League Of Legends World Playoff Participant Fined $30,000
Last weekend the League of Legends World Championship could have gone a bit smoother. After all, various network issues slowed the games to a crawl, and Riot was forced to postpone the remaining matches until a later time. However, that wasn’t the only issue, as it appeared that several teams were ignoring the instructions to “face forward” and instead were glancing up at the giant minimap above their opponents heads and using the information gleaned to impact the game.
There were five incidents where players were caught looking at the screen. Three of them were found to be Unsportsmanlike behavior, though it didn’t seem to have any real impact on the game, and were only issued warnings. One player was determined to have been responding to glare issues, and as it was all five of the opposing team members were already in their minimaps at the time, and he was not issued any sort of warning.
The fifth player, however, got much more than a slap on the wrist. Woong, of Azubu Frost was hit with a $30,000 fine as the information he gained from looking at the other team’s minimap was enough to give Azubu Frost a clear advantage. However, Riot has stated that those actions didn’t decide the winner of the game, which is why they will not be replaying that round.
When the rounds recommence, you can bet that Riot will be making sure there is no way for a player to be able to see the other team’s minimap short of getting up out of their desk and walking in front of a screen. These incidents have been a bit of a black eye for Riot, but at least they’re trying to fix the problem instead of hiding their heads in the sand.
