Riot Games reverses all replays private decision, will limit replay downloads to 10 per hour

With the release of League of Legends Patch 26.21, Riot Games has gone back on an initial decision to private all replays for League of Legends, instead limiting the number to 10 per hour.

The move, as per Riot’s own patch notes, is to prevent what it called “large-scale abuse” by “bad actors,” explicitly calling out AI vibe-coded apps as a driver behind this decision.

LoL replay downloads will be limited to 10 per hour

When originally announced, the privating and banning of replay downloads generated significant ire from the wider LoL community who pointed to numerous issues that would arise from this policy. From teams and players not being able to use replays to improve their play, to content creators no longer being able to do their jobs.

Seeing the backlash, Riot Games has reversed their decision but not entirely.

“Starting during Patch 26.21, replay downloads will be limited to 10 per hour. You will still be able to download your own replays, as well as replays from your friends and other players.”

As speculated, the move was due to large numbers of agentic AI scraping of the replays, as described in the patch notes.

“This change is necessary to prevent large-scale abuse of downloaded replays by bad actors using vibecoded apps to scrape thousands upon thousands of replays. We opted for a time-based limit to still allow creators to make content, while preventing mass exploitative downloads. We’ll continue to monitor how many replays are downloaded to ensure players have access to this important feature while preventing clear misuse.”

While the limit to 10 seemingly does throttle these kinds of mass-downloads, while keeping content creators and competitors able to use the service, it does still seem high. The work around for this limit is likely simply just a case of making multiple accounts, or waiting until you’ve downloaded a large number, so unfortunately this may only be a temporary measure.

Still, hopefully this will stop the tide of AI vibe-coded slop apps and bots being created based on League replays, at least in the short term, while keeping creators and teams able to use replays for good use.