Riot Games has forced a fan project for League of Legends to cease operations: Some fans had been working on a LoL Classic for 5 years. However, an employee of Riot threatened the developers in a way that is perceived on the internet as “extortion” and behaved in a cringe-worthy manner.
This is the project in question: The project was called Chronoshift. It is essentially the same idea as private servers for WoW, before WoW Classic existed. Chronoshift was intended to be a privately operated server where you could play LoL as it was 10 years ago.
Back then, LoL had far fewer champions, and the systems were not as refined. It was a different game.
The developers of Chronoshift say:
- They had been working on the project for 5 years
- Invested thousands of hours
- Had never made money from it, covering all expenses themselves. They had declined offers of thousands of dollars from people who really wanted to join the server.
The fans apparently hoped to operate in a gray area and that Riot Games would let them be. They thought their work harmed nobody. However, that hope was dashed.
Fans say: Riot extorted them to hand over LoL Classic
This is the controversy: 5 days ago, the developers of the project turned to the public on reddit (via reddit). An employee of Riot Games named Zed supposedly invited them to a conversation on Discord and pressured them to abandon the project.
They posted a long chat log with statements from “Zed,” who behaved like a sort of “mafia extortionist” and made particularly bold statements to get the fans to end the project.
Zed immediately threatened with a lawsuit, but that is “long and complicated”; hence he wanted to resolve the problem this way to “spare everyone the trouble.”
If the fans complied with his demands, then “everyone could go home without feeling bad about it.”
The demands from Riot were:
- Hand over the website to us
- Hand over the complete source code
- Provide us with all important information
This was the offer. If the creators of Chronoshift complied, they wouldn’t be sued. If they refused, Riot would file a lawsuit.
Zed explained: He works for the security team. He finds things and people. They could resolve this today to settle the matter or take it to court. It ultimately didn’t matter to him.
He ended the conversation with the words: “I wish I could say it was a pleasure.”
Fans consider alleged Riot employee a fraud and charlatan
This is what was discussed: On reddit, people believed “Zed” was a fraud posing as a Riot employee, but was just a troll.
It was hard to imagine that a guy with such a deliberately cool persona truly worked for Riot. Clearly, this was a guy on a power trip. No one speaks like this in a real professional environment if they have any self-respect.
Riot sends a cease and desist, kills the fan project
This is now the turning point: Zed actually works for Riot Games. The developers of PC Gamer explained this. Riot Games states they had already asked the developers in 2020 to read the terms and cease work on the project.
They have now sent a cease and desist letter to the developers of Chronoshift.
Riot Games admits that the conversation with “Zed” did indeed take place, but says they are “disappointed with the tone of the conversation.”
They will now address it internally. They often first approach people in good faith before going to court, but in this case, they opted for the official route.
The team has ceased work on the project, but expresses being “incredibly disappointed.”
Is LoL going to make a LoL Classic now? No, it doesn’t look like it. According to Ghostcrawler, they theoretically could do it. However, it would be a mountain of work that probably isn’t worth it. They prefer to invest the technologists’ work into the current game.
They have nothing against the idea of an “older version of LoL” and it would certainly be fun for a short time, but they would quickly find that there were reasons to release Season 2, 3, and 4 after Season 1 and it is quite possible that it simply isn’t worth investing much developer work into the project.”
Sounds quite similar to what Blizzard said for years about “WoW Classic”:
New Blizzard head was the hate figure of WoW Classic fans
Sounds quite similar to what Blizzard said for years about “WoW Classic”:
