Key information
Riot Games is implementing a restriction in League of Legends patch 26.20 that prevents users from viewing match replays unless they personally participated in the specific game. This update makes all video-on-demand reviews private, blocking individuals from accessing previous matches belonging to others and stopping outside viewers from checking personal matches.
Reviewing these past matches served multiple purposes for the community, including studying high-level competitors to enhance personal skills, observing experts handle unfamiliar champions, and checking out interesting plays. Such functions provided diverse benefits to users seeking to improve their performance.
According to Riot Games, this update aims to fix security vulnerabilities recently exploited by malicious actors and cheat creators to develop unauthorized programs utilizing game data. Additional limitations were placed on third-party memory access for identical security reasons.
This decision heavily impacts professionals who depend on these features for their livelihoods, specifically affecting League of Legends coaches and YouTube channels dedicated to Challenger replays. Furthermore, a support page link intended to offer further details on third-party restrictions was broken at the time of publication.
