Hi, I'm the engineer working on this. If you have any questions about it, this is a good place to ask them!
EDIT: hey, there are a lot of replies. if I don't get to yours it's because I either answered in part elsewhere throughout the reply chain, or because I didn't see it. sorry :(
What motivated this? Storage issues? API issues?
Privacy & security concerns.
Every account is an email address and some other personal information that we are liable for.
Every account, especially inactive ones, could potentially turn into one that gets compromised and causes Bad Things to happen in games.
We're pretty sure that the accounts we've identified using the criteria in the post probably won't be coming back - although we'd love to be proven wrong - and it doesn't make sense to hold on to data for the sake of holding on to data.
Storage space is really cheap these days so it's not really a motivator
Is there any specific time metric? For example account that is inactive atleast 5 years?
Any account that meets the criteria in the post that has not been active for at least three years
These are so situnational that its really only going to hit those accounts that were made and then instantly thrown away.
Not so related but a bit related question, what about perma banned accounts? Do u guys have any plan on every deleting them? Or atleast freeing the nickname they are holding as summoner name on banned accounts apparently never expire, which is lame if you ask me (once i wanted a nickname which was on an old, apparently permabanned account since it was already past expiring but i still couldnt change into it).
I don't have any plans at this time to "go after" perma-banned accounts, but it is possible there is overlap (ie accounts perma-banned 3 years ago may be caught up in this)
Does it also affect permabanned accounts?
Asking for a friend...
I don't believe we have explicit opt-outs for perma-banned accounts. However, if you do get affected and you're interested in keeping your account, you will still be able to prevent it from being deleted by following the steps in the email you receive. This applies to everyone, not just people who have been perma-banned.
Of course, if you do have a perma-banned account, it'll still be permanently banned even after you prevent the deletion if that were to happen
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
It’s rampant in China and Korea for a reason, keeps the player engaged
I'm not actually sure to what degree there is a net benefit for allowing this to happen. It might keep one very dedicated player engaged, but think of all of the other players who may have a bad experience that may consider not wanting to play anymore.
One could also argue that if someone is dedicated enough that they'd be willing to fork out money on a new account to keep playing that they'd be just as likely to create a new account if buying an account was not an option available to them, and the only thing permitting (And, to be clear, we're not permitting it explicitly) account sale/compromise does is negatively impact players who have their accounts compromised and sold.
I don't think it's as clear cut as it appears on the face of the it.
At any rate, there is a difference between "Riot explicitly wants this to happen", and "It happens a lot in specific communities". At least in the security team the opinion is that we don't want this to happen because it causes a lot of headaches, and we are discussing ways to either disincentivise or stop this behaviour.
There was/is a pretty successful League YouTuber who openly bought accounts, played on viewers accounts and even encouraged viewers to give him accounts, I remember reporting it and that many others did the same only for nothing to happen at all.
Maybe things have changed, but throughout the 13~ years of League, everything has shown that you don't really care that much.
I know there is at least one individual that encourages the purchase of accounts right now specifically because it's the easiest thing to do. That's what I was alluding to with the "carrot" part - I think there are reasons why one might want to get a "fresh" account and that's something we'll have to consider.
All I can really say is that we do care about this and would like to resolve it. This is what I said back when someone asked me why we didn't care about MFA and then released it, and I'm going to have to say the same thing here :(
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 :(
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.
This is good news. Anything you can share? Doesn't have to be anything specific.
Not right now, sorry.
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.
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 have such abusive traffic patterns that the ban is worth it.
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.
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.
Imagine reading the article instead of immediately coming here to comment
i can respect it
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.
How many accounts do you roughly assume to be deleted with this new policy?
I can't disclose numbers, sorry :(
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.
Will usernames become available?
I believe so
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
Since everyone else clearly didn't read the post I'll also just pretend i didn't read it:
I just played a game in valorant, is my league account on a different login in danger? :o
If your League and VALORANT accounts are connected using the same Riot account (ie you log in using the same username and password), you're fine.
Will you get rid of accounts that were permabanned? Also will the accounts automatically be removed from my friend list?
We don't have any intention right now to go after permanently banned accounts specifically but if there are permanently banned accounts who fit the criteria, those will be removed, yes.
