Ask Riot: Usernames and Senna

Senna. Usernames. Existential dread (wait… what?). Let’s go.

What’s going on with Riot Accounts? Why did I have to change the username I use to log into League?

In short: We have to update the account system so we can launch new games. When this update takes effect, it’ll cause problems for players with login names that aren’t globally unique (aka, someone else in another region has it as well), so we’re asking players with duplicate usernames to change them. This only affects the username you use to sign into League. Your Summoner Name will not be affected.

The long version: In preparation for launching new games, we need to rebuild our account system. The old system linked accounts to specific regions, meaning we couldn’t release another game unless it has the same exact regional divisions as League of Legends. This is problematic as we might offer different regional configurations for future games.

In order to fix this, every player needs a unique username, and there’s currently a lot of duplication across servers. As long as there are two people with the same username, neither will be able to log in when we activate the unique username system. We tried to find a way to make the system work differently, but couldn’t find a solution that would be reliable, secure, and sustainable for a multi-game platform.

We wish this transition were less painful and inconvenient. We know it sucks to have to change a piece of your identity as a player, even if it’s one that only you can see. We’re asking players to change how they log in now—before the unique username system activates—so everyone’s experience with future games is as smooth as possible. We know this process hasn’t met your expectations, and frankly, it hasn’t met ours either. We’re working hard to make sure our new systems are as future-proof as possible to avoid situations like this down the line.

In the meantime, we hope that being able to save your username and password to auto-login will make things a little easier. We’re also exploring allowing you to log in with your email address instead of your username, which we’ve seen a lot of players ask for. And for anyone who’s unhappy with the username they changed to, we’re planning on letting you change your login credentials again early next year.

- MOSHIDOG, Senior Director, Player Platform Team

Why didn’t you make it so the oldest account (or first one to log in) gets to keep the login name?

We considered this, but it comes with a host of other problems.

Let’s say you and one other person have the same username, but you had it first. Once the unique username system launches, there’s no way for the login system to know which account that username is trying to access. Is it you, the one who had it first, or is it the other person trying to log in?

The only way around this would be to change the other person’s account for them, but that has the risk of locking players out of their accounts forever. Imagine not knowing your username was changed, trying to log in with the username you’ve always used, then getting the “wrong password” message over and over because the login system now thinks you’re trying to log into the other person’s account. And if you don’t have access to the email associated with your account, you wouldn’t even be able to recover the new username (plus you wouldn’t have gotten a notification about the change in the first place).

- MOSHIDOG, Senior Director, Player Platform Team

How are you going to balance Senna so she’s good as a support but not too strong as an ADC?

It’s always been a goal for Senna to be playable as both a support and an ADC. To help make this a reality we added a few position-specific tuning levers to her kit during development. The primary place we’d look to tune is her Passive’s mist collection game. Mist stacks influence the power of nearly everything on Senna’s kit, and making a specific role get more or less of them has shown to have meaningful impact on that role’s effectiveness. This is why souls are less likely to drop from minions Senna kills—ADC Senna gets more gold and more items, so she needs less stacks to be effective. If ADC is too strong in the future we can make it less likely to see souls drop from cannon minions, whereas if support is too weak, we could consider upping the number of souls that drop from minions she doesn’t kill.

Other adjustments outside the passive to consider are how Senna scales with the item system. Support Senna has access to AP builds, and buffing those ratios could help her in a way that ADC Senna cares less about. ADC Senna on the other hand has an easier time saving up for big AD items like Infinity Edge, which makes adjusting her Crit Damage ratio a potent tuning lever if her carry role needs changes.

At the end of the day, we want ADC and support Senna to be close in power level, but they don’t need to have the exact same winrate. The dream is that they both feel viable without one being so strong that it requires us to destroy the other. I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to tune around and preserve both playstyles for years to come, but, if that proves impossible, we’ll prioritize support Senna over ADC.

- AUGUST, Senna’s Designer

Why’d you make two marksmen back to back?

Generally we attempt to create a varied schedule for the year, with a bunch of different themes, classes, roles, kit complexity/difficulty, tone, regions, gender, etc. We balance this between new champs and VGUs, which is one of the reasons we haven’t released a new jungler in a bit, since quite a few recent VGUs were junglers.

So why then did we release Senna and Aphelios back to back? To answer this, we have to go back a bit in time. We started early exploration on Aphelios before we began working on Senna. He was a complex champion that required a pretty long ideation period to get his kit right, and then also a longer-then-average production cycle to build due to the complexity of his kit. As we were working on Aphelios, we started thinking about which champions we could make for League’s 10 Year Anniversary, and we felt creating a champion that would be exciting to long-time League players would feel really good for that moment.

After some brainstorming, we decided that bringing Senna out of the lantern would be impactful and feel nostalgic to all the players who’ve known about Senna since Lucian and Thresh were released. At that point it became more about doing what was right for Senna, and not what was right for the champion release schedule. We quickly came to the conclusion that it made sense for Senna to be a marksman since she was portrayed as one in all the previous lore. We also felt it would be important for her to interact and lane with Lucian, which is why we decided to build her as a support marksman despite the fact we had already released a support this year (Yuumi) and already had Aphelios planned for the end of the year.

Bottom line is that while we like to keep to a varied champion release schedule, we are willing to sacrifice that if we feel there is a good opportunity that will be impactful and exciting.

- REAV3, Lead Producer of Champions

We’ll do our best to read every question, but we can’t guarantee they’ll all get answers. Some questions may already be answered elsewhere, and some won’t be right for Ask Riot. This isn’t the best place to announce new features, for example, and we might skip conversations on issues we’ve talked about in depth before (though we can clarify individual points).

We are listening, though, so keep asking. We’ll make sure your questions are heard by the Rioters working on the stuff you’re curious about.