Riot Games receive backlash over League of Legends Clubs removal

Riot Games has received backlash from League of Legends fans after it was announced that they would be shutting down their in-game ‘Clubs’ feature later in the year.

Clubs in League of Legends is a feature that allows players to easily find one another in-game, making it quicker to queue up with any players you might not have added as a friend.

The feature lets players add up to 100 members in each group and it also gives each player a custom Club Tag, that they can equip to represent their Club in-game.

However, Riot announced, on September 10, that they would be “sunsetting Clubs” towards the end of the year, following competition from third-party companies like Discord.

“Clubs is a single feature vying for attention among a TON of awesome League features that we want to build or update.” Riot devs revealed in their blog post, “with those competing focuses, we’re never going to create a community tool that beats out the industry leaders. We’re okay with that.”

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They also revealed that technical constraints played a factor in the removal of the feature, adding that Clubs “needs to be rebuilt” if they want to keep it around for longer.

League of Legends fans react to Clubs removal

However, the removal of Clubs did not go down well with some League of Legends fans, as Riot received a lot of criticism shortly after the announcement was made.

One player, Avereo, pleaded with Riot not to remove the feature, sharing that it was quite common to see people join clubs for their favorite champions and that they were not only used for communication in-game.

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“[Clubs] are used to give my friend group a unified identity in-game. If you think they are only used for communication, you don’t know why people are actually using them,” they added.

Another League fan highlighted some of their in-game Club tags, calling for Riot to rethink their decision of removing the in-game feature.

Others like Kyaandere were more frustrated with Riot, simply claiming that the League of Legends devs are “always giving us what we don’t want.”

Avereo later responded, claiming that there were plenty of fans who wanted the Clubs feature to stay and that Riot could look for new ways to improve on the system, such as adding Club-based quests and challenges.

Following the backlash, it is still unclear whether Riot has any intention of rebuilding and reworking Clubs, so that it can remain in League of Legends.