Eye Candy Optional: Kill League Of Legends' Wildlife

My first thought when I heard that Riot had added a "Hide Eye Candy" toggle to the League of Legends [official site] options screen was that a lot of champions would suddenly be sporting frumpy coats. Big wooly jumpers to cover themselves up with, perhaps. But no, instead this new feature is designed to prevent players from being distracted. By butterflies.

Apparently some of League of Legends' more competitive players were complaining about the amount of animated wildlife found on Summoner's Rift, fluttering and scampering around and distracting them from the core action. The choice is now in your hands whether or not to disable fancy bits like water ripples and exterminate all non-hostile life on the map. Goodbye butterflies. Goodbye deer. Goodbye suicide frog.

Disabling eye candy is a staple of many competitive games. For years, Quakers have tweaked settings to turn intricately-textured levels into brown smears.

The only thing immune to this new option? The mysterious duck who lives in the river. Since he spawns at the beginning of the game and disappears soon after, he's not affected by this new option. Riot Games clarified, "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."

I'm looking forward to seeing some much stronger LCS play, now that all of those distractions are out of the way. Sorry, that wasn't meant to rhyme.