Riot Games Releases Riot IDs to League of Legends, Replacing Summoner Names and How to Change Them

Back in the 16th of October, Riot Games announced that an upcoming changer would hit League of Legends — Summoner Names were being sunsetted and replaced with Riot IDs. This started back in Valorant, where players weren't prompted to select a name, but instead, it would show their chosen Riot ID alongside their tagline, and though many summoners around the world thought that they were safe over in the Rift, Riot Games finally brought the system to their MOBA title.

The announcement came in the form of a pop-up when you launched League of Legends after that date, wherein you could find information about the upcoming change and how it would affect everything. In it, the explanations came for the reasoning, including the fact that Summoners were removed from the lore back in 2014 due to the in-world limitations it was causing. Ever since the removal of this original aspect of the game, Riot Games has been removing many of the mentions to the original premise, from champion quotes being removed to mentions of "summoners" slowly being overwritten.

The change was expected to dish out on the 20th of November 2023, where now everyone's name will be changed to their Riot ID upon logging in. A few questions came from the community, including how this would affect adding friends, and even those who were sitting on original names from the release of the game were upset — most of all, perhaps, were the content creators. 

Riot ID day has come and gone, and that means that now, it's time to change your name, which will forever be reflected in your game. Though many players wanted to have unique names between Riot's titles, especially those who prefer to have names directly associated with characters in the universe, this was not fixed or changed, and Riot Games outright states that it won't.

It isn't all bad, despite what some evidence suggests, as players can now select any name and use it in their chosen game, meaning that you could use any word, adjective, or username without having to find a variable that isn't taken. Part of the reason this was important to Riot Games was due to the fact that new players were taking nearly a dozen attempts — and upwards of five minutes — to create a new account that had a unique name. According to the blog post, thousands of players gave up before even entering the tutorial.

So, what does this mean for you? Well, the original plan from the 16th of October for username changes has been scrapped, as Riot Games will no longer give you a paid option to change your display name and you won't get a free one every 365 days. Instead, a new system was introduced, where you will now only get a free name change every 90 days, starting with the update released on the 20th of November.

Though this limits name changes to four per year, it's a more forgiving system than the original limitation, and Riot Games has established that changes could be coming if the system isn't hitting the right goals. As for impersonation attempts, the blog stated that there are more changes coming to protect content creators from impersonation (an update many are looking forward to, as currently, there are a lot of Hide on Bush accounts).

How to Change Your Riot ID

As previously stated, you won't be able to change your Riot ID until 90 days after you previously changed it, after which point, you can do it for free from League of Legends by:

• Go to the in-game shop
• Click the account button
• Select the Riot ID Change
• You'll be redirected to account.riotgames.com
• Choose your desired Riot ID

Or on the Riot Games website by:

• Hover on your name in the top right
• Click on settings
• Change your Riot ID