The League of Legends esports community is at risk of losing access to valuable data regarding professional matches. Information from any competition might become unavailable to third parties seeking information.
It all revolves around the Access Control System (ACS), the backend of match histories. Up until now, third-party sites such as Leaguepedia, GamesOfLegends, and Oracle's Elixer, could use the backend to acquire detailed information about any League of Legends esports game. For example: "How many creeps did G2 kill versus Fnatic?" is a question that could be answered by data sites through the ACS.
However, as pointed out by Schalke 04 Esports analyst Rodrigo "rLT" Oliveira, this backend will disappear soon.
Though Riot Games did just introduce more esports features to their character-based shooter VALORANT, allowing for more data to be gathered, there are no signs yet that League of Legends will receive a similar update to preserve the valuable match information.
It should be noted that the disappearance of the ACS would not impact sites such as OP.GG, as those track individual games rather than tournament games.
This is the Mid Season patch, and is what the Mid Season Invitational will be played on.
Image courtesy of Riot Games.
