After Legends of Runeterra’s unsuccessful run, Riot Games switched the digital playing field for their League of Legends-based trading card game to the real one and released a game called Riftbound. It was a success by every metric, but the launch was rocky, so Riot promised to fix some of the issues for the Spiritforged release.
Yet, when the day of the preorders came, it turned out that the company severely underestimated the public demand for these cards, and their measures to combat bots and scalpers weren’t sufficient in the slightest.
Riot promised that any Riot ID would be able to purchase only one box, but reportedly, after checking out, anyone could just repeat the process again. Additionally, the platform Shopify itself was another reason for the chaos, as bots were able to access some of the preorder links before the sale went live, so they were extremely prepared.
Fans said that the entire stock was gone within a couple of minutes. Lots of these boxes immediately appeared on eBay for twice the price.
Game director Dave Guskin addressed the situation in a multi-post statement on X. According to him, Spiritforged had roughly 50% more product than Origins, but it still wasn’t enough to meet demand. Bots that were primed to get anything they could didn’t help either.
Guskin stated that Riot ceased preorders specifically to stop canceled bot orders from claiming more of the existing stock. He said that the team is working on a plan to reopen the preorders, cancel all the fraudulent purchases, add them to the stock, and gather feedback to improve any future sales:
As you all saw, Spiritforged preorders went fast today. We know it was a frustrating experience for a lot of you. Overall, we saw two major issues: first, even with ~50 percent more product than Origins, we still didn’t have enough to meet demand.
Second, the sales process was overwhelmed by a mix of real traffic from Riftbounders and bots. We’re in the process of canceling all fraudulent orders. If you’re a real player who placed an order, your order will remain valid and it will still ship.…
Some of those fraudulent purchases got through, though – even if they weren’t canceled by those antibot measures, we’re still able to detect them. We’ll continue to thoroughly investigate the situation and implement proper solutions to reopen preorders as soon as possible.
Riftbound is… bound to be a major success for Riot Games, as fans all over the world are looking forward not just collect these cards, but to actually play the game itself.
