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Riot announces LAN client, will be in use for Season 2

Riot Games reveals LAN client for high-profile tournaments; will be used for today's finals between Korea's Azubu Frost and Taiwan's Taipei Assassins.

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Less than a week after issues arose at the Season 2 World Championships quarterfinals, Riot Games revealed at a press event today that it is developing a LAN client for high-profile tournaments. It follows events last weekend where teams Elite and Counter Logic Gaming Europe for forced to replay their match on Wednesday night. The LAN client will be used for today's finals between Korea's Azubu Frost and Taiwan's Taipei Assassins.

CLG Europe standout Peter “yellowpete” Wüppen commented in a Reddit thread that the LAN client was in use for the rescheduled quarterfinal and semifinal matches, but not the games that were originally plagued by downtime. “The time they needed to set this up after the third day's disaster is surprisingly short, which is good on the one hand but on the other makes you wonder why it wasn't done in the first place just to eliminate risks even though it seems to have been relatively simple”, he went on to say.

Riot Games vice president of eSports Dustin Beck, who we interviewed last week, has responded saying that the company is doing everything it can. “We probably should have done this in the first place, but we are running so fast on so many initiatives, and are a really newly formed team at Riot, it's been a lot to bite off,” he says in response to Yellowpete. “We also should have had redundant internet in the event something improbable happens, and we have that now for Galen Center. I hope people don't view this as making excuses, we are the first to admit we need to do things better, but I can promise you that we are doing everything we can, as fast as we can, to identify those gaps and fill them.”

Riot Games CEO Brandon Beck did not confirm whether the client will be available for public use. Issues surrounding a lack of LAN at tournaments has had major implications at other tournaments, most notably with Blizzard's StarCraft 2. In April at the GSTL Grand Finals in Las Vegas, the crowd erupted in chant of “We Want LAN!” during a game between team aces Won "PartinG" Lee Sak and Lee "MarineKing" Jung Hoon when they had their game crash 35-minutes in.

In what appeared to be a like a likely win for Parting, MarineKing went on to win the rematch, as well as the rest of his games, to lead his team Prime to a championship. Blizzard has held firm on not releasing a LAN client, telling GameSpot in June that it introduced possible piracy risks.

“All of you fans who care so much about this are awesome”, Dustin Beck left off. “And the work and effort we are putting in to making eSports great is for all of you, and for all of our players that have the same dedication.”

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