Have the spectators play a game of hangman or LoL trivia while they wait. Let them use these points to bet on the outcome of the match based on the picks/players. Save the points to be used to unlock future achievements =D

Edit: Heh, guess they already thought of that.

and yeah delays needs to be at least 2:30 to give the jungler time to clear his half of the jungle, though they can still then coordinate to trap him when he reaches the second half if it isn't like ~3 min

Funny you should mention this. We were having a discussion today about ways to add more social and interactive features to spectator, and the topic of predictions and gambling came up. It's certainly something to think about, but we have higher priorities to focus on for now.

That will need odds to be set though.

eg: smurfs stomping low elo as a sure way to multiply
IP for observers.

Too hard to monitor in everyday games.

But for tournaments would be sweet.

Too bad they are on tourney server.

Delay has to be very long at least 5 minutes. 30sec-1min would be a joke and heavily compromise the game. The better solution is to just let people watch their friends (and only see what they see) and save being able to see the entire map for replays.

I can't talk details yet but this is definitely something we're investigating.

We're still investigating what is possible with the technology, but one of our goals is to ensure the spectator feature/service does not disrupt the core game service.

How about making it fun. Add gambling to the Spectator process. Bet X IP for which team wins up to a max of X. You know, earn IP for learning counter picks and such.

There wont be an issue if there engineers are not drunk, in short, amount of data that is sent/received should be the same or less as playing normal game - less due the fact thatyou dont send much information (no spells, skill movement) only moving your view.

However there might be more deeper things, how info is updated in real gama differs from spectator mode, for example how fast some statuses are updated etc.

In shport, i seriously doubt that there would be more server/network load in spectator than normal.

have 180 second delay like they used to in counter strike. and 0 delay on LAN