If you care for the League community, please sign!

Who is this addressed to?

This petition is addressed to the entire community of League of Legends and other games developed by Riot Games and gamers in general who may understand our struggle with the current issue.

League of Legends is an MMORPG game released back in October 2009. The game features a variety of in-game purchasable contents such as characters skins, in-game loot and profile customization tools.

What is the petition about?

One of these customization tools lets you change your in-game name to whatever name you like that is not taken yet by any other player - hence you have to check if your nickname is available in order to be able to change it. This change can be made both through free in-game currency (Blue Essences - BE) and a purchasable currency called Riot Points (RP). Some people have spent RP in the past to change their names if they lacked BEs or to be able to gift a name change to someone else (since Blue Essences are not exchangeable), so they invested money into this feature. Others even had to wait months if not years or a full decade for their nickname to be available or for it to be owned by someone who would let you reach out to negotiate.

On November 20th, Riot Games has decided that the now in-game League of Legends nicknames will become only taglines and the actual nicknames will be the ones of our Riot ID, which means the nickname set on the Riot account through the website www.riotgames.com (e.g.: if on the Riot platform you have the Blue nickname but your current in-game name is Red, on November 20th your in-game nickname will be Blue#red, with the #red part being smaller, greyed out and not actually visible during games, only in lobbies). The reason stated by the company behind this decision is "to get the players closer to their Riot ID, since the in-game nickname was originally created only to represent a 'Summoner' of the playable champions of the game while with time the players identify more as the champions themselves while playing them instead of their Summoner. This as well as improved and simplified in-game technical tracking of the players and creating fluidity between all of Riot's games". Riot Games will also give a chance to players to immediately change their in-game nicknames as soon as the transition happens for free, too bad that for most players this will either be impossible so they will have to begin the research again or they would have to put their alarm on at 5 am to be able to INSTANTLY change your name, which sounds pretty dumb. After this, it will cost players 10$, spitting on the money already spent to change name in the past by players.

You can read the full reason behind this decision  on their article on their Support website.

Why is it important to change this?

While some players might not mind this decision (such as the ones with the same in-game nicknames as Riot IDs) others have waited lots and lots of years to be able to obtain their nickname of desire and some even had to spend money to change it. Since this decision does not even benefit the game or developers in any significant and/or relevant way, we believe that we should be able to retain the content that we originally paid for, which is our in-game name and not just our tagline. We find it unfair that we paid for a content that was changed without any feedback collected beforehand and that we are now required to pay more for to undo a change that was not requested by the community nor provides significant improvement to the platform. Even if it's going to be easier for Riot Games to manage our accounts after this change, we believe that our customization choices and most of all the money we spent and the years we waited should not be put aside for a minor improvement such as this one.

Additionally, the new changes will make nicknames way less unique to the player as basically it will be like other gaming platforms such as Battle.net, where multiple people can have the same nickname and only the tagline will differ.

If you want to help undo this change and make our voice heard by the Riot Games company, please just leave a sign on this petition. The years spent waiting and the money wasted for nothing are worth this little help of yours. Thank you so much.