Yes, the deleted accounts will be removed from your friends list.
I'm aware this is perhaps a question you are not allowed to answer, but what proportion of accounts actually fall into such a strict criteria? My first thought is that this can't even be close to 1% of all accounts, and as a result cant be worthwhile.
We have free to play games that have been around for over 10 years - Even a small proportion of accounts is a lot of accounts!
Let's be real. Riot has some really good coding...but there's some pretty bad spaghetti too. I'm genuinely concerned that somethings going to go wrong and an active account might get deleted. Is there a backup plan for this?
If, god forbid, an active account is flagged, you will receive an email and you will have 30 days to action that email (i.e, to click on a link to prevent the deletion).
Doing so will count as a login, so it would be like resetting the clock on that account for the purposes of deletion.
How old
For an account to be considered for deletion, it must match all of the following criteria:
I have my brother added who passed away a several years ago. Last time we played was season 5ish Would i be able to submit a ticket to keep that account from getting deleted? Can I request the information for the account? No skins, not ranked, nothing of value other than it being his account. Only played norms.
Send a player support ticket and DM me the ticket ID and we will get something sorted out for you.
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?
They should be, yes.
Hii there! thanks for being so open about the process. I was curious how do you prevent the deletion of accounts for folks who are inactive due to circumstance?
As an example, I have friends in the military who had done back to back deployments and were unable to play league of legends during their deployments and between them. But they love the game, and many have spent money on the game.
What measures is Riot taking to ensure their accounts don't get deleted so that they can return to the game, when you can't possibly be expected to know if a user plans on being inactive for 2+ years at a time?
Firstly - if your deployed friends have played more than 20 hours, they should be safe.
I've not been deployed so I'm not familiar with how much access they have to the internet in their free time, but if any of your friends can log into their accounts via the league of legends website, that should be good enough to reset the clock.
They'll also receive an email to whatever account they signed up with that they can follow the instructions in to prevent deletion if they do end up being deleted.
Finally, they can also DM player support and we'll work something out.
We don't have any plans right now for way to mark accounts as "safe" en-masse.
Will you guys be sending a list of new available names after deleting these accounts ?
We don't plan to, no.
Old accounts got 400RP when they were made, does that 400RP count as purchases made?
does using any of that 400RP count as a purchase?
I'm not sure on this one specifically, but the rest of the rules would apply to them.
Do you intend on sending alerts to the emails of said accounts first? IE: in 30 days your acc will be thanos snapped if you don’t play a matchmade or Ai game?
Also how far back are we talking if it wasn’t already said yet? S3, S6?
Do you intend on sending alerts to the emails of said accounts first? IE: in 30 days your acc will be thanos snapped if you don’t play a matchmade or Ai game?
Yes, every account will receive an email with instructions on how to prevent the deletion.
Also how far back are we talking if it wasn’t already said yet? S3, S6?
From when the process starts it'll be any account that hasn't been used in three years. This will be a continual process, so next year, accounts that have been inactive since 2019 will become eligible for deletion.
Will the summoner names open up?
I believe so.
Is it only old account or also accounts that play up to lv 20 and go inactive for like say a week
It's only for old accounts that have not been touched in three years and also meet a bunch of other criteria elaborated within the article.
Look, I'm a VERY busy dad of 8 kids. I get 4 minutes every 2 months to play a partial bot game. If, no, when my account gets terminated, prepare for the 4-minute battle of your life once I get around to it.
As long as you are logging in for those four minutes every 2 months, you're free and clear :)
Will you guys ever give us the ability to merge accounts?
It might be possible to merge two accounts on different Riot IDs if you can prove you own both of them by DMing player support (I'm honestly not sure) - for example, if you use one username for League and another for VALORANT.
I'm not sure how you would be able to merge accounts that have conflicting games, ie, two League accounts.
I don't want to say never, but it seems like a niche enough scenario that it might not be worth exploring
Purely out of curiosity as someone that is studying in cyber security / network security etc...
What risk would disclosing that data pose?
Disclosing the exact number in this case is not a question of security. Companies in general will guard any information that informs people about what the size of their player base is
why let a black market flourish like this for years tho? why not just sell your own safe level 30 boosts for people? the game has been out for over a decade.
