Riot Games, developer of League of Legends, Legends of Runeterra, and Valorant (among others) will be getting rid of their player base’s unique summoner names. This change comes, seemingly, out of left field, and has been met with overwhelming backlash.

On Nov. 20th we’re phasing out Summoner Names and shifting exclusively to Riot IDs. We’re committed to making this transition smooth and keeping you connected to your gaming identity.”

-Riot Games

The studio announced via twitter that the change would be taking place as a means to bring the naming system across all of their games in line with the lore of the League of Legends universe. That is, summoners, which players represent, don’t actually exist, and so calling their IDs “Summoner names” is counter-intuitive. That’s the reasoning Riot gave the community, at the very least.

In all likelihood, this change is the result of Riot needing to bring a new level of consistency to their methods of tracking their playerbase beyond a summoner ID. Why they’d need to do that is beyond me, but clearly, the reasoning they gave the community is corporate dog water that people are refusing to lap up.

If the issue was a level of lore accuracy, then Riot could have just changed the name of “summoner names” to “riot names” or something similar while keeping the same unique naming system. The fact that they didn’t and instead opted to make in-game user names no longer unique is evidence that the uniqueness of a username, and the inability for others to make that exact same name, is somehow causing trouble for their future plans.

Whether or not the studio will give more detailed (and hopefully accurate) information on the subject remains to be seen. But as it stands, the vast majority of the Rito community is collectively losing their minds. (R.I.P. Hide on bush)

GLHF,
-E