Bluetracker
Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.
PSA: Do not log in for the first time if you're traveling / using a VPN / etc. Your first login region will be locked.
Hello friends.
I am an American living in Korea. I registered for LoR using my NA League acc, and started playing the game. My Region is set to Korea and my Shard is set to Asia. Because of this, and because I'm currently in Korea, whenever I try to buy Coins, I am directed to the Riot Korea marketplace. Upon being redirected there, I immediately receive an error because the marketplace realizes I am not using a Korean account.
In an attempt to solve this, I asked a friend in NA to log in for me to buy me coins. However, when he logged in, despite it being an NA acc and my friend physically being in NA, he was still directed to the Korean marketplace and his region/shard were still Korea/Asia.
To verify this, I had a relative who lives in Japan give me his account info. I logged into his acc (Region: Japan, Shard: Asia) from Korea and was able to access the Japanese store from his account.
It seems like no matter where you log in from, the game only remembers the first place you logged in and doesn't change your region/shard regardless of wherever you are on Earth.
TLDR; If you log into the game for the first time while on vacation / from anywhere you won't typically be playing from, your account will be locked into that region/shard and your store will be locked into the region's store where you first logged in (physically, not the region you set the game to).
I hope this is a bug as I would like to be able to buy coins from the NA store without having to make a new Korean account.
I messaged support about this two days ago but still no reply. I will update if I hear anything. :)
Edit: I suppose another possibility could be that your account/store will be region locked based on the IP you used when registering for the game (and regardless of the region you select during registration ???) I have not tested this yet but I have heard some SEA summoners have been doing this to get access to the game. Either way, this is a terrible system that I hope gets addressed soon.
If this could get upvoted for visibility for a Riot response, it would be greatly appreciated. <3
maxfields2000
This is expected (but unfortunate in your case) behavior.
In cases like this, where you end up on the wrong shard for reasons outside your control, please contact Player Support and they can help fix your native shard. They'll have a few questions to ensure you're truly based on the country you live in but they can help you. I'm sorry you haven't heard back from Support yet, they're working incredibly hard to help players having a wide range of issues during our beta launch.