandbox/practice mode won’t be the only incoming change; look out for replays and a new client, coming soon.