Why are the minions in League of Legends emoting?

If you’ve noticed minions emoting in your League of Legends games, the April Fools’ Day patch holds the answer.

Patch 12.6 brought some secret changes to League of Legends alongside the announced Rengar update and balance changes. When you wipe the enemy team on Summoner’s Rift, allied minions will be dropping some disrespect by flashing emotes. This confused gamers at first but has now become a hilarious early April Fools joke.

April Fools’ Day patch has minions emoting

Minions will now use an emote from 2018 depicting a generic Demacian soldier, often referred to by the community as “Helmetbro,” playing dead when one team aces the other.

The interaction was first captured by caster Sam “Kobe” Hartman-Kenzler on a Champions Queue game. Kobe discovered that if a team manages to score an ace with every member of the enemy team on respawn timers, every allied minion on the map will emote.

12.6 arrived early to Champions Queue, part of an effort to assuage complaints that playoffs would be played on a patch that came out mere days later.

Deploying this balance patch early also meant Riot tipping its hand when it came to one of the presumably many jokes that fans can expect once April Fools’ Day arrives. There have been some legendary April Fools’ Day jokes from Riot Games in the past, including one that introduced the now-iconic character Urf The Manatee.

This appears to be the only in-game tweak made for a timely joke by the League of Legends developers so far. But fans can expect other light-hearted jests to show up in the client though perhaps not on the Rift. Usually, Riot Games will make a fake announcement of a ridiculous product or in-game item, sometimes taking to fake balance notes to trick fans.

Any other silly changes will be revealed on April 1 on the live client.