Over the past few days there’s been a fair bit of drama in the League of Legends community: a fan project called Chronoshift, which was making a legacy version of the game, announced it had been sent a series of Discord messages from a Riot Games representative requesting that the project be shut down. Yet what made this particularly remarkable was the tone of that conversation – with employee “Riot Zed” making a series of comments that wouldn’t be out of place in a mob movie like Goodfellas.
Riot has now said it was “disappointed” by how this conversation went down, but the company has repeated its request that development on the fan project be ceased.
Last Friday, a member of the Chronoshift dev team took to Reddit to share a screenshot of a Discord conversation between one of its developers and Riot Zed. In the conversation Zed established that Riot’s legal team wanted the project to be shut down… then things got a little weird. “You’ve obviously put a lot of work into Chrono Shift, but I can assure you Chrono Break is coming,” Zed said in response to the dev team removing some Discord channels. “I’m on the security team. I find people and things,” they later added.
Zed also demanded the developer hand over the Chronoshift website and source code, along with details about communications between dev team members, threatening legal action if the developer didn’t comply.
This obviously didn’t go down too well with the Chronoshift Project team, which said it was “incredibly disappointed” with the way Riot handled the situation. “Instead of opening a conversation about the future and interest in this kind of project, they attempted what could be seen as an attempt to take advantage of our work for free and start taking legal action against us,” one developer said on Reddit. “To our best knowledge, and the assessment of the lawyers specialised in IT copyright we talked the project over with, we have not done anything illegal.