Practice Tool: League’s single player practice environment is finally on the way

It’s been months since Riot unveiled its plans to implement Practice Tool into the game, and now players finally have some news on what to expect.

So what exactly is it?

Practice Tool is the sandbox mode that players have been asking for over the past few years. A sandbox mode, as things like Practice Tool have been called in other games and software, is an environment where players can go and change the game to their liking to test things out before taking them into a real game. All the changes are then reverted to normal immediately upon leaving the sandbox.

The Practice Tool is just that—a place for you to manipulate leveling, minion waves, summoner spells, and more for the purpose of practicing.

Esports continues to grow rapidly as a booming professional atmosphere, and with League of Legends spearheading the movement, it makes sense that players should have an efficient way to practice in the game before hitting the ranked queues. With the option of consequence-free farming, the Practice Tool may also reduce the risk of getting flamed in your Bronze-ranked games.

Oddly enough, it took a lot of arguing to convince Riot that implementing the tool was the right call.

In fact, Riot originally released a statement in 2015 saying that it was not planning to develop such a feature. After an onslaught of Reddit posts and message board topics from players voicing their disagreement on the matter, the company decided to go back on its original plan and begin planning the sandbox mode after all.

Six months after deciding it would go forward with the new feature, Riot spread the word to the fans to clue them in. We’re all very happy it did, because the Practice Tool looks awesome.

For starters, there are practice dummies that look like a certain Satan-Yordle that we all love to hate. These dummies will grant tons of practical uses to players—from practicing trick-flashes to just figuring out different ways to angle Vel’koz Q’s.

That’s not all, though. Players will be able to manipulate the state of the game to their liking using console commands. These commands will be able to auto-refresh cooldowns, disable turrets, instantly max levels, and pretty much anything else you could think to try.

So, it sounds awesome, right? Today, the files for Practice Tool were actually added to the PBE, Riot’s Public Beta Environment. The tool isn’t available to be tested yet, but the assets were added.

Riot said today the update will be coming out soon, and in that case, perhaps it will even be in the next patch. We can all dream.