Wild Rift Americas coming March 29th – Esports Update and Patch 2.1b

WIld Rift’s Beta has been building up its content for some time, the mobile title has already become pretty fully formed. With each patch, it comes closer to truly looking like the full mobile League of Legends that was originally envisioned. That beta is about to see a big expansion with the Wild Rift Americas launch. However, this expansion is coming with some pretty weird constraints on the game. On top of the wider launch, the game is heading into some big events soon.

Wild Rift Americas Beta coming March 29th

League of Legends Wild Rift is soon to launch in the Americas. Both the north and South continents are due to enter the Beta of the game this month! This massively expands the game’s reach, but with some caveats. Riot have said that the Wild Rift Americas launch will use a different infrastructure to the rest of the world.

What exactly does this mean?

Details are vague as of yet. It is natural that different continents would use different servers, but an entirely different infrastructure brings more challenges. This will extend beyond just servers, players won’t be able to access their accounts in the two different infrastructure regions. Players with Americas accounts can’t access the game while traveling to the different server locations. Matchmaking, gifts, friend requests, basically any user to user interaction, is not going to be possible across this divide either.

This is a weird situation, but one we can presume is caused by the practicalities of a competitive mobile game. Mobile esports are a growing market, but fairly untested in the West. The North American portion of the launch will be interesting to watch, even if this server difference is going to isolate players there.

What’s left and what comes after Wild Rift Americas Launch

Apart from a seeing huge expansions in March, expanding its coverage to two more continents. The game has really hit its stride, with new patches bringing in some key quality of life improvements. The server differences with the Wild Rift Americas launch are bound to be frustrating for players who used a VPN to try the game out early. With the challenges of mobile esports though, this type of division may allow for a better running game in each individual area than trying to keep things running on the same system.

Coming up in March and April, Wild Rift esports has a number of events like WLS Season 1, SEA Icon Series, and the Rift Showdown. While the game’s competitive community is really still finding its feet, things are looking promising especially with this wider launch.

Ahead of launching in more territories, Wild Rift is continuing to be updated. While the game missed its usual schedule a couple of weeks ago, they’ve made up for lost time. These updates come frequently and they’re helping to gradually expand the roster of Champions. This is what’s been added in the 2.1A patch:

• Balance Changes to Lulu & Orianna
• New Champions – Zayah and Raken
• Replays and Spectator Mode
• Various Skins & Lunar Beast
• Other Added Features – Portrait Lock, In-Game Chat, Ping Display, Spell Timers, Smite Indicator.

There were plenty of other balance changes with this patch, specifically smaller alterations to a lot of the others Champions. We might get a minor patch in the next week or so (2.1b) to add some skins and provide minor tweaks.

The next Champion Rotation is March 11 – 17: Alistar, Amumu, Braum, Camille, Evelynn, Jhin, Seraphine, Singed, Vayne, Yasuo

The new patch (2.2) however, should align itself with the North American Beta, as its scheduled for March 30th. The patch might be delayed a day or two, jut so Riot can make an April Fools’ Day joke.

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