Source: Necrit (YouTube), quoted from the video's own transcript. Verified against multiple sources; datamines and reports are labelled as such, not stated as fact.
The Story
Necrit's 13-minute video says Blizzard is shipping the classic MMO Riot abandoned in 2024. Riot's own words were milder, and the thumbnail's tweets are mock-ups.
Blizzard, the studio behind World of Warcraft, is shipping the MMO Riot threw away, and the biggest League of Legends lore channel on YouTube just told 321,000 people so. World of Warcraft is the 2004 online role-playing game the rest of the genre still copies, known as WoW, and League of Legends is the five-on-five battle game made by Riot Games. The MMO in question is the role-playing game set in Runeterra, the world every Riot game shares, that Riot reset in March 2024 and hasn't shown since.
The channel is Necrit, the largest League of Legends lore channel on YouTube at about 936,000 subscribers. On September 14, 2026 he published "The Biggest Twist For The Riot MMO Development!", a video that runs 13 minutes 28 seconds. By September 16 it had about 321,000 views, 4,900 likes and 778 comments.
His argument, in his words: before the reset Riot was "essentially working on a WoW clone. They were planning on making a League-themed WoW," and the reset is "how Riot walked away from the classic MMO formula." Two days before his video, at BlizzCon, Blizzard's annual fan convention, Blizzard announced World of Warcraft: Forever, a permanent level-60 version of vanilla WoW that follows the classic formula strictly. Vanilla means the original 2004 game before any expansion. So, Necrit says, Blizzard is now building the game Riot abandoned.
Since WoW Forever is essentially what Riot was trying to do, if this game does well, that's going to be a fumble for the history books.
— Necrit, "The Biggest Twist For The Riot MMO Development!", September 14, 2026, watch
That's creator commentary, not a Riot statement, and the gap between the two matters. "WoW clone" is Necrit's phrase. Riot co-founder Marc Merrill, who announced the reset on March 20, 2024, said the initial vision "just wasn't different enough from what you can play today" and that players do not want "an MMO that you've played before with a Runeterra coat of paint." Runeterra is the one thing about the MMO Riot has confirmed.
One thing to read past: the thumbnail. It shows two tweet cards, a "We did what they wouldn't!" attributed to Blizzard's World of Warcraft account on X and an "Oh no..." attributed to Riot's. Both are Necrit's graphics. The real post from that World of Warcraft account on September 12 reads "Carve A New Path In A Legendary World" and gives the November 4 date, and it has about 4.3 million views.
The Reset
Marc Merrill's 2024 thread said the first vision wasn't different enough. Necrit's history of Blizzard's Classic experiments ends at Forever, which launches November 4.
Merrill's thread is the only official account of why the MMO started over. "After a lot of reflection and discussion, we've decided to reset the direction of the project some time ago," it begins, and the reason is one sentence: the initial vision "just wasn't different enough from what you can play today." The same thread said the team would be "going dark" for likely several years, and it has been.
Necrit's version of how Blizzard arrived at the opposite answer is a short history of its own experiments. WoW Classic, Blizzard's re-release of the original game, was a hit. Then came the Season of Mastery, a seasonal server that ran the same game with small changes and, in his telling, "wasn't different enough" to keep people around. Then the Season of Discovery, which went the other way and tested how much of the formula could change. His conclusion: "Blizzard learned that people love new additions to the classic MMOs as long as they are not too different." Forever is that lesson turned into a permanent game.
The facts on Forever are Blizzard's. It was announced on September 12 at BlizzCon. Its beta runs September 17 to October 21, it launches November 4, 2026, and it's included with a WoW subscription. Blizzard's strictness runs all the way down to the wardrobe: it made transmog optional so everyone looks like what they earned, which is the kind of purist call Necrit means by the classic formula.
He isn't sold on all of it. The Skyborne, Forever's new neutral elven race, are "the blue elves," and his verdict is short: "They don't feel classic, though." He will still stream the beta and the launch and, as he puts it, "classify it as a Riot MMO research."
I don't think they can change their philosophy too much if this actually becomes a success because at that point we will have a second reset. And I don't think anyone wants that.
— Necrit, "The Biggest Twist For The Riot MMO Development!", September 14, 2026, watch
The Servers
Forever drops realms for a ruleset pick and region-wide play. Necrit says that is the question the community has been asking Riot.
The sharpest part of the video is the plumbing. Forever is realm-less. Instead of picking a realm, the single server a WoW character has always lived on, players pick a ruleset: Normal, PvP, Roleplaying, and Hardcore after launch. Names are unique per region. It's still region-locked, so there will be separate servers for North America and Europe, but everyone in a region plays together.
Necrit's point is that Riot's games already work this way. "It doesn't matter if you're playing League, TFT, or Valorant, you always connect to one server and play with other people there." League is what players call League of Legends, TFT is Teamfight Tactics, Riot's auto-battler, and Valorant is Riot's tactical shooter. The open question he puts to Riot is whether the MMO does realms, region servers, or something bigger: "what people really want to see is a global server."
Riot has said nothing about the MMO's servers, and nothing about the MMO at all this week. Between September 12 and September 16 no developer account on our Riot MMO watchlist posted about the project.
