League of Legends pro streaming bans lifted

Riot Games has elected to change policies on professional League of Legends players' streaming activities following negative community reaction.

"After reading all of your comments and having a LOT of internal debate over the last 24 hours, we’re going to be changing the LCS team requirement to something that more closely matches our intent," Riot Games’ Whalen Rozelle wrote on Reddit.

"While under contract to the LCS, teams and players can’t accept sponsorship from other game companies to promote other titles. Besides that, they are free to stream any games they want."

Rozelle thanked the community for "helping us make a better decision on this", and explained that said that Riot's initial, arguably draconian policies were prompted by skullduggery from other companies.

"There’ve been instances of other game studios trying to buy access to League fans by using (or trying to use) LCS teams/players to promote their competing games on stream," he wrote.

"The way we chose to deal with this was clearly an overreach. It hit our goal of preventing companies from advertising through LCS players, but it also encroached on pros’ ability to have fun and entertain viewers during long Challenger queues – and we realize that’s not cool."

The original policy banned contracted League of Legends players from streaming a variety of games, as well as from illegal or socially unacceptable behaviour.

Thanks, games.on.net.