Riot Games recently capped replay downloads at 10 per hour.
Why?
Because a wave of vibe-coded tools started scraping replays at scale.
The company reportedly considered pulling API access entirely, but that would’ve punished the people the API exists for. Their community. The creators, analysts, and players who just want their own games.
So they picked a blunt instrument. A time-based cap that hits everyone equally (including the person it’s supposed to protect).
This is the pattern
@0xVatsaShah and I are seeing everywhere now.
Agents are hitting APIs that were designed for humans.
Providers face a bad binary choice: shut it all down, or eat the abuse and the infra bill.
However, there’s a third option.
Instead of treating every automated request as anonymous and suspect, you let the agent prove there’s an accountable, opted-in human behind it.
Now you can ask the question that actually matters: not “is this a bot?” but “whose bot is this, and do they have a reason to be here?”
Legitimate agents keep access. Scrapers hit a wall. Nobody has to rate-limit their own users into frustration.
That’s what we’re building at Valiron.