Major fuck-up at Riot shows why I rail against the likes of BG...

League of Legends is holding it's World Championships this weekend, leading to a Grand Final next weekend at USC.

It now appears that the competition will be steeped in massive controversy.

A number of the teams have been caught peeking at the minimaps (which Riot has placed in convenient view of EVERYBODY -- audience AND PLAYERS -- causing players to make plays they would otherwise be unable to).

Each team can see the other's minimap from their position.

In a tournament run by the game creators...

In a tournament with a TWO MILLION DOLLAR PRIZE PURSE.

Now, I don't know about you, but this not only de-legitamizes the tournament, but the entire E-Sport of League of Legends.  You are literally opening the door for any player in that tournament, at their election, to cheat, look at the minimaps, and basically do the game as if everyone can see everyone else's position.

If I need to tell you what kinds of problems that result, you've never seen any kinds of games like this, Starcraft, or DOTA2.

Again, this is a World Championship tournament with a TWO MILLION DOLLAR PURSE.

Accusations (and proof of some of them) are all over the place now, especially in the LoL (appropriate acronym?) community.

---

So why do I post this?

I post this to answer, again, Karbuncle's question as to why I should care about the cheating in FFXI.

It becomes part of the culture.

It becomes accepted conduct.

It becomes REQUIRED conduct.

And when it starts getting the implicit (here, even by mistake) or EXPLICIT (Bayohne/Camate) acceptance by the game creators, that's where I really start having a problem.

League of Legends and Riot has to take a serious hit here -- this kind of error is inexcusable with this kind of money on the line.

And what happened during one of the matches that really got speculation exploding (an Internet bork calling off one of the matches when it looked like one team was getting a huge comeback win -- with even speculation that a DDoS might well be the cause!) even adds to this.

And this is the same company and game which had to toss two of it's prominent teams from the Summer tournament of Major League Gaming.

Sounds like you got some doing to do before you start taking some of these teams into full professional league-employee status, which is what's planned for their "third season".

----

It now appears as if the entire tournament may well have been compromised, and by how many parties, we aren't entirely sure.