Selling boosts gives the wrong message of "if you were banned, just buy a new account, even riot supports it". I'm not sure what any potential "solution" in this space will look like but the reason we haven't gotten one is because it's difficult to come up with one that doesn't incentivise bad actors and also doesn't make people feel like they should buy a boost as an entirely new player
its riot accounts not just for league accounts right? so any riot games and their hours also stack?
eg 10hours in League, 3hours in Runeterra, 3hours in TFT mobile, 2hours in Wildrift, 2hours in Valorant will be counted as 20 total?
Yes to both counts
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
Hey there. Does this count for Wild Rift too? I didnt play League on pc for few months now but i activly play Wild Rift.
Is my riot account safe? I read the stuff but explain me like im 5 if u dont mind!
Sure!
If your account for League and Wild Rift are the same, you're fine. You can tell if they are the same because your Riot ID (Which looks like Riot dan honks#NVB94) will be the same on both accounts.
If they are different, then we don't "know" that your Wild Rift account and League account are owned by the same person, and you might need to log into League.
In any case, if your account will be deleted, you will receive an email a month before it gets deleted and you can click on the links there to prevent it in the worst case scenario.
Sure the flat number is high, well over a million accounts undoubtedly, but if the goal is to have Riot not unnecessarily hold onto user data of abandoned (for lack of better term) accounts this doesn't seem like it will be hitting a very high proportion of even those accounts, making the exercise mostly ineffective at hitting the (obviously impossibly to fully hit) goal. Of course, I have no strictly better proposal to reach this goal; it's an impossible task to do with high precision, and to get high recall would have many accounts get deleted that are not actually abandoned.
Perfect is the enemy of the good :)
I know you mentioned in another post that you can't disclose anything like a number of accounts being deleted, but can you give a percentage of accounts being deleted by this action? are we talking less than 1% or more like 10%.
I cannot disclose that, no.
I have a second acc like lv 9 I obviously have less than 20 hours but the acc is 6 months old, will it also be in the list of deletion?
Your account will only be considered to be deleted if you have not logged onto it in 3 years and have played less than 20 hours, not bought or received any currencies and have not got any legacy content.
Sell level 30 boosts that require people to be level 30 to purchase. Then have that level 30 account link to the account they bought it on and bans on one account go to both accounts. Not sure if this is a possible solution though.
That does sound like a good solution. I hate to meme myself, but right now the Technology Isn't There. It's one we'll have on our list for sure, though.
So it requires manual review for a sold account to be identified or is there an automatic that flags them for review?
To be clear I'm not commenting on any of the processes we have right now for identifying and actioning compromised accounts, just pointing out that in this case the OP would be fine.
hi dan honks i remember you played an aram and went tank sion not lethality I appreciate that cheers
i play tank on everything in aram. i am not having fun if the enemy carries are.
I appreciate you guys taking these privacy concerns seriously.
Are there plans to email accounts that have been marked inactive but are not subject to deletion because of another criterion? This might be useful to me as a friendly FYI, since I try to keep tabs on who has my email address and such, and it would be useful knowledge to me that I haven’t logged into a Riot service in 3+ years, even if my total playtime means the account will stay.
We don't have any plans for that right now, no. In general, we really only want to email you if there is something that requires your attention.
Thank you foremost for answering.
But meanwhile any other game, HOTS, Smite etc is tracking total amount of games played, how old the account is, etc.
How is tracking of the most basic thing of any online Game such as age of the account or rounds played more "prohibitively expensive" than any of the weird ass challenges we have? Or how many Teemo's die each minute etc?
Why is it that LoL, one of the biggest PC games, lacking such feature? Its there in the client, all you have to do is to play a single SR Game, but why cant I see it outside of a game?
Back in 2009 and a few years +, we could see all the different stats of anything. So how come,that we HAD thr option to see in a decade ago, but not now?
Heck, even Wild Rift is tracking all games played
So, there's collecting that information and then there's making it available, at any time, for any player.
Collecting that information is definitely something we do. Somewhere in our data centers there is information that will say how many games you've played, and all that.
