As we know, on May 13th, Riot made a shocking decision that left the entire League of Legends community stunned by canceling the results of RNG’s first three matches at MSI 2022. The reason cited was the ping discrepancy between RNG and other teams, giving the LPL representatives a slight advantage.
Immediately after, RNG members expressed extreme dissatisfaction with Riot’s decision, claiming it was an unfair ruling. Specifically, both players and management of RNG posted on their personal Weibo accounts an image of the “scale of justice” to mock Riot’s decision. In fact, in a motivational video before the matches, RNG’s coach Kenzhu stated that despite being “treated unfairly,” they would still perform their best and strive for victory.
Right after this video was posted, it ignited a fiery controversy within the League of Legends community. The majority of opinions argue that RNG calling themselves “treated unfairly” is a ridiculous statement since they were the team that enjoyed the most privileges at MSI 2022. Merely not having to travel to Korea to compete and making other teams play at a ping of 35 is more than enough to highlight the favoritism RNG received in this tournament.
Additionally, many people have said that the phrase “unfair treatment” should belong to the VCS region when our teams have been unable to participate in international tournaments for an extended period. With their somewhat ridiculous statements, RNG has inadvertently turned themselves into the “villains” and received a lot of negative comments at MSI 2022.
Fairly speaking, the party most to blame in this situation is Riot Games. They failed to control the ping quality at MSI 2022, only discovering the discrepancy by the third day of competition. Players in the tournament revealed that it wasn’t until the third day that the ping quality improved and was similar to that of practice matches. Coupled with the decision to cancel the aforementioned results, Riot has shown a lack of professionalism in organizing MSI 2022.
Beyond these issues outside of the game, the version of League of Legends used for MSI 2022 also has many bugs that severely impact the quality of the tournament. Recently, there was a bug with Leona being launched into the air when hit by Nautilus’s Q – Anchor Toss. Prior to that, there was a long-range Lightning Rush from Kennen in Hasmed’s hands in the match against T1, and there is no guarantee that similar bugs won’t recur, further deteriorating MSI 2022.