A player who has been active in League of Legends for six years was informed by Riot on April 1 that he would need to change his username, “Corona.” The user, who said his surname is Corona, emailed Riot in hopes of getting his name whitelisted.
Originally playing under Squid Corona before changing it to just Corona in 2019, they were denied whitelisting after two weeks of constant contact with Riot’s support team.
“I thought it was amusing at first, as almost every game a player would say in chat “nice name” to me, but I just shrugged my shoulders and emailed Riot in the hopes of them agreeing that it was a funny situation, and my name would be white-listed,” Corona said. “After two weeks of back and forth with multiple “Player Support Specialists”, I was told that they had come to the conclusion that my name would not get white-listed and that I would have to change it if I wanted to keep playing League of Legends.”
They shared multiple images from the emails with “Player Support Specialists” at Riot, while also calling out other players who are using similar names in other regions and venting about his frustration with the entire situation.
After the post received thousands of upvotes on the LoL subreddit and many people sharing it over other social media platforms, Ryan Rigney, the communications lead for LoL, responded to the situation.
“We don’t think forcing a name change in this instance is in line with our policies, so we’ll be looking into this situation,” Rigney said.
The response wasn’t anything grand, but it did let Corona and the community at large know that Riot would be looking into the matter directly. Additionally, Corona exchanged tweets, which seemed to spark a DM conversation.
