Riot: No plans to develop LAN for home use

On the eve of Riot Games' League of Legends Season 2 World Championships Grand Final between Azubu Forst and the Taipei Assassins, Riot announced it was developing a LAN client for tournaments, which would also be in use for the matchup Saturday night. At the time it was not said whether the client would be for major tournaments only, or also for all League of Legends players. Now it is known it will only be used for the former.

Riot VP of eSports Dustin Beck took to Twitter today to dispel the rumors. “We built an offline solution for the Finals for the pros to be protected from Internet connectivity issues”, Beck tweeted. “There are no plans to develop a LAN mode for offline play at home / LAN centers. Just wanted to clarify for everyone.”

The risk of creating a LAN client for use at home or at LAN centers is one quite large to developers that run online-only games such as Riot Games' League of Legends and Blizzard's multiple franchises under Battle.Net. These risks range from the piracy on a wide-scale for all previous and future iterations of each title, and the high-potential of hackers and cheaters causing major disruptions in these communities.