You have probably noticed that changing your nickname in League of Legends or Valorant does not affect your Riot Games name, i.e. the data with which you log into the game each time. This is because above your summoner name or player name in the tactical shooter is the Riot ID. This is a shared identifier for all games from the California studio, but it can also be changed.
How do I find and customize this Riot ID?
It only takes a few steps to set up (and change if you want) your Riot ID:
- Go to the Riot Games login section. Shortcuts are available on LoL or Valorant if you press "Edit my account" in the launcher (before being logged into the game).
- Enter your username (not Riot ID) and password. During this step, you may be asked to verify your account with a code sent to your email address, be sure you can still access it.
- You will see an options panel where you can configure your Riot ID.
- If you don't have one, you can choose the one you prefer. It consists of a name and five alphanumeric digits.
- Tap Save Changes.
However, there are some peculiarities. Your RIOT ID cannot be changed daily, and you must wait at least 30 days to change it again. Please note that if each game client is enabled for at the time of your Riot ID changes, you will need to change your credentials individually on each client. If you're using the Riot client instead, you'll only need to change your information once.
Usefulness of a Riot ID
There are several main uses behind this Riot ID. For the studio, this serves in particular to centralize the data, which can be useful at the server level, but the technical utility is not the main asset of the Riot ID. Thanks to it, Riot Games can know certain customers better (since in South Korea your account is directly linked to your identity document, the Riot ID is probably less useful to Riot Games to know the habits of Korean players), and do smarter targeting of what's new that may appeal to a particular person. For example if Riot Games knows that so and so has spent 50h on LoL the last two weeks and 1h on Valorant, then they will send an informative email for a future title in the Valorant universe, but will send several for a game in the universe of Runeterra, because more likely to interest the player.
Of course behind the commercial interests there are also practical interests for the player. The most important thing is to be able to keep your list of friends from one title to another, without having to PM each of them to know their nickname in the new game. The system with alphanumeric characters allows users to be able to choose the name they like, without the risk of duplicates. Then is Zorro#56489 better than ZörR0? You be the judge (apologies to One Piece fans, the editor made a splash splash to find out which manga would be taken as an example).