Confusion over 2019 Worlds finals ticket sale times, fans upset

Sep 16, 2019

Reading time: 2 min

Riot Games is facing backlash after a mishap in the sale time of the tickets for the 2019 League of Legends World Championship finals.

The original announcement posted on August 26 stated that the tickets would go on sale on September 16 at 4pm CET, with prices ranging from €40 to €80 plus additional fees.

The tickets were supposed to go on sale through Accor Hotels Arena’s website. Instead, a wave of tickets went online at 2pm CEST through Ticketmaster and a second wave went on sale at 4pm CEST, one hour before the designated time. As a result, the tickets were completely sold out in less than an hour.

According to Anton Ferraro, manager of global esports communications at Riot Games, the tickets sold through Ticketmaster only represented a small portion and were meant for Riot’s partners. Apparently, the URL intended for the partners was leaked and the public got access to those tickets. Ticketmaster didn’t have any type of identity check in place, so anyone with access to the URL could purchase as many tickets as they wanted.

On Reddit, the community reported that getting tickets through Accor Hotels Arena’s website was impossible. According to the testimonies, people joined the queue at 3:45pm CEST and waited for more than an hour to access the site. One redditor said that they got access at 4:05pm CEST and everything was already sold out.

The tickets ended up on multiple ticket resale websites, where they’re going for over €300. One website is selling platinum tickets for over €400, and on other sites the prices go up to $2,000 per ticket.

The community is not taking the issue lightly. Some fans are asking Riot Games to recall the tickets and start the process over, which is unlikely to happen. Others are blaming Ticketmaster directly, alleging that the website is associated with other resale sites so they profit twice if the tickets go through a reselling site after the original sales are made.

At the time of this publication, Riot Games has not further addressed the issue.