League of Legends 25.17 native jungle timers criticised, Riot plans changes in 25.18
League of Legends, developed by Riot Games, added native jungle timers in patch 25.17, and the feature landed this week to mixed reactions. Riot already says it will reduce what the timers show in 25.18, following community examples that suggested the overlay provided too much tracking information.
Jungling is an information-heavy role, and third-party apps long supplied timers that helped players predict camp respawns. Riot’s goal with the native overlay was to achieve parity across the player base, but the current implementation can display full-length enemy camp timers even when a player has never seen a camp taken, which allows opponents to infer whereabouts with little effort.
One clear example comes from a post by analyst Nick ‘LS’ De Cesare showing a case where allied vision and an allied invasion produced a full cooldown on enemy Raptors despite no direct sighting; that cooldown made it trivial to guess a jungler’s position. Is that fair? Well, the shot across the bow was enough for Riot to respond publicly.
https://twitter.com/LSXYZ9/status/1961085582601547888
Matt ‘Phroxzon’ Leung-Harrison, lead of the balance team, commented that the studio will “dramatically reduce the information that you get from spotting dead camps” in 25.18 and may hotfix sooner if engineering capacity allows. The team says it is debating how much info to show, noting that overlays before 25.17 commonly showed up to one minute pre-spawn while Riot’s native overlay showed up to ten seconds at launch.
X and Bluesky are both good places to post quick reactions and follow-up threads.