However, having all of that information available in a format for every account that has and will ever exist, accessible in real time would be the expensive part.
Does the alleged stockpile of bottled accounts sitting in cold storage to be sold have anything to do with this decision?
We've made this decision solely to reduce the amount of personal information we store on players that we probably don't need to store.
And the account age/total games played is more expensive than tracking the challenge for the weirdest things?
Why not simply unhide it?
I don't think it would be expensive for simple counting statistics (which the challenges are), but something as fully detailed as every match history and every person you played against... yeah, possibly.
Again, this is all speculative. I don't work on any of this, and I am just making educated guesses about what the bottleneck would be on any system like that if I were to personally author one.
Capitalizing VALORANT, props to the Brand management team🤌
I have a friend, who is a producer on VALORANT; I want to stay in their good books :)
I think I speak for the whole community when I say we would love to be kept in the loop on this obviously don't tell us the solution but any updates on this situation would be very much appreciated. It would certainly be a good will win but actions are louder than words.
Like many other things we've discussed publicly, this is something we are actively investigating and might not have any updates on for some time. We try our best to let you know what we're thinking of but that does also mean that sometimes you might hear about something long before it comes to fruition.
Thank you for your patience :)
I imagine you did not cut it already because new accounts mean more chance for the user to buy the same skin more than once
I commented on this here.
How much was GDPR specifically a factor?
We've been using GDPR as the floor, not the bar, for player privacy since before it came into force.
GDPR allows you to keep data on individuals as long as you have a legitimate business interest to keep it. I'm not a lawyer, but as far as I know we do have that legitimate business interest to keep player data even of inactive accounts.
We've just decided that we don't keep data around that we know, in good faith, belongs to players that probably won't return. As I mentioned, every email address or account is one more that could potentially be compromised.
Sorry but may I ask why? I don't know the reason but the size of playerbases always interests me and I like comparing it, seeing how much the game still grows and/or if the growth is slowing down but it's kinda sad that I can only find rough estimates of the playerbase size on random articles and nothing about the chinese servers sizes.
Honestly, that's a question for someone who actually runs a business and not for an engineer like me.
My guess is that it's because there are more downsides to releasing that information than there are upsides.
Companies only really disclose that information if they are required to by law (i.e if they are publicly traded) or if it's a selling point for one of their products (Steam, specifically, shows you the MAU of products on their platform, but does not show you the MAU of Steam itself).
Are you planning on deleting permamently banned accounts as well, considering they don't play valorant or other Riot games on that account? People could use the nicknames that were used on permamently banned accounts.
I addressed this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/wp69rq/riot_will_soon_be_deleting_old_very_inactive/ikev74s/
Note that accounts that are inactive will have their summoner name become available for claim through player support before they are eligible for deletion. I believe the cutoff is 30 months (2 1/2 years) to claim the name of an inactive account, and it's at least 3 to be flagged for deletion.
Thank you! Just making sure I understand, if I haven't logged in for over three years, but I've played over 20 games and have purchased RP, then I won't be deleted yeah?
20 hours of games, but yeah, you should be good
Are you discussing account selling or smurfs in general? I know some rioters are against smurfs while some are promoting it.
My personal opinion is you can't separate one from the other.
Any attempt at tackling account sale, botting, etc, is going to be intrinsically linked to the desire players have to get a "fresh" account
This isn't really a security problem, it's a "how players interact with our game" problem and it'll require solutions in that vein
You're doing God's work in this thread, Dan.
Thanks Vapora. I hope you're doing well :)
What about the name selling market where they keep names on low level accounts just to sell to other people for IRL money?
Not something we want to encourage and I imagine it would get hit as well on any work we do on account security stuff (see here) but it's not the highest thing on the totem pole right now.
Unlike most other problems in this space, this one is sort of victimless because it doesn't usually involved compromised accounts, we just would rather it not exist because we can't really be sure you're not going to get scammed.
If I play wild rift using my original league account, as my computer is dead, would that count as my account being active?
Yes
But to clarify that also means it will not be deleted if for example;
Played in Season 2-3, hasn't played since
BUT owns some skins they bought in S3
therefore will not be deleted correct?
