How to Appear Invisible While Playing League of Legends

Anyone who has ever been in the grips of a rage-fueled gaming bender knows how annoying it is to have people randomly pinging you in the chat with random nonsense. If you don’t feel like putting up with friends while playing League of Legends, there is a way to appear offline, albeit an abstract one.

Here’s how to appear invisible while playing League of Legends.

How to Appear Invisible While Playing League of Legends

For whatever reason, the backend used by Riot Games for League of Legends doesn’t natively support the ability to let players appear invisible. Whatever the explanation, you can’t hide your presence through the regular UI. You can, however, hide yourself by disconnecting from the chat server. League of Legends maintains separate servers for game chat and gameplay, so if you just disconnect from the chat, you can still play online normally.

This method only works on a PC running Windows and requires a bit of tinkering in the Command Prompt. If you’re not comfortable with that, we’ll have an alternate method for you later.

Using the Command Prompt

First, make sure you have your basic Windows Firewall enabled. Basically, what we’re doing here is tricking the firewall into blocking the specific IP address of the chat server, so it needs to be active.

Run your PC’s Command Prompt application, cmd.exe, and do it in Administrator Mode. With the command prompt open, you’ll need to copy/paste one of the following commands based on where you’re located:

• If you’re using the North American client: netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=”lolchat” dir=out remoteip=192.64.174.69 protocol=TCP action=block
• If you’re using the European client: netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=”lolchat” dir=out remoteip=185.40.64.69 protocol=TCP action=block

After you do this, you should get a notification that you’ve been disconnected from the PVP chat in the League of Legends client. No one on your friends list will be able to see if you’re online like this, and you can still play the game normally.

If you want to restore chat access, just bring up the Command Prompt again and type this: netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name= “lolchat”

Invisible Services

For those of you who aren’t comfortable messing around with the Command Prompt, there’s another route you can take. There are third-party applications specifically designed to hide you from sight while playing particular games. For League of Legends, the best choice is Deceive, which you can download for free here. Just launch League of Legends using the Deceive launcher instead of the regular one, and you’ll be hidden.

Remember, there’s no shame in wanting a little peace and quiet while you’re gaming, nor is there any shame in dodging that one friend who always wants to play League but is really bad at it.