TheDarkRobotix

would love to know what names will become available through name checker sites but seems the api is down atm? (for months now AFAIK)

I'm not really sure what name checker sites you're referring to but I'm not sure we have an official API for specifically checking names. It's possible the sites that you are using are using our third party API to identify accounts that exist; that third party API has keys that need to be maintained by the owners of the third party site.

In other words, I think the sites you are using are at fault here

BoobsAreNicer

How realistic is it for you guys to consider IP banning and VPN blacklisting?

If there are identified users abusing this type of "buy lv30" accs over and over again tactic is it possible that you would implement IP bans in these more extreme cases and start blacklisting VPNs since they're such an easy method of avoiding the IP ban?

IP banning

IP banning is ineffective for quite a few reasons - not only is it trivial to change your IP, but the one case where it's not trivial is when you're on a shared network like a university campus. If we IP banned one very toxic person on a university campus it would ban every single person on that university campus.

IPv6 might change this, but might not. The TL;DR is that IPs are not an effective way of identifying an individual and most serious attempts at account security use IP addresses to inform but not be the sole identifier of someone's identity.

VPN blacklisting

There are a lot of good reasons to play on a VPN. The only reason to really implement VPN blocklisting would be if we wanted to make it somewhat harder to evade an IP ban but as mentioned above IP bans are flawed, so we probably won't be going with that.

I offer both of these with the caveat that we can and do ban certain IP ranges for places that we know players either should not be playing from or h...

macgart

Can i only log into the lol or riot client or can i login to your website

Any login will work. Be that in the Riot website, the League client, on TFT mobile, etc.

CuteTao

Dude. He said "actively discussing". That's pr talk for not doing anything about it

I don't engage in PR talk.

This would be an effort that I would be driving with my team.

I said 'actively discussing' because I was sitting down with my team lead, a few senior members of the team and a VP talking about it on Thursday last week :)

We are currently working on ways to reduce this behaviour but I don't have anything I can share right now.

Lakinther

Imagine reading the article instead of immediately coming here to comment

i can respect it

YaBoiiBillNye

I think that’s fine. I remember for ESEA I hadn’t played for like 4+ years, even with way more than 20 hours. And that’s totally reasonable.

Do the taken usernames get freed?

Yes, they should be freed.

_ziyou_

How many accounts do you roughly assume to be deleted with this new policy?

I can't disclose numbers, sorry :(

TheHunterZolomon

Do you know exactly when this inactive account deletion is going to happen? There’s a username I want that’s tied to an inactive account, likely holding the name hostage or trying to sell. Hasn’t been active since season 8. Thanks!

While I could give a rough timeframe of when it might begin to happen I couldn't give you any estimation on when any particular account might have its username freed.

Are you referring to a username (the thing you log in with) or a Riot ID/summoner name (the thing people see in game)? I'm sure you're aware but, just in case, player support may be able to assist you in getting a summoner name if the account it is currently on is clearly inactive.

-ElBandito-

Will usernames become available?

I believe so

LunarLumos

If my old banned account gets deleted can I change my name back to my old one on my new account?

It should be possible, yes

sollar808

Was there any other times you guys did this? I remember my first account since s1 suddenly disappeared couldn’t find my email, or user after coming back from deployment in 2016

No, not that I am aware of.

It's possible your account was compromised and someone changed the e-mail address :(

Hyoudou

I have a question to ask:

Why cant I properly view my game data since season 1 from all the games played in every game mode? Why is there no way to see my total games played outside the game?

I couldn't give you an authoritative answer as I don't work on any of that.

The speculative answer would be that it would be prohibitively expensive to make all that data available for any player at any time. For example, even op.gg limits how much match history you can view.

I expect you might be able to get this information by messaging player support, but I don't know for sure.

Weedwick

This is good news. Anything you can share? Doesn't have to be anything specific.

Not right now, sorry.

Calm-Display-8290

maybe unrelated (?) But I have a random letter name and am worried it can get banned cause I'm often mistaken for having bought my account when I made it myself.

lvl 400 in Smurf queue so am slightly suspicious it that it put me there cuz of my username

If the name is inappropriate or breaks rules then you might be in hot water but your name wouldn't affect whether or not you got in trouble in a hypothetical system which banned bought accounts.

We can usually identify on a manual review when an account has been compromised/sold, and we wouldn't take action if it was on the wire.

Lakinther

How do you plan to deal with somebody inevitably being very annoyed at their account being deleted?

We're pretty confident that if you match the criteria in the post (played less than 20 hours, haven't logged in 3 years, never bought or received anything) that you probably aren't coming back and don't care about your account being deleted or not.

Anyone affected by this will have a 30 day window to prevent the deletion of their account by following the instructions in the email that they will receive.

In the unlikely event that you have not played in 3 years, did not play more than 20 hours, did not buy anything, and did not respond to the email in the 30 day window, and are still annoyed that your account is deleted, I'm afraid we by design will not have any recourse for you - the deletion is final, and cannot be undone.

Phantomx_Destiny

I honestly hope you guys can crack down on the account selling, seeing smurfs every game in ranked league and them not caring about their lev 30 accounts because they can just buy another for 5$ really ruins my motivation to play ranked.

This is something we are actively discussing.

SeulBear

they won't, they love it when people have access to cheap accounts, after they get perma'd they just hop on to another account, keeping him engaged

it may surprise you to learn that we do not love this; players who engage in this behaviour tend to be very disruptive and make the game worse for other players. Some players may buy an account to dunk on new players, circumvent a ban, cheat (in rare situations), or be extremely toxic without fear of repercussions (Note on this though that currently bans are, in most cases, intentionally targeted at an account and not a player).

It also provides account hackers with a reward for hacking accounts because they can just sell them for money.

we want to do what we can to limit account sale and compromise for these reasons.

I don't know what the solution is here; as a security engineer I am mostly the stick and not often the carrot and I expect we need both to tackle this.

mraowl

what is the best way to keep my accounts in other regions that i may not use for another 2-3 years alive? logging into the lol website equivalent for each region? or do i need to play a real game

edit: without access to the email account. e.g. an account setup in another region using a uni email that is now gone.

just log into them once!

YungStewart2000

We're pretty confident that if you match the criteria in the post (played less than 20 hours, haven't logged in 3 years, never bought or received anything)

Tbh at that point the player is probably better off with a new account anyway with all the BE and champs you can unlock. Though the first games without all the summoners are too fun.

Anyway, are there set times that this will refresh? Like are you guys going to put out deletion waves every month, 6 months, year, etc... or is it just a kinda one time thing right now to mass removes a lot of em?

Our plan is for this to be a permanent, on-going process after it launches.

UndeadMurky

3 years is not old at all, why not increase it to like at least 5/8 years

Right now, we think that 3 years in combination with the rest of the criteria is reasonable.