The League of Legends: Worlds 2018 event is set to begin on October 1st, and tickets for the finals are already sold out! Actually, tickets were sold out INSTANTLY, with virtually no fan being able to acquire a single one.
So, who got those tickets? One word…
Bots.
Tickets went on sale via Global Interpark, and according to a viral thread on the League of Legends subreddit, all of them were completely sold out in 8 seconds due to the work of Korean bots. The thread, which has already racked up nearly 8000 upvotes in 7 hours, was started by u/TestRoyale. In addition to reporting on his inability to purchase tickets, TestRoyale noted two other bits of relevant ticketing info:
- Tickets are already being resold on other sites for $550 USD. Considering that the original price for tickets are either 25,000 won or 45,000 won (which translates into $22.50 and $40.50 USD), you’re looking at a resale price that’s more than 10 times that of the most expensive ticket!
- Four new waves of seats appeared sometime after the thread went up and all were just as quickly picked up by the bots. This amounts to nearly 1200 seats being instantly bought out.
Needless to say, fans who’ve already booked flights as well as hotels aren’t pleased with Riot Games’ latest mess. Most of the top comments in the thread reflect their anger over Riot’s failure to manage the sale of tickets more responsibly. Here are some of the most upvoted responses.
At this point, it’s going to be extremely hard for Riot to sort out this ticketing mess. If they want to reclaim the tickets from the bots, they’d have to identify the credit card or payment method used by them and refund them to reopen the seat. While it isn’t impossible, it seems unlikely that Riot will act given the amount of homework they’d have to do to fix the situation for this particular event. So far, their hasn’t been any official response from the company, and whether or not they even address the issue remains to be seen.
At the very least, let’s hope that Riot actually learns something from this experience and puts in the effort to ensure such a disaster doesn’t occur at future events. One can dream right?
Featured Image Source: Lolesports
