Riot Games and China have been long known for their control over many aspects of players due to political reasons. With the state of the coronavirus outbreak right now, it seems that the word "corona" has caught their radar this time.
A player recently made a post on Reddit saying that Riot forced him to change his name or he won't be able to play League of Legends. The player received the message when he logged into the game on April 1. He then sent a ticket to Riot Support so they whitelist his name.
In the ticket, he explains that he was first using the name "Squid Corona" for many years and changed his name to only "Corona" since July last year, which is his surname in real-life, so friends can recognize him easily.
However, after two weeks of going back and forth with the 3 different supports of Riot, they came to a final conclusion that he would have to change his name or he won't be able to play the game.
They basically said that the family name of that player is offensive while other players who made names such as "CoronaVarus, CVD-19, ChinaVrs, CoronaComin4U" are still existing in the game freely. Also in many different languages in the world, "corona" can mean anything other than the virus. In Italy and Spain, "corona" actually means "crown". The word "corona" itself doesn't really have any negative consonant to it and Riot is basically fighting something that not even a problem in the first place.
This incident is actually not surprising at all considering how paranoid Riot Games and Tencent have been in the past. During the Hong Kong protest last year, Tencent prevented players in PUBG Mobile from typing "Hong Kong" in the world chat by replacing it with asterisks.
Comments