[2023] I Programmed A Tool For Using Any Language On Any Region

The policies around third party apps are fairly nuanced, but typically yes bans are mostly related to breaking competitive integrity in some manner. You shouldn't get banned for enabling Spanish on NA, but I also can't say, "this app is okay" because not only would I have to vet it, I'd have to continue to vet any future releases and that's something we can't do for every app.

PLAYERS: In general, be cautious about any third party application you download. If it breaks competitive integrity you're likely to get banned, but if the app is literally just changing the language setting for your client you should be fine.

Also u/Jabukufo please register your app on the developer portal when product registration opens next Monday.

While I understand you believe this is something that should already exist in the client, there are reasons why it's not. The simplest of those reasons is that there is other work in the client that's higher priority.

Because I felt like your impression was inaccurate. We're not ignoring it, I know the work to do this has been considered. So now I have the option of completely ignoring your comment or replying as best as I can while attempting to not sound dismissive or combative because I disagree with your assessment. Of the two options, I'd like to reply to you because the topic appears to mean enough to you that you left a reply, but I think maybe I shouldn't have. You didn't get an answer you wanted, I didn't really change your mind, and I probably do look dismissive or combative.

To my knowledge, the solution to this problem isn't as easy as enabling the option to select any language in any region. An implementation of this done poorly, could make the whole client experience worse. So from my perspective, it's either we leave it how it is or we commit to doing it the right way which will take more time than we can spare.

I understand that this is something that players want, which is why I came into this topic originally to say if you modify the client to enable another language it's unlikely you'll get banned. However if you download a program to do this for you and the program does something shady, you're also risking getting banned so exercise caution.

/u/HOUNDfre as for your edit,

edit: can you actually explain why is it such a resource-draining job when third-party apps can already do this? I understand that no way im getting an honest answer here but whatever, asking doesn't hurt

There's two sides to this. Why can third-party apps do this and why does it take a lot of time for Riot to do this correctly. When a player modifies their own client, either by themselves or via a third-party app, then the changes are localized to them. If the client breaks it only affects them and they can easily just re-install the client or remove the app. If we do this and it's done poorly, it'll affect millions of players.

Now we're wandering into territory that I'm not the subject matter expert (sme) on so some of what I say might be inaccurate, but it'll hopefully provide better context. If it wasn't clear, my subject matter expertise is in third-party apps.

1. Every region tailors content to it's own player base, this is because some content makes more sense in some regions than it does others. This is why we name skins differently in some regions vs others allowing for things like localized puns and such. As such not every region sees the same content and therefore isn't localized. If we were to just enable every language, then there would be content that missing or just not localized at all. Then we'd have players asking why we shipped a half-baked experience. If we wanted to do this correctly, we'd have to localize each regions content into ~29 languages and create a new content management system to ensure all this localized content was delivered at the same time and properly managed by the client.
2. Okay great, lets say we decide we bite the bullet and take the time to do all of #1, now we get into the technical hurdles. A lot of the content that isn't on-demand like the News Page, is shipped with the client itself. Think the tooltips, the profile page, etc. Everything that doesn't change between patches is usually just packaged and shipped altogether. Well if you're supporting 29 different languages now you gotta ship a package that is much larger than if you only ship 1 language or 5 languages. Now I live in the US, so I pay a flat fee and get unlimited home internet. No problem I don't care if it's a 500mb patch or 2gb patch. I've even got 100Mb down so maybe it takes under 2 minutes to patch. Well if we ship 29 different languages with every client, we're kind of giving the middle finger to any player in regions around the world where unlimited internet isn't a thing. Some places you're charged by the gigabyte or you have a monthly cap. In fact in some of the regions, I believe we make USB sticks and ship it straight to the PC Bangs. In some regions it can take 30m to an 1h to patch if they did it over the Internet (instead of local installs). What if we added those 29 languages there? So now we're talking about making the content optional, we have to change the way we ship content in the client. There's a lot of ramifications here.

Again, there are parts of this that may be inaccurate, but hopefully I've illustrated the point of how it's not as simple as let's enable language drop down in every region. I truly believe the experience would be disjointed and arguably worse.

edit: I'm thinking about this a bit more, and I believe #2 is actually less of an issue than I originally mentioned. I believe the client already optionally downloads some content. Not sure what extent, but that's why the client usually patches when you switch regions or languages. I believe that's the localized assets being changed. Hence my hesitation to go this deep in the first place and leave it at, the simplest reason is there's higher priority work. I should stick to explaining third-party apps :(

Thanks for understanding, but keep up the good fight. Priorities are based on what player's want so the more people want all content localized for every region the more likely it'll happen. Don't let me discourage you, but now you know why I work on helping third-party developers. The dev community does some great things for players.