Riot Cuts Off Wild Rift Access For VPN Users

League of Legends: Wild Rift’s open beta is currently only released in Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand. However, many players outside the beta regions have been using virtual private networks (VPNs) to play the mobile MOBA. This has apparently caused a range of issues from an inconvenience (like language barriers) to outright game-breaking problems (like unplayable lag spikes for everyone—not just the players on VPN). Keeping this in mind, Riot has decided that to give players within the regions the best in-game experience. To this end, they will be restricting VPN logins for Wild Rift in regions outside the open beta.

Riot will prevent VPN access from the highest volume VPN services outside the beta regions effective immediately and continue to evaluate whether additional VPN services need to be added to the list. “It kills us to turn off access to anyone, but we think this is the right move to make sure players in the beta can enjoy Wild Rift the way it was intended to be played,” Riot said. 

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When Is Wild Rift Coming Out In Other Regions?

While the game is coming to Europe, Middle East, North Africa, Oceania, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, and Vietnam in December, for North America, South America, and India, Riot plans to release the game in the spring of 2021. Michael Chow, the executive producer for Wild Rift at Riot talked about the main reasons Wild Rift has been delayed in these regions. “The ongoing state of COVID, with its continued impact on the global landscape around us, is creating brand new technical constraints and complicating each regions’ own unique set of challenges and requirements”, says the Riot executive producer. “The pandemic has the team grounded and unable to travel, making it impossible to do what we would normally do to set up new server sites and server locations”, he continued. 

The net result of this has been a much more complex and multifaceted problem to bring service to certain regions in particular. “We want the quality of the Wild Rift service to make the game shine for you. Rushing this isn't going to give you the experience you deserve and might even put us in a situation where we need to take down the game completely”, says Chow. Regarding the problems of players joining the ecosystem late, Riot says it is looking for “cool opportunities” to make it right for players. One problem, in particular, is about losing time in earning enough Blue Emotes for champions to play in ranked mode. “We will be implementing some ways for all of you to get a bunch of champions to close that time gap.”

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