In a recent stream, Faker – the captain of T1, expressed his frustration over the current state of the League of Legends server in Korea, specifically the game sabotage at high ranks. The Demon King revealed his helplessness in having to coexist with rank trolls for such a long time, while Riot Games fails to implement effective solutions:
“These days, there are too many people intentionally trolling ranks, and they aren’t even getting banned. I’ve lost 2000 LP points over the past year because of these individuals.
What should I do? Report with full evidence? I don’t even have enough time to practice, let alone do that.
I always try to finish the game, but in the end, I can’t because I’m haunted by what these people are doing…”
Right after receiving this complaint, South Korean media, particularly gaming forums, began investigating the current rank trolling issue. Because it’s not just Faker; many other professional players are experiencing similar situations. Recently, Ning also expressed his frustration after being followed by a group during his rank climb, leading to continuous rank drops due to their sabotage.
By examining Faker’s match history, the League of Legends community in Korea discovered that many individuals had participated in his matches frequently, suspiciously, and repeatedly sabotaged the games.
One notable example is the account with the nickname “Bilibilinico”. This player has appeared in all of Faker’s last 30 ranked matches. Even though the number of players at Grandmaster – Challenger is very low and the encounter rate is quite high, finding a match against one player with a 100% occurrence rate is clearly unbelievable.
This indicates that these are not spontaneous rank sabotage or trolling behaviors, but rather organized actions and systematic tricks. Back in early 2021, the South Korean media exposed a network of betting websites in China, organizing bets on rank matches involving pro players.
This activity even involved members from teams in the LDL tournament, leading to the historic match-fixing scandal in Chinese League of Legends as we know it.
A suspicious detail pointed out by the Korean community is that the aforementioned accounts only go online precisely when Faker is streaming, or right when Faker’s League of Legends account logs in.
Therefore, they concluded that these are individuals working for the mentioned betting websites, engaging in game sabotage to manipulate rank matches in favor of the bookmakers.
Since the issue was discovered in the first half of this year, Riot Korea has begun banning numerous accounts with foreign IPs, including those of professional players. However, this measure seems not to be very effective, as it is possible that many Korean players are also involved in this issue for the sake of making money.