Is Korea boycotting the worlds? A fan reaction to the League of Legends S4 World Championship

Remember when Riot Games announced the location for the League of Legends Season 4 World Championships last November? Good old Seoul, Korea; fans were happy, pro players were happy, and of course, the Koreans were really happy.

But just yesterday, we found out there was a bit of fine print in that statement: the group stages will be held in Taiwan and Singapore, the quarterfinals will be in Busan, Korea, and only the finals will be in Seoul.

(See: League of Legends Season 4 World Championships: more Asian than ever)

Now, the Koreans are not happy; the move felt like a betrayal. In fact, one person on Inven is calling for Korea to boycott the Worlds and there’s already quite a bit of support.

Warning: long read ahead. Also, Please keep in mind that this is the post of a single person. However a lot of people do seem to agree, since the post gained significant traction.

Why Korea should boycott Worlds

What I felt strongly with this incident is that while Riot, on the outside, may seem to hype up and sweet-talk Korea saying it’s the center of e-Sports, saying they want to follow after them, but in reality [Riot] considers Korea to be nothing but customers throwing money at [Riot], hence my writing this post. We should take this chance to seriously boycott Worlds and ensure that the Finals stage has an empty audience to make [Riot] realize that Korea isn’t just an idiot country, but is an important customer base that needs to be taken care of.

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We got backstabbed

Early this year Riot announced that Worlds would be held in Korea, everyone was so happy. But today they announced that Worlds wouldn’t be held exclusively in Korea, but rather between Korea and SEA, and backstabbed all the Korean fans. All this seems to show they consider Korean customers to be not just moneybags, but degenerates of IQ 50.

Some idiots are saying that it was never announced that Worlds would be held exclusively in Korea, and trying to circlejerk, but when Riot first made the announcement, it was well implied that it would be exclusive to Korea. Then why the hell the sudden change of plans? To make an analogy, this is very much like when one of your friends invited you out to buy you a steak dinner, but then only paid for your salad while the rest was dutch pay.

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The group stages are the milk and honey of Worlds

People who’ve watched Worlds for Season 2 and 3 probably know this already, but the main events for Worlds are group stages and Finals. End of story.

The most interesting games happen during group stages when metagames of different regions clash with one another, and there are in general more games, and since various teams go against each other to try their best to make it through, it’s the next best thing after finals. Also, because the participating teams play soloqueue in the region Worlds is held in, all the fun stuff happens during group stages, when teams who didn’t make it to Worlds get to scrim with World qualifiers, funny anecdotes when foreign players play soloqueue, etc. However, leaving this opportunity to SEA means Worlds is held in Korea in words only; SEA take all the fun and glory while Korea is left nothing but the honor that is supposed to come with hosting Finals.

Also, everyone who plays League already realize that Korea is the strongest region right now, and assuming that all 3 Korean teams make quarterfinals, it means we only get to see 5 foreign teams. It seems pretty obvious already that Korea is going to win, the biggest thing Korean fans will be able to get out of this event will be being able to see all their favorite teams such as CLG, TSM, Alliance, Fnatic, WE, OMG and their players, but we won’t be seeing close half of them. If we get really unlucky, the bracket will consist of 3 Korean teams, 3 Chinese teams, LMQ – who is Chinese NA – and another team, which would make for the worst quarterfinals bracket in the history of League Worlds.

It would make more sense if groupstages were held in Korea and from quarterfinals on, held in China. The finals would be a bout between Korean teams anyway, what we want is the chance to be able to see different foreign players play.

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Riot has been ignoring Korea as a region

This is the biggest issue.

On the outside, Riot seems to consider Korea the center of e-Sports, alluding they want to follow after our footsteps, but in reality they consider us mindless customers, easily coaxed to spend money.

It really pisses me off that Korea has an equal customer base to other regions’ customer bases. China may have a large population, but most are too stingy to spend money in-game, there are numerous servers to be taken care of, so in face actual profits are not that high. However for Korea, starting off with the PC-Bang [Internet cafe] Premium [all Korean internet cafes have all champions unlocked. For this bonus, internet cafe owners have to pay a fee to Riot for every hour a customer plays League], they make $$$, and since the Korean playerbase is used to spending money on games, the money they make off Korea is at least the same as for China. However the way they treat us is so polarizing.

China was the first location where All-Stars was held, and because they have tens of hundreds of servers, they don’t lag or get DC’d. Every New Year, or for similar anniversaries, they make new China-related skins, and the Chinese server has superior in-game images for champions as well.

As for EU and NA, they keep the players on a payroll, and since NA is their homeground, they even hire psychologists to take care of in-game trolls. They communicate freely between the playerbase through Reddit and the official forums, and get feedback from one another…well can’t say much about this, League is an American game in the first place.

However in comparison, what about Korea? Only last year, we couldn’t play during weekends due to server problems, and trolls and toxic players are a serious problem but nothing is being done, trolls are actually triumphant over the regular, innocent players. Look at half the posts here (on Inven), they’re about how League is eventually going to fail due to trolls, and still Riot doesn’t give a shit.

In-game wise, for a champion we got Ahri, that’s one; for a skin we got Shaco for a 1-year anniversary, that’s another -_-; we at least managed to win Season 3 Worlds to get a Worlds skin, but they seemed to be lazy and gave us skins that pale in comparison to Season 2 TPA’s skins. Japan doesn’t even have a dedicated server yet, but they’re doing so much for the upcoming Japanese server with things like items and unique dances, having 4 ninja champions and Yasuo for a Japanese champion, etc.

With this year’s Worlds, contrary to their first announcement, Worlds with be a joint-hosting event thus Riot considering us (Korea) to be a region beneath NA and China. We’re on the level of SEA…us hosting exclusively won’t be classy enough and therefore we have to host jointly with SEA.

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And the top three comments from the original thread: