An update on 3rd party Mods (and Curse Voice)
Hey everyone,
We wanted to give you an update on our stance on third-party mods, since it’s been an ongoing subject of discussion and debate in recent weeks. (If you just want a TL,DR then hit the bottom).
Here’s how we look at things:
- Our top priority is to preserve the consistency of the in-game player experience.
League’s a competitive game, and it’s critical that players have a level playing field. We’ve definitely heard your passion on this point and we agree.
It’s also important that the game experience you get when you download League of Legends is the complete experience - you shouldn’t have to go digging for other apps and addons just to stay competitive.
Finally, it’s important that the games you play are stable and secure. If any third party can potentially affect the stability of the core League experience, we’ll always act in the best interest of all players.
- We strive to make League of Legends the most sportsmanlike competitive game.
Programs or applications that warp your first interactions with other players have a direct impact on the sportsmanship of the game, and everyone deserves a fair first handshake.
- We want the community to be empowered to contribute to the League of Legends experience (as long as it doesn’t clash with the above!).
There are a bunch of awesome resources out there for the League community: websites that have champion guides, stats, videos, fan art, wikis, mobile apps – you name it. We like that, and we think these resources are responsible for tons of growth and nurturing in the League community.
Riot’s Policy on Third-Party Apps
With the above points in mind, we’ve recognized that our existing policy on third-party apps needs an adjustment. Currently we’re just too ambiguous in some areas (what constitutes an “unauthorized” app?), and too restrictive in others.
So here’s our clarification - we’re still working on properly wording it for a potential TOU update, but we wanted to share it with you as soon as we had a clear direction:
No software should interfere with the League of Legends player experience between when you press “Play” and the end of game screen.
This policy allows for all the cool stuff we mentioned before, like websites and apps that don’t interfere with or grab data from the player’s actual game client. This also allows us to explicitly disallow anything that directly integrates in between the in-game experience and after-game stats.
We think this is a hell of a lot closer to an ideal policy, but we don’t think it’s completely locked down. We are taking a hard stance that nothing should interfere between pre-game and post-game, but we’re always open to improving the player experience.
The Riot Games API
Part of of this plan will be continuing to focus on developing the Riot Games API, which is our official channel for the developer community to gain access to League of Legends data in a secure and reliable way. This is just part of our ongoing effort to respond to players' and developers' requests for data and to arm the community with more ways to contribute in a stable and healthy way.
To date, we’ve given out several hundred API keys to developers who are working on awesome stuff. If you’re a dev and want to contribute, visit http://developer.riotgames.com/ to sign up and learn more.
So, what does this mean for Curse Voice?
Two elements of Curse Voice aren’t allowed under this new policy:
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Automated timers: while our design team is still exploring whether we’d want to add any kind of built-in timers to League of Legends, we agree with many of you that having it accessible only through a third-party app is a clear competitive advantage between those who download it and those who do not, and isn’t acceptable.
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Automated voice calls: We have no problem with players hopping on Curse Voice (or any other voice chat client) to coordinate with their friends in-game, but when the application begins directly connecting you with dozens of other people in unfiltered (and untrackable) voice chats, it can make for a huge negative player experience in a space where we can’t help.
A summary
Ultimately we recognize that our initial third party application policies were unclear, so we’re clarifying them in line with a few core philosophies:
1.) The League of Legends in-game experience should be consistent and fair. 2.) We strive to make League of Legends the most sportsmanlike competitive game. 3.) We want the community to be empowered to contribute to the League of Legends experience.
This has allowed us to formulate a more comprehensive policy for third party applications:
No software should interfere with the League of Legends player experience between when you press “Play” and the end of game screen.
We always want to improve League of Legends in the best ways possible, so this will be an ongoing project, but we think that as long as we adhere to our core philosophies, we can uphold this policy.
I’ll be hanging out in this thread to answer questions and hear your feedback and ideas. Hope this clears things up!
10-14-2014 EDIT **We just added an update to all of this, posted below In the interest of making it clearer, here is a copy of what that update says... ** *"Hey everybody!
I wanted to jump back into this discussion to share some updates. As those following this topic know, back in the spring we made some clarifications that 3rd party applications with particular functions were considered against our Terms of Service (that link goes to the old Forums thread, which is a mirror of this one), and that the use of such applications was prohibited (and could even potentially lead to disciplinary actions). One of the several contributing factors to this topic was the early beta of Curse Voice and recent updates to Razer Comms, and the conversations that arose around them.
Over the past few months we have been working with the developers of many applications, including Curse and Razer. Because of this, the latest revision of Curse Voice (version 6.1.X) and Razer Comms (version 2.1.X) no longer violate our current guidelines. I should note, however, that with all third party apps these situations are subject to change as programs evolve, and this issue may be revisited in the future if the situation warrants it. Also... Curse Voice, Razer Comms, and all other 3rd party programs are not supported by Riot. Because of that, we can never guarantee the user experience when they and other programs are run in tandem with League of Legends. We always suggesting disabling such programs in your first step towards any troubleshooting, should problems arise
Hopefully this clears up any remaining confusion out there."*
