On Friday February 21, NetEase announced that the use of third-party plugins – including Blitz.gg – would be viewed as cheating, effectively banning them entirely. This quickly raised questions around League of Legends, where Blitz, Porofessor, and other overlay systems are completely legal. While Riot cracks down hard on modifications to its MOBA (custom skins primarily), product lead Chris ‘Auberaun’ Roberts has confirmed that using Blitz won’t incur any penalties.
If you’re unfamiliar with Blitz.gg (I’ve absolutely never used it), it basically tracks objective spawns, ally summoner spells, and can recommend build pathways (including abilities). When you’re loading into the MOBA, you can also add an overlay to the lobby that gives you an overview of everyone’s general strengths and weaknesses – your top laner may die early to ganks, for example.
Theoretically, Blitz doesn’t give you any information that League of Legends itself doesn’t: realistically you can time down objectives if you want to, as well as ally summoner spells. As a result, Riot has largely left it alone: Blitz repurposes the data Riot itself provides, after all.
Having read through the Marvel Rivals overlay that’s available on the website right now, it also seems to track your team specifically instead of providing information on your enemies. It shows your squad’s health and ultimates, which are pingable in-game, as well as adding a real-time scoreboard to save you from having to hold down tab.
While it doesn’t appear to be particularly invasive (some do claim it used to show enemy ultimate charges, but that doesn’t appear to be the case with the current version), NetEase isn’t playing games: using Blitz.gg and other third-party plugins will net you a ban.
As a result, players have raised concerns around its use in League of Legends, with one post stating that “I personally would love for them to just get taken out of the game completely already, but I also know that some people don’t believe that these are that big of an issue.”
The general response seems to be that, if the plugin provides information that’s to the detriment of the enemy team, it should be banned. It’s a sentiment that Roberts agrees with, but he clarifies that there are “major differences” between what Blitz shows for League of Legends, and what was available to Marvel Rivals players.
“From what other folks are pointing it out it sounds like there’s some pretty major differences in how Blitz specifically interacted with Rivals vs how it does with League,” he writes. “We agree though that having a tool that tracks enemy ult cooldowns crosses the line in providing information that’s not available in game.
“Generally we don’t want apps pulling in gameplay information that provides a competitive advantage that isn’t just extrapolating from information we already provide (e.g. converting a radial timer to a numeric one). If it feels like you start to ‘need’ it to be competitive, then we’re likely to take some action there.” Blitz is here to stay, then – at least, for the moment.
If you’re looking for some extra tips and tricks to level up your gameplay, check out our LoL tier list to ensure you’re picking the right champions for the job. Alternatively, if you’re more about style, here’s all of the League of Legends skins that are currently on sale.
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