[2021] Turning Off Web Match History

I believe this should be Tuesday, Sept 7th Monday, Sept 13th. The article should be updated soon.

I believe this should be Tuesday, Sept 7th Monday, Sept 13th. The article should be updated soon.

We're also looking into solutions that will allow players to query for their own private custom games with OAuth tokens through the Riot Games API. These are tokens unique to a player which allow us to ensure a player is looking up their own match history. This solution is something we're looking into but wasn't a requirement for deprecating web match history. In the interim, the tournament code solution is what should be used to create public custom games.

In general, custom games are considered private. The old system which allowed custom games to be viewed if you knew the game id is a poor security practice which is typically referred to as security through obscurity. In essence, we allowed people to view custom games if they knew their id but if we truly consider custom games private we should properly secure them. If players believe customs games shouldn't be private, then they shouldn't be secured at all (like we've done with customs made with tournament codes).

Over the years there's match history website has suffered from a lack of strong ownership resulting in a lot of bugs that never really get fixed. In my mind, there's two possible solutions: 1) we decide this product is super important to the player experience and prioritize maintaining it over other opportunities OR 2) we decide community developers do this better than we do and we get out of the business of maintaining products that community developers have done and will do better than we could.

I'm a huge advocate of APIs and sharing data and in my mind giving this problem space to the community is what's best for players. Basically I believe in competition and I think a community of developers competing to build the best match history website will result in some kick ass tools for players. Not just now, but in the future as new developers enter the space and try to outdo their predecessors.

I'll pass that feedback along. I'd also suggest googling and searching for a Clash tool if you're looking for scouting info. There's several sites that do this and you'll want to find the one that you enjoy, but if you don't already know of any I'd check out https://www.lolvvv.com. I remember talking with them when they were iterating on their Clash tool they seemed to be pretty passionate about Clash scouting.

After Monday, Sept 13th ACS will no longer ingest new match history and will effectively become read only. It may stick around a bit longer than the match history website, but it won't include new data from live shards. If you're a developer, you should move to match-v5 in the Riot Games API. If you're using ACS for pro matches that data should be obtained from Bayes.

Tagging u/GitGene here. He's in charge of the comms for the Riot Games API. I believe the best place to follow for updates is the Riot Games Dev Rel Twitter account. There's also a community managed Discord server and usually they are up-to-date on any changes coming to the API.

I can definitely understand this perspective, but I definitely don't share this point of view for a couple reasons.

1. There are areas that Riot is uniquely positioned to solve. Player Behavior systems are one example. We've seen community developers create products in this space and we generally discourage it. Replays were originally a community endeavor but they weren't positioned to create a quality product (a lot of the community solutions were hacky). Players asked for this repeatedly and Riot was uniquely positioned to provide a reliable solution. A web based match history product, in my opinion, doesn't fall into this category. Other Rioters have talked about this before, but when resources are limited you have to focus your attention and our focus is typically on problems Riot is uniquely positioned to solve.
2. This is mostly my opinion, so I wouldn't say this is Riot's opinion or the opinion of my colleagues: Riot is a video game company as opposed to a web design company. The websites we do run are typically one of these problem spaces where we're uniquely positioned to solve; publishing (lol.com), account management, player support. Match history isn't a problem space where we're uniquely positioned to solve and the core requirement is having some form of match history in the client. If players feel the client match history is subpar and that's the reason a match history website is needed, I'd say that's feedback for the client. We do believe match history should be available out of the client, which is why we provide the Riot Games API and have worked to include match history in the League+, soon to be, Riot+ mobile app.
3. Over the last couple years we've worked to enact policy to allow community developers to monetize their products in player friendly ways. This is specifically so community developers can get compensated for their efforts. I'm not going to pretend this is perfect and every community developer is making bank. There's plenty of work to do here, but our goal is to support community projects that are player focused and are valuable to players.

Obviously, you don't have to agree and in fact I appreciate players being critical and holding us accountable. Keep us honest.

Now you're speaking my language. Grew up with Halo. I also loved their website. Heat maps. Medal counts. Bungie really did a great job and set the bar super high. When I look back on that whole product it feels like an outlier. There weren't a lot of web experiences that Bungie provided apart from that. I'm assuming they decided this was an important core player experience that they wanted to provide and specifically wanted to make it available everywhere and not just in game.

When I look at our match history, at least the web part doesn't feel like a core part of the experience and we have other methods which we're using to make this data available out of game. Even today what 10 years later? I think the Bungie website is still the gold standard for web match history. I think there are some community websites that are close if not on par with Bungie. At least right now creating a great web match history experience isn't a priority for Riot. Bungie did a lot of things right and I think Riot just has different priorities typically focused more on the in game and client experiences.

As for the ads being pesky and intrusive this tells me we need to do better supporting community projects (which we knew, but that's how I'm parsing your feedback).