Riot games is no stranger to criticism and controversy within their esports ecosystem, whether it be impromptu schedule changes or suspicious favoritism, the multi-million dollar company tends to be on the spotlight. Sadly the current Mid Season Invitational was no exception to this.
It all started when Riot Games announced that the chinese representative “Royal Never Give Up” also known as RNG would not be able to attend the tournament in a physical form. Due to the situation Riot Games decided something quite unusual, letting RNG remain within their gaming house and create an artificial ping system to be implemented to the entirety of the teams participating.
This definitely raised some eyebrows from the community, immediately making comparison with previous Riot Games events where the Vietnamese representatives were in the same situation. However they were not presented with options to participate remotely from the tournament.
After three days of the event, Riot Games published shocking news in regards to the situation. Alex Francois the “Global Head of Competitive Operations” announced that after extensive technical evaluation, there was a discrepancy in the latency being reported via the game logs. This created an unintended disparity to the teams playing in Busan, to keep the competitive integrity within the tournament intact, it was decided RNG will replay their previous three games.These replayed games will be finished within the already stapled Group Stage by May 15th.
It is worth to highlight that players within Busan were mentioning and communicating the possibility of this latency issues, as they were saying “just by feeling of playing”. Nevertheless the investigation culminated after three days of the competition were already played. No further communication was published by Riot Games in regards to the situation, however they mentioned an effort to communicate with the players in case of future similar instances.
