How players, accounts, and subscriptions relate

Scout models three things, and nearly every confusion about it comes from collapsing them into one.

A player is a person, as your server knows them: an alias.
A Riot account is one League account. A player can have several.
A subscription is a decision to post one player’s matches into one channel. A player can have several of those too.

So a player has many accounts, and a player has many subscriptions, and those two relationships are independent of each other.

Why the player is not the account

The obvious design would be to track League accounts directly. Scout does not, for two reasons.

The first is smurfs. People play on more than one account, and a leaderboard that lists someone twice — once per account, each with a fraction of their games — is not measuring anything anyone cares about. Grouping accounts under a player means the aggregate is per person, which is what a server actually wants to rank.

The second is that in-game names change. Riot IDs are editable, so a system keyed on them would lose track of who someone is whenever they renamed. The alias is your server’s name for them, stable regardless of what Riot says today.

The cost is that Scout cannot know two accounts are the same person. Someone has to say so, and if nobody does you get duplicate players — the most common way a Scout setup goes wrong.

Why the subscription is not the player

Tracking someone and posting their games look like the same act, but they are not, and separating them buys the arrangement most servers eventually want: ranked in one channel, ARAM in another, someone muted for a fortnight without being untracked.

Because subscriptions are separate objects, each carries its own queue filter and its own mute state. Adding a second channel does not duplicate the player, and muting one channel does not affect the other.

This also makes mute meaningfully different from delete. Muting keeps the subscription, its filters, and its history, and is the right move for a temporary pause. Deleting throws that away — which is why moving a subscription between channels is a first-class action rather than something you do by deleting and recreating.

Aliases are per server

A player is scoped to one Discord server. The same person tracked in two servers is two players, and each server can call them whatever it likes.

That is deliberate: servers are separate social contexts with separate rosters, and one server should not be able to see or affect another’s configuration. The tradeoff is that setup is not shared — joining Scout to a second server means adding players there too.

Deleting one thing does not delete another

The hierarchy decides what cascades:

Deleting an account stops following that League account; the player and their other accounts remain.
Deleting a player removes their subscriptions with them.
Deleting a subscription removes only the delivery to that channel; the player stays tracked.

Nothing removes messages Scout already posted — those are ordinary Discord messages your server owns.

Merging versus transferring

Two operations look similar and mean opposite things:

Merging two players says these were always the same person. Their accounts and history combine under one alias.
Transferring an account says this account belongs to someone else. The two players remain distinct people.

Reaching for merge when you meant transfer silently fuses two people’s records into one. The audit log is how you find out that happened, and it is a good argument for restricting who can do either.