As some of y’all are aware (or not), VG just got an update that allows players to finally select skins (excluding LE skins) in the Community Edition of the game. While discussing this, Loquori, the only dev working on VG at the moment was kind of enough to share some insight on the questions the community had (via Vainglory discord). Please check it out, it’s worth a read:

"Restoring accounts" is such a theoretical, I can't speculate what might happen with LE skins in that circumstance.

(Question is do y'all still have that player data? like account data?) Yes, I have backups of the databases when we shut them down. So, the data exists, but not anywhere that the servers can get at it.

Accounts are still offline. We archived the databases. So, we have the data, but it's offline. We have no immediate plans to restore it. I'm also very cautious about making promises, especially given that it took me two years to get a bug patch

Fixing infrastructure takes priority in the near future, but only because it will be required in order to make any additional updates. Some of the tech we built VG on 8 years ago is now End of Life and unsupported. Just like I had to make some client updates for Apple and Google, I need to make some updates to the backend to get us back to a good place for some years.

I am the only dev currently actively working on VG. I needed to set the CE work aside to focus on Catalyst Black, and once it launched, I started transitioning more and more of my time back to CE. However, I'm still the only person actively working on it. This particular fix was not easy, but it was in progress when I had to shelve CE. Most of the past couple of months have been spent on rebuilding the build and deploy infrastructure, which had all been torn down, and making a bunch of Apple and Google required updates to submit. So, we are in a better position to ship additional updates than we were a year ago, but we have no immediate plans to make any more changes to the client. I am working on some strictly backend changes, though.

The ranked game modes still exist and still use elo for matchmaking. The elo is stored on your device, though. So, if you uninstall and reinstall or move to a new devices, then you get reset back to 1200. I don't see Seasons and Trophies coming back in the near future, but I could see something where we publish elo for people who opt-in, and let community developers take that elo and use it for standings, leaderboards, etc. The best way forward for competitive seasons is going to be with community developers.

The year that it was quiet was because I was doing what we said I was going to do. We needed everyone (more than everyone we had reallv) to focus on Catalyst Black. I kept an eye on things and restarted servers when they fell over, but that's all the activity that VG got in that year. So, there wasn't anything to communicate. I still don't really have anything to communicate other than"skins and talents yay!"

Vainglory used to use a combination of Redis, Couchbase, and Elasticsearch for its databases, but these days it only has a tiny Redis cache instance that it uses for matchmaking. Catalyst Black uses only Couchbase.