Amidst the technical issues plaguing League of Legends’ World Playoffs, there also emerged accusations that some of the contestants had essentially “cheated”, by using the venue’s monitors (there to show the game to the large crowd) to check in on the activity of their rival players.
After an investigation by developers Riot Games, a number of contestants were found to have engaged in “unsportsmanlike conduct” and were issued strict warnings against future violations. This was mainly due to the fact that, while they were caught looking at the screens, they hadn’t actually gotten a competitive advantage from doing so.
One player in particular, though – Woong, from Azubu Frost – was after review found to have gained a clear advantage in his team’s quarter-final by looking at the big screens, and as a result has been fined $US30,000, which is his cut of AzF’s prizemoney for reaching the tournament’s semi-finals.
That’ll be of little consolation to TSM, the team he defeated, but since members of that team were found to have looked at the screens as well, they can’t complain too much.
Totally reasonable fine. But seriously, this shouldn’t have happened. Put up a fucking barricade in front of them. Not rocket science.
It’s especially embarrassing right after Valves International where teams were in soundproof booths on stage.
Absolutely. Im thinking he may have grounds to contest reasonable measures were not gone to to prevent this in any case.
Reasonable measures or not, cheating is cheating. And regardless, he has the free will to not look.
Perhaps, but if they are going to make a rule like that they also have the responsibility to ensure that it is enforced through reasonable means, and that reasonable precautions are undertaken to ensure that such actions are not taken.
Add to that the fact that everyone at the tournament had the ability to act in the same capacity as him, potentially in a less obvious manner, and it really was a case of the fault lying with the tournament organisers. Don’t get me wrong, I’d call him a screencheating bastard too, but unless they are going to undertake reasonable measures to block screencheating like that, the only basis for this fine was that he got caught unlike others.
Exactly. It’s been done in tournaments before. If fines are imposed, competitors can argue their case on the grounds the organisers did not take all reasonable measures to ensure they could not see the screens. Simply placing them to the side or back is not enough. Simple dividers would have been best. Booths even better. Another term for it is ‘duty of care’. The competitor has a duty of care towards the organisers etc to ensure they play fair, but the organiser has a duty of care to ensure that anti cheating methods are enabled, from computer bound methods to simple things on stage. Im surprised the competitor hasn’t argued he simply had a sore neck and was stretching it. *shrug*
Doesn’t he therefore go from ‘accused cheater’ to ‘cheater’ since they’ve acknowledged it?
Doesn’t hurt to cover yourself from slander/defamation claims, sometimes situations change.
Yeah I thought this was sort of obvious, any *smart should be inserted here now* tournament organizers have sealed off play areas for this very reason =/.
Luke earlier there was shots of TSM looking at the screens – but these were pretty conclusively shown to be taken either before gameplay started or after gameplay finished. If you have any direct link to anyone from Riot saying TSM actually cheated please post it.
IMO AZF should have had the win where the cheating occured cancelled and have to rematch TSM. The reason is it wasn’t just the one AZF player who benefitted from cheating – at the start of the game, he looked then pinged TSM’s exact position, so his whole team knew.
Wall of text warning:
TL;DR: Chaox looked at AzF, Dyrus looked at the screen to see if he could see the mini-map, Woong looked at the mini-map and saw what TSM was doing.
Woong looked at the mini map then AZF used this info to cannon shot tsm, avoid ganks and invade red.
“but since members of that team were found to have looked at the screens as well, they can’t complain too much.”
Luke tries to act like he knows what he is talking about.
So, whilst both teams had clear view of this massive screen, because he looked it was a 30K fine… This is just ridiculous.
The thing is he didn’t just look, he noted the location of the enemy team and pinged their location on the mini map to give his team a clear advantage in early game. This is Extremely terrible as teams can rarely recover from that early game deficit. I think there should have been better preventative measures with making the Big Screen not visible by the playing teams.