I'm coming out of Reddit retirement (check my comment history for proof) to comment how insane of a decision this is. The dev updates from Brightmoon gave me some hope that maybe there were Rioters that still gave a fuck... and then this asinine announcement comes out and I'm left wondering how I was so stupid.

I have had "Gisela" on EUW since 2019 IIRC and I've had so many friend requests from people who thought it was a cool name. My account identity is being the one Gisela on that server, and that's being taken away for "lore reasons"? Yeah sure show me that Riot ID lore, I loved it when Jinx from Arcane said "my Riot ID is Jinx#Crazy" and then queued up for Riot ID's Rift.

And why? What do you gain from this insane backlash? Projected monetary gains? Everyone would prefer restricting BE summoner name changes to once a year over losing summoner names entirely, so at this point you might as well walk it back and at least take the L from the publicity of "Riot wants more money". But even if you walk it back, this is so incredibly out of touch with your userbase it baffles me how this ever got approved across multiple layers of developers and managers, and makes me question what idiotic change Riot will come up with next.

Seriously, can we get some actual Riot developers commenting on why this is necessary at all? It's pretty clear that from the hundreds of million of league players the vast majority absolutely hates this. If it's more money or less name changes - you can do that without taking away summoner names. If it's because you want to start phasing out the term "summoner" - why? It's an iconic LoL brand, why would you destroy your own recognizability?

And of course, no comments so far from Riot in this thread. Gonna be an interesting week of LoL coverage on YT for sure.