The Riot Ban Hammer Comes Down on XiaoWeiXiao and FORG1VEN
With only one week of League of Legends Championship Series left until playoffs, Riot has revealed the results of its heavy investigations into player conduct. Two teams in particular will be devastated by these rulings in Team Impulse and Gambit Gaming.
For Impulse, rumors of ELO boosting, which is the act of playing on another person’s account and raising its rank for money, have been proven true for their mid laner Yu “XiaoWeiXiao” Xian. With XWX being one of the main components of Impulse’s raw aggression playstyle, a suspension is sure to hurt the team moving forward especially since they’re coming off a stellar 7-game win streak.
As of this writing, it is uncertain how heavy the suspension will be, but with worlds on the horizon and Impulse on the brink of securing that all-important first round bye in the playoffs, the road will be undoubtedly difficult. The silver lining is that while their support Adrian “Adrian” Ma recently stepped down to make room for Austin “Gate” Yu, Gate previously played as a mid laner for Final Five/Vortex and may be called to fill XWX’s shoes as a last resort.
For Gambit Gaming, the loss of last split’s MVP Konstantinos “FORG1VEN” Tzortziou is equally as devastating, if not more so. Gambit are locked in the middle of the pack, fighting off at least 3 other teams for a possible playoff spot. A foul time to lose the self-proclaimed best bot lane ‘by far’ indeed.
FORG1VEN’s suspension of 4 games comes on the back of repeated reports of toxicity, placing him in the top 1.5% of reported players in the last month (most toxic player by far?). The kicker is that Gambit were already given a warning regarding FORG1VEN’s behavior weeks before. This makes their sudden acquisition of Pierre “Steeelback” Medjaldi who was Fnatic’s AD Carry last split, make so much more sense.
It seems that since Gambit were aware of FORG1VEN’s attitude, instead of making an effort to rectify it they doubled down on backup plans. On top of Steelback they can still pull from their cache of Kristoffer “P1noy” Pedersen and Evgeny “Genja” Andryushin. With Steelback and P1noy simultaneously on Challenger Series teams however, the final replacement is still up in the air.
Update: According to the Fantasy LCS site, Gambit has chosen to field Amaury “Moopz” Minguerche, a former player for the Supa Hot Crew, and another one of their subs.
Riot is pulling out all the stops to make sure all the organizations under its wing know that they mean business. Players like Trevor “Stixxay” Hayes and Shern “Shernfire” Tai were recently suspended for toxicity and ELO boosting respectively. Even players on the Worlds stage aren’t safe as many European fans still remember the banning of SK’s Dennis “Svenskeren” Johnsen for racist remarks last year.
The bottom line is Riot will not spare the rod when it comes to keeping the teams on its payroll in check. Riot’s unrelenting vision of a legitimized eSports scene has no room for misconduct, and they’ve proven time and time again that nobody is above their laws.
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