Baron and Dragon Spectator Timers Coming to the PBE!

Continue reading for more info and discussion on this new feature!

Here's RiotBrokenSword with more information:

"Hey PBE Community, 

My team, Strike Force, has recently developed a feature for Spectator Mode to improve the viewing experience of your friends' games, and the broadcasts of LCS. We've had a lot of requests for the feature since the release of Spectator, and we've finally got it for you, right on time for the Playoffs and the World Championships: it's an in-game timer for Dragon and Baron as they get ready to spawn! 

The timers will appear 2 minutes before the monster spawns, then fade away shortly after displaying the message "LIVE". 

I'd love for everyone to spectate the sh*t out of some games to vet this feature as thoroughly and extensively as possible. Additionally, be sure to send me and my team feedback on this post, so we can fix any and all bugs that we missed on our end. The feature is solid as is, but there are always uncertainties when working with software. 

Here's a few screen shots of how they will appear...



Thank you all so much,

RiotBrokenSword"

He continued:

"Thanks for the feedback, everyone. 

I'll explain a little bit about why the feature acts the way it does at a strategic level.

We chose to have the icons appear and disappear on timers, rather than be static, to keep ourselves from piling on more information onto the screen than we feel is relevant to the particular moment of the game you're watching. If you look at the spectator UI in its current state, it's already pretty cluttered, and that's without the overlays in the eSports broadcasts. If you were to look at the screen and break it into chucks, and make those chunks fractions, you'd realize that we're already taking 1/4 of the game from you with Spectator and LCS overlays. The purpose of Spectator Mode is to show viewers the game currently in play, not a bunch of irrelevant information. Static information only hides more of the game from sight. So we chose, and will likely continue to choose, to show only contextually relevant information.

A few tactical notes: 

We kept the timers below the threshold of three minutes to help mitigate the feature being exploited for the benefit of the players in the live version of the game. So viewers will only be seeing the timers a minute after the event has already happened. This, of course, doesn't apply to eSports broadcasts, which stream with 0 delay. 

This is only the first iteration of this feature, so it will be evolving with time. :)

-RBS"