Yes, you won't be deleted. You owned skins in S2-3 which means you either purchased them, were gifted them, got them through a promotion (hello, Championship Riven, which is legacy) or probably played enough to earn them through ranked play.
Are you sure 3 years isnt too recent? I know a lot of people that played from like 2010-2018 and then stopped. Do those people really need to lose their accounts?
3 years is just one piece of the criteria. You need to have not played in the past three years, and not played more than 20 hours, purchased or received RP and not have any legacy content.
Angers the money men. Think danhonks wants to get farted on?
Sexual harrassment isn't a punchline.
Ok thank goodness, the title scared me. Glad to hear how conservative the rules are for deleting. I still message my late friend I lost last year and don’t want to lose his acc in my friends list
We'll be updating the article in a little while to address concerns we've heard so far and one of the things we will explicitly be addressing is preventing the deletion of accounts of deceased friends and relatives
Any way to salvage my Silver Kayle from my account last played on in S3 and move it to my "new main" last played in S10?
That sounds like something you should raise to player support.
[deleted]
Yes, but I can't disclose them. Sorry :(
Just throwing my 2 cents in here, but I recently quit the game because of the low quality of solo queue. Nobody cares anymore because they all have 10 accounts, even gold players. There is a reason Korean solo queue is better - social security numbers.
If you made it so you had to have a phone number attached to your account to play solo queue (and only for solo queue) I am confident the ranked experience would be IMMEDIATELY improved, and improved IMMENSELY. Please, if you have any influence at all, pass this thought on if you could. I would immediately come back to league if this were the case. Force people to play on their mains. Force them to give a shit about the game. You could literally solve trolling and soft inting, which if you ask literally ANYONE who plays this game is by far the main problem.
That's something we'd want to think about very carefully before doing, because it means we'd have to collect a phone number for every single person who plays. That's a lot of player information to track.
I'm not saying we'd never do it; it wouldn't be my call, but I personally would not want this to happen. You shouldn't need to give us a lot of really personally identifying information to play a video game.
What counts as "game currency"? Is that specifically just RP or does IP/Blue essence count as "game currency"?
RP, Teamfight coins, VP. It's purchased currency.
You ever play tank fizz?
unfortunately yes, but i believe the last time i played tank fizz i had i different online alias. it was a long time ago when it was meta on SR.
Dan, may I ask you something off topic?
Will Riot ever consider hardware ban a solution to cull some of the toxicity? (not flaming, but other egregious things that dragged this game to its current "reputation") If memory serves, Valorant issues hardware bans mostly to cheaters to keep the game clean. Some will say this idea is too extreme, some will say it will be useless because people can spoof their hardware and it's business as usual. What do you think about it?
I'm not qualified to answer this, sorry.
If I understand it correctly, if you have more than 20h played, even if it's been 3+ years, you won't get deleted, correct?
Yes.
Hi,
that rule about 20 hours only counts last 3 years, or are hours counted since creation of account?
I mean if someone registered themselves years ago and 99% sure has more than 20 hours combined playtime, but in last 3 years it would less than that. Is that account safe, or might get caught by the filter?
As long as it's 20 hours in the lifetime of your account, you are safe.
I have 3 accounts on the same email (i play on all 3). This might create any accounts management problem for me in the future?
I'm not aware of any plans we have right now that will cause issues for players with multi-tenant emails.
Could you clarify what would make something a "rare limited edition game entitlement"?
I'm mostly curious about what would make something "rare limited edition" vs just "limited edition".
edit: wording
I don't have examples of the specific distinction now but this is referring to things like Championship Riven, Grey Warwick, Rusty Blitzcrank etc
I read your explanation for the why you are doing this and it makes sense - it's a reasonable way to make your servers a safer place for us players. Thanks for that, tho!
I dunno if you already answered it, if that's the case pls tell me and I will search for it in this comment chain. Anyway, my question is: What is/ will be the approach when someone that DID actually take a huge break from the game wants to come back and use their old account? Will there be a possibility to restore them? Or will they be gone forever?
I mean, lots of people could pretend to have their old account deleted so abusers will abuse, so I could understand both ways.
If your account is deleted through this service, it will gone forever, for real.
