It seems as though when the web hoster and internet domain regristrar GoDaddy began offering different TLD's (.com, .gov, etc.) someone took the opportunity to register "leagueoflegends.co." The problem? That person had no affiliation with the game, and the website was a redirect to a porn site.
Funny they didn't pick "LeagueofLegends.xxx."
Obviously a case of cybersquatting, gamers with the unfortunate lack of ability to type in an "m" at the end of a url (it effects more than you might think) now no longer have anything to worry about.
Riot Games, the studio behind League of Legends, claimed trademark infringement and sued for ownership of the doman name, and Riot is now in control of the site. Visiting the site now leads you to a blank page.
While dishonest overall (porn sites are dishonest?), it's an effective strategy to ride the coattails of League of Legends. Forbes reports that "new data from Xfire shows that Riot Games' League of Legends is now officially the most played PC game in North America and Europe. When you add in the rise of the game in Korea, where it's already beating out StarCraft II as the most popular game, it's clear that League of Legends is here to stay."
Xfire logs what games users are playing, how many hours they have played them, and saves other information (such as scores) from game servers. Malcolm CasSelle, Xfire CEO explains, "The Xfire application lets us examine the real-time data of users as they play any of our more than 2,000 supported games." Working with them, DFC Intelligence managed to compile a list of some of the most popular games based on the total amount of hours played by ALL of the players. In the end, League of Legends came out on top with close to 1.3 billion hours of gameplay.
Though one League of Legends porn site has bitten the dust, there's still the aptly named, LeagueOfLegendsPorn.com. No word on if Riot has their legal team working on this, but don't expect it to be around much longer. Thankfully, the site is only a placeholder at the moment, for in the name of research and professional self sacrifice, I visited the site where I learned it's the "future home of something quite cool," but just in case that changes, I wouldn't bother investigating the matter while you're at work.
