League of Legends is Making Changes to Unranked Games' Match History

A new change has been announced regarding unranked League of Legends games that will allow third-party websites to display match history data.

News of the match history changes comes from an announcement that was released on Friday by Riot Revenancer. The changes will affect the way that unranked match history is shown in both the in-game client and League website as well as through third-party websites. Players will be able to check out anyone's normal stats through official League resources instead of just those on their friends list like it is now, and developers from other sites will be able to use the unranked data as well.

The decision to change the way that unranked data is presented marks a turnaround from the 2014 stance where it was only visible to players' friends. With the retiring of the old client, the plan was also enforced on third-party sites as well, but Riot Revenancer explained why they've now changed course on this topic.

"We think the benefit of transparency outweighs the risk of revealing unranked data," the Rioter stated. "It's been accessible on third party sites for some time, and we haven't seen any significant worrying trends™. Many players primarily play unranked games, and those players want to be able to track their stats and scout their opponents. All players should have access to the compelling experiences third party devs create with the API."

As far as the third-party websites go, they'll be able to use the data with a couple of restrictions that they must abide by.

"Developers can display aggregated statistics to provide win rates, KDA, or other measures of player performance, but the queues used to aggregate these stats must be clearly identified," Revenancer said. "For example, if devs wanted to display a player's Fiora stats they'd need to identify which queues were used to determine their win rate, KDA, etc."

Player-shaming sites also won't fly, so the data won't be usable to create sites or subsites that attempt to embarrass players.

Changes to the way that players' unranked match history is displayed is expected to ship sometime during Patch 7.17, and the full explanation from Revenancer can be read here.