League of Legends Design Lead Talks Tracking Summoner Spell Cooldowns

League of Legends players can easily track the respawn times of certain jungle monsters like the Red and Blue Buffs as well as the neutral objectives, but some players have questioned why the same logic isn't applied to Summoner Spells.

The suggestion to make enemy Summoner Spell cooldowns visible and trackable via the scoreboard isn't one that's unheard of, but after reaching out to a member of Riot Games' team, a League player's question received a response from Jo "Fearless" Graylock, design lead for game systems in League of Legends.

"A few years ago, riot decided to reveal jungle buff timers and do away with the need to track their timers," the tumblr user's question began. "The reasoning for this was to keep players playing against each other instead of against the game itself. Why isn't this same logic applied to summoner spells? Players track summoner spells the same way they tracked jungle buffs, and there's a similar burden in tracking them via chat. When an enemy uses a summoner in your vision, why not add the timer to the scoreboard?"

Regarding the suggestion, the Rioter began by saying that he is "not personally convinced that all timers should be shown in the game" and added that revealing timers should be decided on by a case-by-case basis rather than a blanket judgement. Riot Fearless pointed out that having jungle timers visible does reduce some of the skill difference in the game, but added that it's led to more exciting play since the change was made. Any jungler or teammate who has pinged an enemy's buffs and made their way into enemy lines to carry out a potential invade instead of farming as usual in lane can likely attest to this statement.

But when it comes to Summoner Spells, Riot Fearless pointed out that there are more factors at play than there are when tracking respawns of jungle monsters.

"For summoners specifically, giving out the exact timers gives out a lot more information than most other timers. Summoner cooldowns vary a lot more from summoner to summoner, and are affected by items and runes. There's a lot of knowledge tests that we undercut by giving exact timings, and some of the power of the content that changes those timings is the ability to sneakily change the tempo of a champion's summoner usage. I'd argue that it's much less clear that exposing exact timings would be beneficial to the game."

Riot Fearless addresses players' questions about game balance and other League topics on tumblr from time to time, another of which was one about the new anti-shield item that's being worked on. To keep up with more questions and answers like these, keep an eye on Riot Fearless' tumblr and Twitter accounts.