Riot’s API Challenge brings innovation and Yasuo bans

Riot’s API Challenge brought out the best and brightest in the developer community.

With 300,000 Riot Points on the line, developers who took part in the contest had five weeks to work on their projects. Developers of all skill levels participated, creating applications that interacted with Riot’s game client through the League Client APIs.

According to Riot, one of the goals for the API Challenge was to “strengthen and empower the developer community as a whole.”

Many of the projects were focused on finding useful and creative solutions to common problems for League of Legends players. Others are exercises in humor, like YasuNO and Derpthemeus’ YasuNO, a simple application that blocks players from picking Yasuo.

A winner and runner-up were determined for three different categories, each judged on such criteria as technical difficulty and project documentation. The winners received 50,000 RP per team member, while the runners-up won 15,000 RP per team member.

The winner in the challenge’s Usability category was Dark Binding by xJinx. This API would allow League players to assign individual keybindings to particular champions. When entering a game, Dark Binding would detect the selected champion and automatically switch to the proper keybinding page.

Vexrax and Earleking won the Creativity category with their Insert Mission Here program. This API creates missions for both clubs and individuals. It also features competitions for clubs in which club members are tasked with completing the most missions possible, called Club Wars.

The Entertainment category went to Heriot and MT RainbowWolf’s API Bravery. This application randomizes champions, summoner spells, runes, and item sets, “keeping players honest” in a game mode called Ultimate Bravery.