If you end up taking an extended break and your account is flagged for deletion, you can go through the instructions emailed to you to undo this, which will reset the clock.
Hi Dan, fancy seeing you here 😇 keep up the good work!
Hi Val! 🥰
Couldn't this theoretically cause legal problems (at least in some countries), if the person spend money on stuff like skins etc.?
If you have spent any money on a Riot product you are immediately excluded from this
Will this affect Garena servers too?
Not just yet.
Oh so if I understand correctly if you spent money on the account it is permanently protected from deletion?
It is, at the very least, protected from deletion through our automated deletion system, yes. You can still manually opt to delete the account if you want, and that will be as thorough at deletion as this system would be.
wild guess, 2,423,272 /u/riotdanhonks
it's more than 1 account and less than all of them and that's all you'll get out of me
i'm a bit sketch on this decision. i recently recovered an account that I haven't used in 7 years that apparently wasnt attached to my primary email. it would have been deleted 2x over, and im really enjoying playing again.
I had to go through a support ticket and provide critical information to retrieve it.
I'm a returning player, and I had spent like, 3k (i was young) on the account.
The idea that all of this would have been lost if i had waited much longer to retrieve it is both relieving and frightening. I have a few other accounts i'll probably not bother trying to figure out retrieving, so i imagine they'll be lost forever.
This is only for accounts that signed up, tried League and decided it wasn't for them and stopped playing. If you've played any amount of time on League, you likely won't get hit by this.
Specifically, you would not have lost your account if you purchased anything at all from us, received anything as a gift, or played more than 20 hours of games.
I had an account banned many years ago, and ive since reformed. Is there a chance that account will get deleted with no possibility to appeal?
If the account has not been logged into in those years, yes, it's possible.
You can either:
ok but maybe also discuss how its absolute ass to lv an account to 30
This is in fact something I discussed, in slightly more delicate terms, a couple days ago.
In relation to banned accounts I don’t remember if my original account was permanently banned or not? How can I check? I’m just bitter about my lost skins still lol
You'd want to submit a ticket to player support. You should still be able to log into an account via the league of legends website (or VALORANT, etc) to submit one.
what about veryfying accounts with real documents?
That would mean we'd need to store identifying information on to know that those were the 'real' documents, thus increasing the amount of personal information we store, not decreasing it.
I'm not saying we won't do something like that, or store phone numbers, or any other solution - just that we ideally want to capture as little personal information on players as possible.
So if an account has played more than 20 hours it will never ever get deleted?
It won't be deleted by this automated process, no.
What about wintrading accounts in high elo? A lot of high profile streamers - like Tyler1 - have found numerous, blatant wintraders. Despite manual reports and making custom videos on it, they still don't seem to be punished.
That specific situation is not something these changes aim to address.
Hey, if my league account is current permabanned and hasn’t been logged into(banned) for a while will it be deleted? The support agent I talked to said while the account can’t have its ban lifted as of now, he is hopeful in the future it could potentially be unbanned, of course after a substantial amount of time or another unban experiment(make this happen please) pops up. I don’t want my account to be deleted just because it’s permabanned as I might be able to recover it in the future hopefully! Thanks 🙏
If you log into your account once, even if it is perma banned, it should reset the clock on it. Alternatively, you can just wait to receive an email from us if you do get chosen to have your account deleted, and follow the instructions in it.
Is there any place to see what user names may become available?
Not one that we officially support. You could maybe try sites like op.gg but they are pretty hit and miss.
Does this also affect Garena servers too?
We don't have plans to include Garena at the moment.
This might suck for weird reasons. One of my buddies, who got me into playing league, passed away a few years ago. Every time I sign on, I still see his user name as "away". It's a nice reminder of him. RIP BearT0wn.
I can't make any promises but we've seen a number of people specifically talk about a scenario involving the loss of loved ones. We'll be talking about it internally to see if we can balance deleting player data vs keeping them around.
I'd like a way to at the very least immortalise the connections people made even if the account is gone. I don't know if it's possible but I'm going to do what I can.
how much inactive time would tag an account as very inactive?
You'd need to be inactive for 3 years in addition to matching all of the bullet points in the article.
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