Riot Games has confirmed that it has sent a formal cease-and-desist letter to the management of Chronoshift, a fan-run "legacy server" for League of Legends that allowed people to play a decade-old version of the game. On Reddit, however, he denied accusations that he was trying to "blackmail" developers, saying that his policy on such things is clearly spelled out in his legal guidelines and that he warned the project not to proceed when it was announced last year. [In response to the announcement of Chronoshift in 2020, Riot Jean wrote, "Please don't hijack. "Riot Games' policy on product development is very simple and easy to read: read the Legal Jibber Jabber (yes, it's called that) and the policy at developer.riotgames.com."

The project was proceeding anyway until late last week when Chronoshiftdev's account posted a message that the developers had been contacted by Riot's security department and "forced to hand over code and website."

"We have worked on this project for almost five years and thousands of hours," Chronoshiftdev wrote. 'During all this time we have never asked for a single donation. We have rejected and expelled people who have offered thousands of dollars to access this project."

The message includes a link to a screen capture of a conversation with Zed, a person claiming to be an employee of Riot's security department. The message begins nicely enough, with Riot's legal team saying, "Unfortunately, we are not too thrilled with your project and are looking for a way to bring it to a mutually acceptable conclusion."

But when the developers involved immediately refuse to flip, the tone quickly changes: first, Zed hints that Riot is monitoring the Chronoshift team's actions in real time (including a purported effort to remove the chat channel), then flatly demanding the chronoshift.dev website, source code, and all identifiable information that was shared with other developers.

"Give me what I'm looking for and we won't sue. Refuse and we will sue," they said. 'I have no interest in prolonging this. If you want to talk to a lawyer, you can do so. I am a security team. It's my job to find people and things. I am not a lawyer and have little or nothing to do with the legal proceedings Riot is involved in. We can reach an agreement to end this today, or we can both turn this over to an attorney. Frankly, I am fine with either."

The handover to the lawyers is what finally happened: a Riot representative confirmed today that the studio's legal team sent a letter to Chronoshift's developers yesterday, "formally requesting that they cease development of the project."

"Our stance on projects like Chronoshift is also set forth in Section 3 of our Legal Guidelines. We understand that the Chronoshift team is disappointed, but should not be surprised by our request."

The rep also acknowledged that a screen cap chat with Zed took place, but said Riot was "disappointed in the conversational trend."

"We will address this internally," they said. We often attempt to make good faith contact before issuing legal documents," they said. However, in this case, given the Chronoshift team's reaction, we proceeded through more formal channels."

"We have been working with the Chronoshift team to ensure that they have a clear understanding of the situation," they said.

The letter sent to Chronoshift's creators states that its intellectual property is "extremely valuable and therefore Riot is taking this matter very seriously."[24] Chronoshift's suspension of all development, closure of its servers, the group's demands the removal of all related materials from social media and the handover of all software related to the project, including modified clients and source code.

"As unfortunate as it may be for you, please keep in mind that Riot and its developers, designers, artists, and employees have spent countless hours creating fun and engaging experiences on authorized, official servers. Unauthorized servers like Chronoshift harm Riot, its business, and ultimately its employees."

"While we hope to resolve this matter informally, please be advised that Riot is prepared to take any action it deems necessary to protect its rights, including initiating litigation in US federal court.

The Chronoshift team has complied with this request, but is clearly unhappy; a message posted on the Chronoshift website emphasizes the length of time the developers have spent on this project, five years, and that they have declined all offers of financial support The message also states that Riot's works are illegal. They also deny that Riot's work was illegally distributed or that Chronoshift was intended to compete with League of Legends live games.

"We are incredibly disappointed in the way Riot has chosen to handle this situation. Instead of starting a conversation about the future and interest in this type of project, they took advantage of our work for free and attempted what could be seen as an attempt to start taking legal action against us."

According to Riot's letter, Chronoshift's request for source code "is a standard request made of all developers engaged in unauthorized activity," but the studio is actually trying to set up its own LoL legacy server, possibly speculation that it will be based on Chronoshift's work. That seems unlikely: Riot is fully capable of coding its own legacy server, and while the person in charge acknowledged that anything is possible, he added that the studio's position has not changed since the 2017 Q&A.

"We can't just pull old data and expect current game engines to play well with it all. If we had a bunch of smart engineers working to make it happen, we could almost certainly make it work, but then those engineers would not be working on other features that might be more valuable to you guys in the long run," Riot s Ghost Crawler, aka Head of Creative Development, Greg Street, said at the time.

"Similarly, you could have designers create versions of existing champs that try to mimic old data (season 2 abilities, items, tuning, etc.), but that's a mountain of work for something that might only be fun for a few games or so.

"So philosophically, I'm not opposed to playing an older version of LoL, and for a short period of time it could be fun (because there's a great chance you'll discover that the reasons for all the changes made in seasons 3, 4, and 5 still exist).