League of Legends’ new “No Eye Candy” mode has nothing to do with feminism

Instead, despite the misleading name, it has everything to do with reducing ambient visual motion effects in-game. The new option is being developed to reduce confusion on the battlefield and remove distractions.

This change is coming at the request of several professional LoL players and other players who wish to focus on gameplay without minor visual effects. The option is still in development for the PBE, but so far No Eye Candy will disable things like:

• Butterflies
• Dragonflies
• Water motion effects

This new mode will not affect game performance in any significant way, said Riot JxE in the official post. If you’d like to improve game performance, your best bet will still be to downgrade your game client’s visual settings overall. The No Eye Candy option will exist separately from the “Effects Quality” slider in League’s in-game Video Options menu.

The official statement:

Hey all,

Recently we added an option to the Game tab in the menu called “Hide Eye Candy”. Some of our more competitive players requested the the option to hide some of the less subtle movement on Summoner’s Rift. We added the option to disable things like butterflies, dragonflies and the water wakes to help competitive players focus on what they care about, the gameplay.

The next PBE deploy should have the hook ups enabled. Let us know if we missed anything that should’ve been added and if you have any other feedback regarding this new option.

Thanks!
~Riot JxE

Edit: Only ambient critters that persist after 1:55 will be disabled by this option. You can continue to perfect the dark ritual necessary to spawn the Duck.

Riot JxE also took to the forums to discuss that it’s essentially the equivalent to banning vuvuzelas from the FIFA world cup (although, FIFA couldn’t just design vuvuzelas away)!

I also thought back to how disruptive the vuvuzela was during the world cup in 2010 and came across this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuvuzela#Noise_levels_and_bans The players hated it, but it was so integral to South African culture that FIFA didn’t ban it.