Riot Games is considering removing summoner names in champion select in League of Legends solo queue.
The potential move is designed to prevent players from looking up info about their teammates and pressuring them into playing a certain way, or getting tilted seeing someone pick a champion they rarely play.
By hiding summoner names in a lobby, it gives anonymity to players. This could be particularly valuable to streamers and content creators, who can get their main champ taken away in the lobby, receive toxic chat messages or see their teammates make troll picks. These actions are sometimes made based on who the streamer is, in order to get a reaction out of them, like tilting them.
Riot said in a matchmaking and champion select update on the League of Legends website: “A lot of players use external websites and third-party apps that provide all sorts of information about their teammates.
“With this information, players are drawing conclusions that aren’t necessarily correct and pressuring their teammates into things that they might not want to do, like picking the exact same champion every game because it’s their highest winrate or most played.”
Riot said it was still deciding what kind of changes it would make here, but said it’s ‘likely’ to hide all summoner names in ranked solo/duo queue lobbies as a starting point.
It also added: “We recognise that there are legitimate reasons that someone might need to dodge a lobby, but there are also a lot that aren’t done in good faith. We want to impact the motivations behind why dodging occurs to reduce the frequency in a natural way.”
“We think the best version of League is not one where you metagame based on the players in your lobby, weigh who’s on a win or loss streak or playing a different champion, and dodge or pressure others to dodge when your setup doesn’t meet perfect conditions.”
Riot Games
Other changes Riot plans to make include pick order swapping, where teams can swap pick order with the press of a button, champion loadout recommendations in champion select (such as recommended runes and summoner spells).
Riot also touched on other progress since its last update, including making tweaks to ranked matchmaking in patch 12.17 to attempt to improve the issue of mismatched MMR and visible rank, and improvements to help give players their preferred position when queuing up. Riot says it is better matching players in their primary position against other primaries, secondaries against secondaries, and autofills against autofills.
Revival MMR and better calibrating the skill of players getting back into the game has seen a rise in returning player first-game winrates from 44.5% to 48%, reaching 50% by game ten (up from 48% by game 10).
Riot will also re-evaluate the summoner’s rift queue types portfolio in 2023.
On the proposed Solo Only Mode in League of Legends, which would’ve seen Duo Queue removed or separated from solo queue, Riot said it is not not planning to go ahead with this.
“While we still believe in the logic for why this could be a good idea, we first need to make sure that duo players have another place for a compelling competitive experience,” Riot said. “Flex queue doesn’t currently meet that bar.”
Last year, Riot thought about allowing League of Legends players to hide their match history, but this change wasn’t implemented.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
