After announcing the plan to move all accounts to Riot ID last month, the devs have made a big update that most players will love.

Image Credit: Riot Games

Bye Bye Summoner Names, Hello Riot ID

Riot recently announced the introduction of Riot IDs to replace the previous Summoner Name system that has been in place for over a decade in League of Legends. Despite some frustration from the community, Riot still decided to implement the change, explaining some of the reasons why they decided to go for it:

The process of picking a unique Summoner Name is a terrible new player experience. It takes new League and TFT players an average of 5 minutes and 8 rejected attempts to pick a unique name, and thousands of players give up before finding a name they like. Just making it to the tutorial shouldn’t be this hard.

According to Riot, it’s common for players to use numbers and symbols to imitate the name they actually want and they feel it’s better to “have more than one Aatrox on a server versus multiple variations of 447r0x”.

On other titles such as VALORANT, Legends of Runeterra, and Wild Rift, Riot ID changes are pretty frequent, with some changing it every 30 days. Compared to the League system where Riot ID can get changed once a year, the devs decided to reduce that period down to 90 days. While they know players would love to call themselves differently across titles, Riot stated that there will be one identity across the whole ecosystem.

Upcoming changes

Below are the changes made by Riot going forward, starting on November 20:

Cost for Riot ID Changes – even though it will be free, players will have to wait some time before changing their Riot ID again. The devs have mentioned they are open to adjustments in the future, including adding paid or earned options for faster changes.
Frequency of Name Changes – according to Riot, 3 months should be a good sweet spot to have the Riot ID changed. Going forward, you’ll have the opportunity to change it for free once every 90 days.
Name Uniqueness – Riot will be displaying the hashtag when multiple players with the same name are in the game, and you’ll be able to see it also when hovering over the player on the scoreboard.
Impersonation Concerns – Riot has been working on a solution and will share more about that when details are final.

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