It is now possible for players to hide summoner names in champion select in League of Legends solo queue
The 2023 Preseason is just around the corner, and with it, we’ll see our favorite game change once more. One of the most recent updates, which has been discussed for several weeks, now allows League of Legends players to hide their Summoner names in lobbies.
Riot said in their earlier Matchmaking and Champion select Dev blog:
“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 stated that it was debating what modifications to make in this area, but that it was ‘likely’ to hide all summoner names in ranked solo/duo queue lobbies as a starting point.
On November 4, the feature finally became available on PBE. It is currently only accessible for regular games and not for solo queue. Once it is completely prepared and loaded, it will only be used in the solo queue.
Riot Games is implementing this functionality to eliminate stream sniping, repetitive dodging in high elo, and long queue times, as well as to combat toxicity. Although the concept behind this new feature is admirable, eliminating names from the lobby will undoubtedly make an impact.
Because this is mostly a modification aimed at high elo players and their complex int lists, the functionality should certainly be toggleable so that low elo players may readily convey their thoughts and odd selections amongst themselves.
With that in mind, the feature will be accessible on live servers on November 16 with patch 12.22.