wtf is phantom-dancer?

Phantom Dancer is a macOS desktop app that lets you appear offline to your friends in League of Legends, VALORANT, and Legends of Runeterra while keeping full use of the games' chat and social features. It is a native macOS port and modernization of an older Windows project called Deceive, rebuilt using .NET 9.0 and the Avalonia UI framework. The app works by sitting between the Riot Client and the chat servers, changing what presence status your friends see without touching how the games themselves function. You can still invite friends, accept invites, and talk in champion or agent select as normal, though friends will not be able to send you invites while you appear offline. A small system tray icon lets you switch between online, offline, and mobile status at any time, and choosing which game to connect to can also be set from the command line. Installing it means downloading a prebuilt app or dmg file from the releases page, or building it yourself with the .NET 9.0 SDK on macOS 10.15 or later by cloning the repository, restoring dependencies, and running dotnet build. The README notes that Riot has confirmed the original Deceive project does not get users banned, though any modification could stop working at some point in the future. If the app's traffic interception hits a DNS resolution error, the README suggests switching to a public DNS provider or editing the local hosts file. The project is built with .NET 9.0 and Avalonia in an MVVM architecture, using a small embedded web server for communication and a command line argument parser. It is released under the MIT license, and the README states plainly that it is a third party project with no affiliation to Riot Games.