League of Legends fans who queued up early for tickets to the 2019 Worlds Championship Finals were shocked when the venue sold out before the window to buy went live.
Riot Games are gearing up for the culmination of the 2019 season with a Worlds event spanning three different countries.
The Championship was bound to generate loads of hype, but elation quickly turned to frustration as fans were denied a chance to purchase a ticket.
Problems with scalpers and bots gave way to the problem, while it seems like someone also posted the incorrect time for tickets to actually go on sale. This resulted in a lot of people missing out on a fair opportunity to go to Worlds.
Fans quickly realized a ton of tickets had already been claimed, but salt was applied to the wound when they found third-party vendors reselling them at incredible markups.
“Basically on the AccorHotel site the tickets went on sale at 4pm,” one fan said. “But on Ticketmaster they were already up at 2pm, I entered the queue to buy tickets at 3:48 on Accor I was told I have to wait 10 minutes and at 4:22 I’m still in the queue for completely sold out tickets…”
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Riot Games Global Esports Communication staff Anton ‘JokrCantSpell’ Ferraro replied to the thread saying “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.”
Though it was his closing thought that left people even more confused: “The vast majority of tickets went on sale at the designated time.”
Worlds Finals tickets to the general public were supposed to go out at 16:00 CET / 7:00 PST / 10:00 EST, but they had reportedly been released at 16:00 CSET / 6:00 PST / 9:00 EST which was a whole hour before the advertised release.
This meant that people who planned out their days to arrive just in time for the ticket launch, had actually already missed it due to the error.
While the Worlds competition will feature the best League of Legends teams around, it seems like fans will have to pay ludicrous resell values to attend the Finals in Madrid on November 10, 2019.