What This Means for the Riot MMO
Forever is the public test of Riot's 2024 bet, three of Riot's MMO leads are WoW veterans, and the difference Merrill promised has to come from Runeterra.
Our read, and it's speculative. Riot has never shown its MMO, so the community measures it against whatever the genre ships, and this week the genre shipped the thing Riot said it would not make. Forever is the control group for the promise Riot made when it reset. If a strict classic MMO lands big on November 4, the pressure on Merrill's promise of "a significant evolution of the genre" goes up, and Necrit has already told 321,000 League of Legends players to watch it exactly that way.
The people building Riot's MMO know the formula from the inside. Principal Game Designer Brian Holinka spent about eleven years on WoW's PvP and combat design. Senior Game Producer Raymond Bartos is a former WoW Lead Producer. Senior Engineering Manager Orlando Salvatore is a former WoW lead software engineer, and he shipped WoW Classic before going back to the whiteboard where Blizzard guessed its opening-day player counts. So the lessons Necrit expects Riot to take aren't hypothetical. What Riot has committed to is a different matter: we counted seven WoW problems Riot's MMO can skip, and it has committed to none of them.
Forever is the control group for the promise Riot made when it reset.
The server point cuts closest. Riot's live games already run one shared shard per region, and Forever going realm-less is the first time Blizzard has matched that model in an MMO. The question is whether Riot's MMO goes further, to one global shard, and that isn't revealed.
| Side by side | WoW: Forever | Riot MMO |
|---|---|---|
| Formula | Vanilla WoW, level cap 60, followed strictly | Not "an MMO that you've played before," per Merrill. Nothing more |
| Servers | Realm-less. Pick a ruleset; names unique per region; region-locked | Not revealed |
| Setting | Azeroth | Runeterra, the one confirmed fact |
| Dates | Beta September 17 to October 21, launch November 4 | Not revealed |
| Price | Included with a WoW subscription | Not revealed |
| Where the news lands | BlizzCon, on a stage | A 39-second clip on September 5, then silence |
Then there's the coat of paint. Merrill's line only works if Runeterra is more than a set of names to paint over Azeroth, WoW's world, and Riot's own fiction says it is. Take one war. Noxus, the empire where strength is the only currency, invaded Ionia, the island nation of spirit and balance that is still scarred by it. Noxus lost at the Placidium of Navori, a defeat that turned the invasion into a grinding war of attrition.
Riot put that war on screen in Awaken, the cinematic it released for the 2019 season, and it's the best three and a half minutes of what a Runeterra MMO would be drawing on. Draven, Noxus's showman executioner, holds an arena full of prisoners from Ionia. Irelia, Ionia's blade dancer, whose weapons move with her, breaks them out. Karma, Ionia's spiritual leader, rallies villagers in a field as Sion, the Noxian warlord raised from the dead, leads the charge.
The cinematic then crosses the sea. In Piltover, the city of progress, Camille, the enforcer with hextech blades for legs, hunts Jhin, the masked killer from Ionia who stages murders as art, through a theater.
None of that is a coat of paint. It's a war with a front line, an occupation, a resistance and a crime scene, and it is the material Merrill was pointing at when he said Riot had to "truly do justice to the potential of Runeterra." The war has an aftermath RuneGrove has already walked: the Noxian fight pit in Ionia that never closed and the grove that buys your worst memory.
The map below is that fiction, not a launch plan. Which regions the MMO opens with, how much of the map it covers, its era, its platform and its price are all unrevealed. Demacia, the kingdom of justice and martial might that distrusts magic, sits beside Noxus and Ionia here because those are three of the world's regions; the crests illustrate the world, not a starting area.
Which leaves the line the community picked up. Necrit closes with "Riot actually needs a Riot Con," and the gap he's naming is real. Blizzard announced Forever on a stage. Riot's last MMO moment was a post: on September 5 its own account wrote "So about that MMO we're building..." over a 39-second clip of Merrill from PAX, the games convention, which sits at about 7.2 million views. Executive producer Fabrice Condominas quote-posted it with "I can confirm that this project is not for the faint of heart" and an eyes emoji. That's the whole official record for September, so a YouTube video is where the comparison gets set.
- Forever's November 4 launch is a public referendum on Riot's 2024 decision that a classic-formula MMO was not different enough.
- The realm-less, region-wide server model Blizzard adopted is the model Riot's own games already use. The open question is whether the MMO goes further, to a global shard.
- A creator with 936,000 subscribers framing Forever as Riot MMO research means the comparison follows Riot's game until it shows something of its own.
- The difference Merrill promised has to come from Runeterra. The Noxus and Ionia war above is what that looks like when Riot shows it.
Your Take
Is WoW Forever the game Riot should have finished in 2024?
What to Watch
Three dated Forever beats, then three more RuneGrove reads on Riot's MMO.
World of Warcraft: Forever beta opens
Necrit says he will stream it as Riot MMO research.
The Forever beta closes
Two weeks of dark before launch.
World of Warcraft: Forever launches
Included with a WoW subscription. The referendum starts here.
Reported from Necrit (YouTube), quoted from the video's transcript, with Marc Merrill's reset thread and the Warcraft and Riot posts embedded above. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.
