In the two years since the reset, the Riot MMO has generated four official statements, three senior hires, one departure and one false cancellation. Everything else published about it in that time was commentary on those nine events, or invention. If you want to follow the game, the job is to catch the nine and ignore the rest, and there is a method for that.
The four sources that break real news
LinkedIn. Every senior hire on the project since 2024 announced themselves there before any outlet reported it. Raymond Bartos in January 2026 and Brian Holinka in June 2026 both reached the public as profile updates. Follow the people, not the company: the ex-Blizzard staff listed in the WoW all-star team are the ones whose next move matters, and so are their former colleagues.
Riot's MMO recruiting page. It has said the same thing since December 2020: no specific openings, but send your details. The day it lists a role is the day something changed, and the role's title will tell you what.
Massively Overpowered's Riot MMO tag. The site has followed the project since the announcement, reports hires and departures within a day, and corrects itself in public, which almost nobody else on this beat does. It is the one outlet we would keep if we had to keep one.
Justia's trademark index for Riot Games. A title will be filed before it is announced. Riot's existing "Legends of Runeterra" marks from 2018 cover the card game; a new filing with an MMO-shaped description would be the first sight of the name.
How to grade everything else
We use four grades, and they are simple enough to apply to any headline.
Riot itself, or a named developer on their own account: take it as fact. Merrill's statements, Bartos's and Holinka's announcements, the recruiting page.
Established specialist press with a record on this beat: take it as reported, name the outlet, and expect it to hold. Massively Overpowered, PC Gamer, PCGamesN, Game Developer, Game File, Wowhead, Inven Global.
Aggregators and general gaming sites: useful for noticing that something happened, never sufficient to say what. Check who they cite. Most of the long-lived errors about this game, the 2028 date and the pre-reset feature list among them, live at this level, and we catalogue them in the Riot MMO facts that expired in 2024.
Leakers and anonymous accounts: rumour, to be reported only as rumour, with the account named and the date attached. They are sometimes right about direction and never a confirmation of anything. The March 2026 episode, in which a leak about a different Riot game cancelled this one for a morning, is the case study, in the March 2026 cancellation rumour, taken apart.
Two questions that catch most errors
When was this said, and by whom? Anything from Greg Street or from 2022 predates the March 2024 reset and describes a design Riot decided not to ship.
Which Riot project is this about? Riot has the Runeterra MMO, a Valorant-universe shooter known as Project T, and possibly a third open-world game known only from one leak. A claim that does not name the setting is not a claim about this game. Project T is explained in Project T, Riot's other MMO.
The calendar
Riot has not shown the game at any event, and has said it will stay dark for years. But companies talk on schedules, and these are the dates on which a change would most plausibly surface.
February: the DICE Summit, where Merrill gave his "most of my time" comment in 2025. March: the Game Developers Conference, where Riot's engineers speak; the Unreal Fest talk that revealed Riot's shared Unreal stack was a conference talk of that kind. October: League's anniversary, the occasion of the MMO's original tease in 2019. October and November: the World Championship, Riot's largest stage. Any of those could carry the first image. None is likely to, and we say so each time.
What an announcement would look like
Not a leak. Riot revealed Valorant with a closed beta weeks away and a full marketing plan; it will not let its largest project surface through a screenshot on a Discord. Expect a trailer at a Riot-controlled moment, a title filed weeks earlier, and job listings that go from "no specific openings" to "senior" roles in the months before. The absence of all three is the current state, and it is documented on the page we maintain for exactly that purpose, everything we actually know about the Riot MMO.
Following this site
We publish when something happens and date every claim we make. The feeds are at /feed.xml, /atom.xml and /feed.json, and the list on the front page sends one email when there is something real to send, which, on this project's record, is a few times a year. The full dated record is the Riot MMO timeline.