Search for the Riot MMO and the first page will tell you it has action combat, player housing, fishing, raids with Baron Nashor, and a 2028 release. Every one of those claims has a date attached, and the date is before March 2024, when Marc Merrill reset the project because its design "wasn't different enough". The claims did not update. The game did.
This is a checklist, for readers and for anyone writing about the game: the specific statements that circulate as current fact, where each came from, when it stopped being current, and what Riot has said since. In most cases the last column is empty.
The checklist
| The claim | Where it came from | When it expired | Said since? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Action combat, no tab-targeting | Greg Street, 2021 to 2022 | March 2024 reset | No |
| Third-person camera | Street, 2021 | March 2024 | No |
| A "very large" open world | Street, 2021 | March 2024 | No |
| Persistent sandbox world | Reporting on Street's comments | March 2024 | No |
| Free-to-play with cosmetics, no subscription | Street, 2021 to 2023 | March 2024 | No, but unlikely to change |
| Dungeons and raids, Baron Nashor as a boss | Street, 2021 | March 2024 | No |
| Player housing, transmogrification, fishing | Developer answers, 2021 to 2022 | March 2024 | No |
| "Respects the player's time", low fear of missing out | Street, 2021 | March 2024 | No |
| Release in 2028, or 2028 to 2029 | Wikipedia infobox estimate, repeated by press | Never true as a Riot statement | Riot's only date is "before 2030" |
| The game is cancelled | Leak about Project T, 23 to 24 March 2026 | Never true; wrong game | Riot has hired since |
| Scruffy is game director | Riot, 2021 | Unclear since March 2024 | No |
| "Runeterra MMO" or "League of Legends MMO" as a title | Press shorthand | Never a title | No title exists |
Why the first eight are one problem
They are all Street's, and Street left in March 2023. The reset a year later was Merrill's judgement that the game those eight points describe was too close to existing MMOs to ship. An article that repeats them in the present tense is describing a design Riot decided not to make, and the repetition is now so wide that the expired version is the consensus.
Some of the eight will come back, and we estimate which in what is left of the 2021 vision. "Will probably come back" is a different sentence from "is", and the difference is the whole of this article.
The date
"2028" is the most repeated claim about the game and the one with the least behind it. It began as an estimate in Wikipedia's infobox, was quoted without the word "estimate", and hardened. Riot's only statement is Merrill's "before 2030", which is a ceiling. The arithmetic behind our own estimate, labelled as one, is in why "before 2030", and not sooner.
The cancellation
On one night in March 2026 a leaker's post about Project T, Riot's shooter in the Valorant universe, became a headline about the Runeterra MMO. Nothing in the post concerned the MMO. Riot hired its principal combat designer ten weeks later. The full account is in the March 2026 cancellation rumour, taken apart, and the dated evidence against the claim is in is the Riot MMO cancelled?
The title
There is none. "Legends of Runeterra" is a card game, trademarked in 2018. "League of Legends MMO" and "Runeterra MMO" are what people call a project Riot has not named, including us, and any article that uses one as a title is inventing it.
The people
Mark "Scruffy" Yetter moved from League to the MMO as game director in 2021, and articles still list him as such. His role after the reset has never been stated. The people whose roles have been stated since 2024, all of them from World of Warcraft, are in the WoW all-star team.
How to read anything about this game
Two questions catch nearly every error. When was this said, and by whom? If the answer is Street, or 2022, or "reports", it predates the reset. And which Riot project does this concern? Riot has at least two MMO-shaped games in development, and a claim that does not name the setting is not a claim about this one.
Everything that survives those two questions, as of the date at the top, is on one page: everything we actually know about the Riot MMO. It is shorter than the first page of search results, and that is the point.