Southeast Asia League Of Legends Get Sudden Ban Hammer Action

Riot Games, the game company behind action role-playing game League of Legends, has signed a deal to get the game distributed in Southeast Asia. That’s good news, but it’s also bad news. Now, it’s more bad news than anything else.

“Attention, League of Legends players!,” starts a message on the League of Legends forum about the sudden news. Riot Games is unable to go into specifics about the distribution deal, but the company says it is “extremely excited at the prospect of being able to offer a higher quality experience to players in this territory through our new partner”.

“Through this partnership, we will be able to offer Southeast Asia its own, unique League of Legends experience,” the message continues. “In addition to a localized client, we aim to be able to provide increased accessibility to Southeast Asian players through features and promotions specifically geared towards the residents of this region. We also hope to advance League of Legends to many new players in the area, including a large number of veteran DotA players.

Unfortunately, this does mean that, as of February 25th, players located in Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, and the Phillipines [sic] will be blocked from the North American servers as part of our publishing agreement. All of these players have received a refund in full for any purchases they have made, and each has received a personal email from Riot Games explaining the situation, and offering a code redeemable for additional exclusive content once their local servers go live.

“We believe that this will be an exciting opportunity for League of Legends to achieve even greater success in a new market, and to provide a high-quality, competitive gaming experience to a much larger number of Southeast Asian players.”

The upside is that Riot Games is offering a full refund for any purchases and a code for additional exclusive content. That is making the best of what could be viewed as a bad situation. What’s more, Riot Games claims that the partner will be able to offer a “higher quality experience” by most likely localizing the game — though, obviously many Southeast Asian players already speak English…as their native language.

That being said, this move does potentially prevent people from playing with the friends they’ve made playing this game. And what about things like all the things, like XP or IP or runes, that players did not purchase, but spent hours and hours grinding through the game to get?

Riot Games is looking into “potentially” transferring accounts. Friends? Well, make new friends.

Riot Signs a League of Legends Publisher in Southeast Asia – League of Legends Community [LoL Thanks, Tody!] [Pic]