Riot Games Technical Issues During S2 Playoffs

     What you see above is an image taken from the League of Legends Season 2 Playoffs. This particular match raised a lot of issues in the community due to the large amount of cheating claims being thrown around. Team Solomid *left* was scheduled to play Azubu Frost *right.* Team Solomid (A.K.A. TSM) had spent many hours watching games that Frost had been in previously to identify a strong strategy against them. Upon realizing that they could take advantage of an incredibly early aggressive play leading to a snowballing victory, they were ready to start the match.
     Not even a minute into the game and the game was paused due to technical difficulties. According to a vlog by TSM players Reginald and Theoddone, the chats and headsets were having issues and were not operating correctly. Despite these issues the team did not want to approach the officials and disrupt and prolong a game they had been awake for over many hours preparing for. Frost however did not accept these issues, their team captain called a referee over and had the game paused while the problems were investigated. During this pause members of Frost were seen turning their heads towards the large monitor behind the teams to see where the players on TSM were. After the pause was ended, pings where thrown down showing that 4 of the 5 people on TSM were heading towards their 2 team members, which would have been guaranteed kills. Frosts jungler invaded TSM jungle and stole one of his buffs due to the knowledge of where the enemy team was.
   There were multiple other claims in different matches stating that the enemy team was looking back at the spectator monitor which displays everything for the audience. Riot officials claim that having tested the setup, they can say that there was no way that screen watching would have been possible without the officials noticing the action.
   What really rose tempers during the playoffs, were the constant technical difficulties that were occurring. Game clients were bugging and in game chats were not operating correctly, this caused many problems in terms of timing objectives in game easily. Headsets were dying or not operating correctly, cutting out communication with the team for multiple instances. The crowd and announcers were still audible to the players, the biggest thing being the announcers still being heard. Announcers talked about the entire game from both sides of the field, and the players could hear this and take advantage of it. There was one instance where a team was attempting to get Baron, and the sound of the crowd alerted the opposite team to the action and they could react accordingly. On top of hardware failures, there was multiple internet crashes during the games, multiple matches had to be restarted. One match in particular was nearly finished, it was a long game nearly over, that had to be restart because the internet crashed. As a team playing for a prize pool of two million dollars, it is a big deal to have to reset a match. Many audience members such as myself were watching the playoffs from home via the live internet stream, and when the crashes happened, the stream went down.
    Riot Games did a good job handling the situation with the audience in attendance by buying out every pizza place in the area and giving away pizza to the audience, along with bracelets, hats, and photos. However, all of the tournament players, and stream watchers are highly upset with the proceedings and lack of caution taken by Riot Games.