After many years, Riot Games has officially announced that it will be deactivating League of Legends’ web match history service permanently in around two weeks, on Monday, Sept. 13.
“Very few players use our official match history site, and we’re okay with that,” Riot’s comms lead Paul Perscheid said in the post. “Web match history is in a similar situation as Clubs was: Community sites have done amazing things with the match data provided by our APIs, far surpassing our site. So, as with Clubs, we’re going to fully hand things over to these experts.”
The League client will still have match history built into it and Riot isn’t shutting down third-party access to match history data. The team will, however, be transitioning to a new service for the future. The developer relations team will continue to support third parties while that service comes to fruition.
In April, reports surfaced about the possible removal of League’s online match history, much to the chagrin of esports writers and data analysts across the globe. Websites like Oracle’s Elixir and Leaguepedia all use the access control point system that came with Riot’s online match history, and if this was removed, then all of these sites would also go down.
These highly informational sites have been a backbone for many professional teams and journalists, who use them on a daily basis to collect important information about specific players, teams, and regions for reports, articles, and scouting. Luckily for everyone, Riot said it’s “creating a solution for esports sites that should be an improvement to how they currently get data.”
In the meantime, if you need to get your match history fix, you can visit sites like op.gg or Porofessor.
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