Taiwanese gamers found out that despite Riot Games protesting any inclination to adopt China’s censorship practices for League of Legends, they did indeed adopt China’s censorship practices for the game. Following the complaints one of the community managers stated that the North American client is no longer censoring certain words, but gamers from Taiwan noted that the censorship is still amply in effect.
Twitter user Peter Hansen did some legwork, spotlighting how certain words and terms have been censored in League of Legends. He also provided some video footage of the censorship on October 20th, 2019.
Being somewhat suspicious I decided to test this myself and can confirm it is true. Here is a recording. Note that my status reverts back to being empty after filtering through the menus a bit. pic.twitter.com/D5VvrC9apv
— Peter Hansen (韩磊) (@daokedao1234) October 21, 2019
Community manager Ryan Rigney updated fans about the censorship and informed them that Riot “fixed” the list of banned words and disallowed phrases, removing “Uyghur” from the list.
UPDATE: Effective immediately this is fixed on live in all Riot Regions. We’ll be spending the next few weeks triaging with our global teams to review our “disallowed words/phrases” lists and update accordingly.
— Ryan Rigney (@RKRigney) October 21, 2019
This was a follow-up to recent complaints about “Uyghur” being a censored term in League of Legends, which resulted in a massive Reddit blow-up and Rigney eventually responding to it.
Even after claiming that the Western version of the client no longer listed “Uyghur” as a prohibited term, Taiwanese gamers were still complaining about censorship.
Hansen would go on to document the censorship in the Taiwanese version of the League of Legends client, where terms like “Tiananmen” and “freedom” and “truth” and “great firewall” are still prohibited and censored.
To drive the point home, Hansen also provided video footage of the censorship.
Again, video documentation of this behavior from after the change. I have made the default status Uyghur to demonstrate that that change has indeed been made. pic.twitter.com/wFLSwPnDKW
— Peter Hansen (韩磊) (@daokedao1234) October 21, 2019
The Taiwan version of League of Legends being censored isn’t addressed by Rigney, and would likely require the Asia region community manager to address that particular kind of censorship.
Even still, Riot – who is owned by Tencent, a corporate arm of the PRC – made it known that players and broadcasters were barred from discussing politics during or after games anyway. So censoring the Taiwanese version and limiting the players’ expressions regarding sensitive geopolitical subject matter relating to China is not only not surprising but seems to fit in line with Riot’s current position of accommodating the Chinese government.
(Thanks for the news tip Guardian EvaUnit02)
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