Riot Talks Cheating, Network Failures During League of Legends Tournament

League of Legends is undoubtedly enjoying its heyday right now as a large free-to-play eSports game. While paid MMOs like World of Warcraft and SW:TOR suffer from losses of subscribers, League is definitely one of the most popular online games at this time. But allegations of cheating and connection issues plagued the recent League of Legends World Playoffs.

Riot Games' Vice president of eSports Dustin Beck finally commented on the issues on the League of Legends forums. He started off by calling day 3 off the playoffs "disappointing" and said that they spent Sunday investigating the issues and wanted to address the community's big concerns. He went on to say, 

"In hindsight, the potential visibility of minimap screens for players was a mistake. Despite on-site referees, close monitoring of player cams backstage, and stage design that ensured players would have to turn more than 90 degrees to be able to catch a glimpse of the minimaps, even the possibility of unfair play was simply unacceptable. We’re taking steps to ensure the minimap screens are not visible to players."

The VP also talked a bit more about how they are addressing cheating and fairness issues.

"Forward-facing camera angles can be misleading and we want to make sure everyone has the full picture before drawing any conclusions. This is something that we believe requires a comprehensive investigation but we absolutely understand why it’s cause for alarm."

As for the connection issues, Beck indicated that they were not happy that it happened but assured players they'd get to the bottom of it.

"We had a string of issues including a power failure, and two Internet connectivity incidents we are continuing to investigate," Beck said. "It sucks that this happened, but we’re going to dive deep into the root cause to see if there are any other redundancies that could safeguard against this in the future."

Source: League of Legends Forums