It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Riot Games and the LoL Esports team always struggle when it comes to ticket sales, and even more so when it’s the World Championship finals we’re talking about. It happened last year in Korea and the year before that in China.
Most of the problems they face aren’t exclusive to League of Legends or esports, as situations where bots and scalpers buy hundreds of tickets only to resell them have always existed. Nevertheless, this year Riot outdid themselves and made the already complicated endeavour of buying tickets for an international event that’s taking place in two months even worse.
To start things off, the LoL Esports article on the english site mistakenly stated that tickets would go live at 4 PM Central European Time (CET) when, in truth, they were intended to go on sale at 4 PM Central European Summer Time (CEST). This mistake meant tickets went on sale ONE HOUR before what fans who checked this article were told. Oddly enough, the spanish LoL Esports site listed the times correctly and a tweet from @lolesports made just yesterday also referred to the correct time zone.
Not only that but tickets were randomly sold through Ticketmaster France TWO HOURS before they went up on the Accorhotels Arena site. Riot employee u/RiotJokrCantSpell tried to clear this situation up by commenting on Reddit where he stated that this early sale was meant for Riot partners and only made up a small portion of the available tickets. However, many Reddit users are reporting that they were able to buy tickets without needing to confirm that they were Riot partners or anything of the sort.
As of posting this article, tickets are obviously sold out but can be found on third party reseller sites going for 500 € on average. Riot has yet to officially comment on what happened but this situation will most likely be added to the ever growing list of times they’ve botched ticket sales for their biggest event of the year.
