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I live in the UK, along with a friend from Europe. We play League of Legends on the Europe servers for ping, though sometimes on the US servers if we want to play with US friends. Each server has entirely seperate progress, which kind of sucks, but it's fine. We can swap between them at any time.
We planned to play Runeterra on the NA server, because latency doesn't matter in this game, and we'd rather play with all of our American friends. So we signed in to the NA server on the launcher, specifically picking the dropdown; signed in with our NA league account, and then it assigns us to... the Europe "shard" (which is where your data is stored, and what matchmaking uses), because of IP. We literally can not play with any American friends, ever, no matter what. Changing regions on the launcher doesn't do anything, because the "shard" region is what dictates this, not the region you logged in with.
I used to play hearthstone, and you can swap between any region at any time with the click of a button, and keep all your cards/progress/everything, and play with anyone, or in any matchmaking server (Edit: I forgot, Hearthstone let you swap regions but has seperate progress/items per region; I was misremembering that Overwatch keeps all your stuff between regions). So all of this feels like so many steps backwards, it's absurd, how did a game launch like this in 2020, from a company with this much money?
And even when it comes to fixing the issue, or perhaps asking Riot to transfer your region; it doesn't work! I have absolutely no idea what's going to come of this, I'm not hopeful Riot will fix this unless attention is brought to it, so that's why I'm posting this.
There's a lot of forum and reddit posts shining some light on the backend that made me realise just how bad the problems were.
So, to recap, it assigns you your shard region based on your IP, instead of using the region you select when you create an account, which is then further unchangable without support help. There are multiple problems with this:
1: It can assign the wrong region!
Here are some example posts about that.
Why on earth is my account set to Indonesia? I don't remember ever being asked that nor having to answer where I'm playing from. Is this some kind of auto-setting that Riot f*cked up?
I'm getting the same error. When I log into my Riot Games profile, it says my country is China, but I can't change that. I'm trying to play in NA.
My country says it is Thailand, but I'm from the UK. I made the account 9 years ago but have never played LoL.
Same problem. It seems that my account is from Indonesia, even though I made it in Spain. Wtf
Same Problem here. Created Account in Germany but Country says it Indonesia. rip
I can't play Legends of Runeterra even though I live in NA. I play LoL on NA servers but my riot account says my country is Taiwan?????
And many more.
2: It can fail assigning a region, locking some people out of the game entirely
https://i.imgur.com/mVEx6W1.png
3: Changing a region with support will completely destroy your account, and doesn't solve the issue at all
Support doesn't seem to understand what's going on.
Support explicitly tells you that you will lose everything.
Thanks for writing in! So we've actually very recently updated our process, so I can change the shard of the account for you, and while it will still reset any progress that you've made on the account so far, you'll be able to keep the currency that you've obtained on your account and once the shard is changed you'll receive 3000 shards, completed tutorials and starter packs, and 11k XP added to your account! Also changing the shard would allow you to challenge your friends in the same region!
Yet even if you go through with it and have them change your region, it doesn't seem to fix the issue; leading me to infer that they're changing the Riot account region rather than the shard region.
I had the same problem sent a support ticket to riot they changed my region but not my shard. They are now telling me there is nothing they can do for me.
This might be one of the worst customer service experiences I've had in over a decade.
They back tracked on everything. I haven't played in over a week waiting for a resolution and now they've made my account even worse than a brand new one! At one point I had 19 cards, which may be a world record for fewest owned cards on any account in the game. It's kind of hilarious at this point. I think I could've mailed a letter written on Kleenex, addressed it to an active dumpster fire, and still had a better customer support experience than I have had thus far.
And finally, the worst examples of them all, something that combines all the above problems (and more!) into one succinct post; people who were affected the most.
I was placed in the Russian region on a European shard...
No idea why. I live on the east coast of the U.S. I never used a VPN to potentially confuse it. Had to contact support. My region was thankfully moved to US but my shard is still European, which still makes no sense.They said it'll take time to transfer shards, and my decks will be deleted -__-Luckily my xp still remains, supposedly. Of course they said "continue to play to earn xp and buy coins as those will transfer." I think I'll not risk paying money to have it deleted
Also, my username was some random hash of characters rather than the username I used to login to the game. I played League once years ago, so I used that account. It's all be very confusing. I just want to play against my buds:(
Just wanted to vent a little about Legends of Runeterra's support. I understand this game is in beta and there are bugs to be dealt with, but it's still frustrating.
There's a bug where some people are put in a random region on Legends of Runeterra. This means you can't challenge friends (unless they happen to be in that random region too). When I got on Legends of Runeterra, my region was set to Sweden for some reason and I was playing on the European servers.
I contacted support, and explained I'm supposed to be in America but some weird bug had me set to Sweden. They swapped it for me and said "please know this is a one time exception."
I was like, okay..? Shouldn't be a problem, but they said that as if it's my fault my region got set to Sweden. I signed back in, and sure enough - my region was America now. If I went to the store, it was no longer showing prices in Swedish currency.
However, the server I was playing on was still EU and I couldn't challenge friends. So I contacted support again, and they said they can change my server to America and would give me enough experience to have the tutorial and prologue completed so I wouldn't lose too much progress.
I said okay, sure. They went through with the change, and I signed in, and all of my progress is reset. It's like I've never played the game before. I told them the prologue didn't finish and they said "Oh, sorry about that. We can't actually do that for you."
I mentioned how the other person who replied to my ticket earlier said they could, and that it's not very fair to tell me that after I agreed to the swap thinking I wouldn't be losing too much.
They said "I understand this is frustrating but we can't give any progress."
I haven't seen a single post saying support has helped them in any way. Nobody has ever gotten their shard to change without weird VPN region masking on the first login. It doesn't seem like support even understands the issue of a "region shard" and people saying "please move my region" just has their account trashed without fixing the issue at hand.
This is absurd, it feels like it's held up by such bare threads, and I really don't think they should launch the game in this state.
I made this post because I feel like some kind of recognition of the issue needs to be brought up, because currently the community just thinks it's standard region locking without knowing the far worse issues lurking barely beneath the surface.
Edit: From the comments, it seems to be that support has in fact successfully swapped peoples' shards, which is good, though it still completely wipes their progress. This implies that all the data is kept on the shard and that keeping progress/cards between regions will never happen, even if they do add shard swapping.
Honestly I'd still be annoyed, but nowhere near as annoyed as I am now, if they'd put people with US accounts onto the US shard, people with EU accounts onto the EU shard, etc. I signed up with my American account for a reason, why can't I play with Americans on my American account?
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