How to Appear Offline in League of Legends

Sometimes, you wish you could play League without your friends being able to see it. Luckily this guide is here to help you access offline mode while playing the game.

Why play in offline mode?

There are many reasons why someone would want to appear offline in LoL.

Casual players

There can be several reasons we casual players might want to access an offline mode. Maybe you do not need your IRL friends to see you play the game when you should be working on a group project.

You might have someone you don’t feel like playing duo with, but you do not want the confrontation of saying no.

You might also be trying to avoid annoying friends who won’t stop spamming you. So, you want to avoid them seeing you being online while you are playing League.

Or maybe you want to avoid getting caught duoing with a different support.

High elo players

For high elo players, it might be beneficial that friends cant see when they play solo queue. Especially for one trick ponies. To avoid people who champion select snipe them to ban out their one trick pony champions.

Streamers

For streamers who stream live games, a very real annoyance is being the victim of a stream sniper. These people will see the streamer playing and try and get into their games.

The stream can have a delay to make it difficult to queue up at the same time as the streamer. The friends list does not have such a delay. This allows the stream sniper to get into the streamer’s games much easier.

There are many ways to appear offline in League

Regardless of why you wish to appear offline in LoL, here are a few ways to access offline mode. Letting you remain undisturbed through your gaming session.

Chat status (Away)

The first solution is from Riot Games and is not quite an offline mode but rather the “Away” status. You can toggle this status by clicking on the indicator below your name in the client.

The indicator is green for online or red for away. Toggling it to “Away” will allow you to move around the League of Legends client while looking like you are AFK.

Not an offline mode

Unfortunately, it does not hide your activity while in queue or in-game. But it will let you admire your skin collection or add to it in the shop in peace. As your friends will think you are away from the game.

Use command prompt

The second method is a far superior way to appear offline. You do so by disconnecting yourself from the LoL chat servers using your firewall.

You can do this with a simple command through the command prompt on your computer. Making Windows firewall block the League client’s connection to the League chat servers.

Will this affect the game?

The game will continue to work as usual while disconnected from the chat/friends list system.

How to disconnect from the LoL chat server

Follow these three steps:

1. Close your client
2. Open command prompt in admin mode (you must right-click and say run as administrator)
3. Copy in the following line of text and press enter:

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=”appearoffline” dir=out remoteport=5223 protocol=TCP action= block

And you got it! A simple “ok” should appear below in the command prompt to show it worked. You are now appearing offline when you play League of Legends.

How to reenable the LoL client chat servers:

Once you wish to appear online again, repeat the three steps above. But instead, copy in the following:

netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name=”appearoffline”

This Command will allow the client to re-establish the connection to the chat servers.

And now everything is back to normal! A fast and easy method to hide your online status by making you appear offline.

The flaws in this method of appearing offline

Unfortunately, you lose access to your friends’ list while you play LoL. You must unblock access to the League chat servers to get the friends list back. Because of this, you also will not be able to see if others are online or offline.

The Riot Mobile app

A way around this would be to use the riot app Riot Mobile to access friend lists and send messages. The app works while playing League of Legends.

The app will not make you appear online. It will, however, make your in-game status show you as connected to the app. So, it might encourage people to message you even while you appear offline.

Use Deceive app

The third method is for those of you who want a more convenient solution. Or do not feel comfortable messing with the command prompt. The third party tool Deceive is what you are looking for. You can download the Deceive client here.

How Deceive works

Deceive is an app that alters the data your computer sends to Riot’s chat server. It won’t be blocking access to it entirely.

Meaning you will keep the ability to see and use your friend list. While still appearing offline to your friends.

Launching Deceive

Once you download the app, the Riot client will open for you to log in through. Deceive will appear at the top of your friend list when you launch League. It will inform you that the app is working, and you now appear offline to your friends in League of Legends.

Deceive is thus the closest thing to an actual offline mode. As it lets you appear offline while using the client like you usually would.

Can I get banned for using deceive?

No worries. Riot will not Ban your account for using this third party software. Riot confirms this here.

Some people have reported occasional issues with the app not working. But a restart of the app seems to fix these problems. Personally, I have never run into any of these issues while using the app. Downloading software and allowing it to run on your computer while not knowing what it might be doing is a risk. The risk of the software being malicious is small, but you should consider it when picking a solution.

Play on a Smurf account

These methods sound too troublesome for you? Well, luckily, there is also a different option. You could simply use a fresh smurf account!

This way you, your friends will be unable to spot activity in your match history. It just so happens that we sell such accounts. 😏 Feel free to check them out here.