Language options
Hey everyone, [vlad-salute]
I am here to talk about and bring attention to a feature which I think should be implemented into the client.
As you might've guessed from the title it's the options you have to set your client and in-game language in League. Presenting my little, not as exciting, story:
I recently had a conversation with a really nice Rioter after I submitted a ticket about how I wanted to change my client and in-game language to Korean. What I wanted to accomplish with my ticket was asking whether working around the restrictions of the language options would be able to get me or my account in trouble. After a few quick searches through the internet I had found a simple way of breaking the chains
that Riot binds us all to and expand the pool of languages to choose from. All you have to do is add one bullet point in a file called system.yaml (for the Korean language that's - ko_KR) and then you're free to choose Korean as your client and in-game language. So that's what I did. [sg-ezreal] My client started updating like it would when patching and the in-game update indicator at the top-left of the client soon followed. I was able to log into my account normally and the client was already in Korean while the game was still patching. I was getting pretty excited and reported my actions to the nice Riot Support guy who I had contacted earlier and who had only advised me against installing third-party software in his reply. Since it was all this simple I was wondering whether what I did was legal by Riot's TOS. I was thoroughly disappointed to learn however, that my solution did not in fact work since when patching was done an error popped up and the client forcefully restarted itself. This would happen whenever I logged into my aco%%%% after choosing Korean as my language option, everything worked fine when i switched back to English again. I send Riot Support dude an update that my method doesn't work and he quickly responded, telling me that such actions are "not officially approved" by Riot and do not work anyway.
Now my reason for even wanting all of this was just trying to pick up some Korean (also you'd probably instantly start playing better), so I was alright reverting all the changes I had made. But I can imagine that for some people this might be a lot more problematic. Especially in regions like NA, Turkey, LAN, LAS, Oceania, Russia, Japan, Brazil and Korea (those are actually all) where you can only choose one language newer players may even be discouraged from picking up the game at all, when they see they won't be able to enjoy this game in their own language, just because they don't speak their region's language.
Even players who have invested some hours into League and are moving to another country might shy away, when they can't even look up what their champion does.
Especially considering that the technology for changing languages seems to be there, I do not know why this should be prohibited at all. At least on the surface level it doesn't seem hard to just enable all language options for all servers (I mean, when anyone can just do it) and let them work properly. I can literally not find a downside to that, unless I'm broadly missing something, as the languages are only being installed as you select them, so they won't take away any of your beloved disk space when you don't need them.
That's pretty much all I had to say, I hope I can arouse some interest in this topic and hopefully even a Rioter stumbles over this and can give me some more insight.
See you all on the rift![slayer-jinx-catface]
TL;DR: RITO, pls allow more options for the client and in-game language for each server! There is no reason against it, trust me.