For the first time in 12 years, League of Legends and its popular auto-battler Teamfight Tactics will be published by Riot Games in SEA region, ending over a decade of partnership with Garena.
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SEA players have a cause to celebrate
When LoL was starting out, Riot Games did not have the resources and influence they enjoy nowadays and had to partner up with local publishers in order to bring the wonderful world of Runeterra across continents, Garena being one of those.
However, Garena’s service quality is significantly below that of the global Riot Games. Patches are often delayed by at least 1 day, and if a patch was released on Thursday, the game would instead be updated on the following week’s Tuesday, a 5-day delay because Garena doesn’t want to work on the weekend to fix bugs. This not only frustrates SEA players but also affect the integrity of competition, as SEA pro teams will have to play and practice on an outdated patch.
On top of that, Garena LoL client proved to be even more buggy and CPU intensive than the infamous Riot client. Update speed is significantly slower and slows down your PC too. Garena also bombards players with cosmetics gacha events to profit off LoL’s IP.
It’s safe to say that the entirety of SEA LoL player base just breathed a sigh of relief! The reddit thread currently sits at over 10k upvotes
Players can start migrating their Garena LoL accounts to Riot
Riot’s contract with Garena officially ends in January 2023, and Garena servers will also cease to operate. The account migration process will begin on November 18th 2022. Here’s the official migration guide
Players in SEA but playing outside of the Garena server will also be able to migrate to SEA, but the process is 1-way only.
Players will get to keep all of their information, cosmetics purchases, RP, loots, friend list, etc but it is highly recommended to link your account to Riot by December 2022, otherwise compensations will not be guaranteed, and data might be lost, although the process will still be available even after Garena closes their server.
Your Garena shells will not be converted to Riot points.
