Mentioned in this article Games: League of Legends

On Monday, tickets for Riot Games’ League of Legends World Championships 2019 Finals in the AccorHotels Arena in Paris went on sale. Tickets sold out within minutes while many fans report they didn’t get a chance to access the website handling sales just to find tickets being offered for up to 10 times the original price by scalpers within minutes. Several factors upset the League of Legends community.

First, a link for partners to purchase tickets for the event two hours before the official launch of ticket sales got leaked, causing confusion within the community. “The earlier sale represented only a small portion of the total available tickets. It was meant for our partners who this year had to secure tickets through the ticket portal,” wrote Anton ‘RiotJokrCantSpell’ Ferraro, manager of global esports communications at Riot Games on Reddit. “The vast majority of tickets went on sale at the designated time.”

Also, several communication errors were made by Riot Games, adding to the frustration of fans who were not able to secure tickets for themselves. Ticketmaster, the ticket sales platform worked with, uses a queue mechanism in an attempt to prevent bots from buying tickets. The company recommends users “sign in to your Ticketmaster account at least 10 minutes in advance of joining the waiting room,” a necessary process that has not been communicated by Riot. Even with that process in place, tickets sold out within minutes and presumably, despite those measurements, bots still purchased a large number of tickets.

Further issues in communication were created by announcing 4 pm CET (Central European Time or UTC+01:00) as the time ticket sales would start. This is equivalent to 5 pm CEST (Central European Summer Time or UTC+02:00) which is the clock time currently in use while ticket sales actually started at 4 pm CEST (3 pm CET).

Subsequently, only minutes after the launch of the sale, first reseller websites began listing tickets for the finals. While initially, resold tickets were available starting at €159 EUR ($176 USD), prices have since increased to up to more than €800 ($884) within a day. Original ticket prices were starting at €45 ($50), €40 ticket price plus €5 in fees, with the most expensive tickets sold at €87 ($96), €80 ticket price plus €7 in fees.

According to the European Consumer Center, “Selling, offering for sale or exposing tickets for sale or providing the necessary means for the selling of access tickets to sports, cultural, commercial, or live entertainment events in a usual manner and without authorization of the producer, the organizer, or the copyright owner of the event or entertainment is forbidden and punished with a €15K fine, €30K in case of repeated offence (Article 313-6-2 of the French Penal Code).”

Despite reselling tickets for sports and live entertainment events being illegal in France, this did not stop scalpers from using the League of Legends World Championship Finals in Paris to make a quick profit. Likewise, legal consequences are improbable for ticket scalpers considering the effort involved for authorities with sellers/buyers not being residents of France, using virtual private networks (VPNs), or using one of the many ways to circumvent the law for example by selling an €800 ($884) esports jersey and adding a ticket as a gift hence not reselling tickets.

While the ticket scalping issue catalyzed by automated scalping bots is not exclusive to the esports ecosystem, it is in the best interest of tournament organizers, that prioritize fan experience over ticketing revenues, to proactively handle this issue instead of hoping for ticket sales platforms to come up with a solution, as ticket scalping will always be an issue for events where demand for tickets outweighs supply due to the money to be made of resale margins.

Most ticket sale platforms have no direct financial incentive to prevent scalping as they earn from any sale made. In the specific case of the platform used for this event, Ticketmaster, its American arm of the company was previously accused of supporting scalpers. Potentially adding to the challenge for Riot Games to prevent ticket scalping, could be that the venue preset the ticket sales platform (The Esports Observer could not confirm that with any of the parties involved yet).

So far, Riot Games (ticketing is handled by the American Riot Games headquarters, not the European offices) has not announced any actions to be taken in response to the situation. For upcoming events, creating transparency around ticket sales could become crucial to regain the trust of the community. Such an effort could include personalized tickets (ID or phone number) only granting access to the person named on the ticket, non-paper tickets such as badges send per post to avoid fans potentially buying easily produced counterfeits, or a ticket lottery such as is used to distribute tickets for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

In the second half of 2019, this is already the second highly relevant esports tournament creating outrage in the community due to ticket scalping following similar issues occurring during The International in Shanghai.

The Esports Observer reached out to Riot Games, Ticketmaster FR, and the AccorHotels Arena Paris for clarification and statements. We will update this article if we receive a response.