League of Legends Southeast Asia

My sister received an email about it and while it is expected that a SEA publisher will take the game, some part of the news came as a surprise and caused an uproar with the SEAsian LOL players.

Official News: Riot Signs a League of Legends Publisher in Southeast Asia

The email that players receive is as followed:

Dear xxx,

We are excited let you know that Riot Games has entered a partnership with a Southeast Asian publisher which lives up to the Riot standard of awesomeness, and as such, we have granted them exclusive rights to League of Legends in Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore and the Philippines. Unfortunately, this means that players in those countries will be restricted from the US servers, so that we can ensure that they receive the highest quality play experience available.

Our first thoughts in signing this agreement were what would happen to our loyal players. We would like to thank you for your loyal support of our game, and let you know about some of the things that you will receive as part of this transition.

· First priority beta access to the new servers
· Lower latencies
· Simplified payment processes
· Personalized customer support
· A tailored gameplay experience

Thank you for your continued support and understanding. We look forward to seeing you once again on the Fields of Justice. Feel free to reply to this email with any questions you may have.

– Alex
“Skribbles”

This is a bucket of mixed blessing. The SEA publisher is not even known to the players at the moment (there is a guess) and yet the players are already going to be blocked from the North American servers with an advance notice of just a few days. Some players may not even be able to bid their ingame friends farewell properly before they find themselves shut out of the servers.

And it also means that until the SEA servers are up, SEA players won’t be able to play LOL at all or will have to resort to using proxy to play on the NA servers. With such a long wait, there’s no saying that the attention and interest of these players won’t stray from the game for good. That’s not a good move at all.

The good part is they are refunding the players who have spent real cash on them and some sort of account transfer is in consideration. That is good news, because of all the cases of players in a region being blocked from a server that I know of, the players were not refunded. Or it could just be that the publishers in those cases simply does not do that.

Though it is true, playing on a server hosted in a more local region means that the players may not lag as bad as when playing on the NA servers (my sister doesn’t lag much anyway) and can enjoy events more localized for this area and at better timing.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to play SEA LOL servers. League of Legends itself is a pretty noob-friendly game, in comparison to its Warcraft 3 mod cousin, Defense of the Ancients (DotA). However, from my experience, SEA community for Free-to-Play games generally have higher percentage of childish and spoilt players. Being abused by foul-mouthed teammates does happen occasionally in the NA servers, and it’s never a nice experience, and I can foresee that happening a lot more often in SEA servers.

So now, my sister is playing as much LOL as she can, then when the block slams down, bye bye Teemo.