Last night I was excited, and surprised, to see my favorite title to a thread on Reddit: “Competitive Ruling”. This thread came up not once, but twice.  Riot laid down some serious punishment to two LCS teams, Renegades and Team Impulse.

Like I said, I was excited to see these threads, but one i got deep into them, the punishments were insane.  Renegades owners were banned, and forced to sell their team. And Team Impulse was also forced to sell their LCS spot.

We wont get into the allegations, because Riot gave no evidence to prove they were true (at least in the case of Renegades), and I have no evidence whether or not they weren’t true either.  But the punishments seem rather extreme.  It’s one thing to force ownership to sell their teams, it’s another to mandate this to happen within 10 days.  This short amount of time is its own punishment, as it will surely heavily lower the price of the potential sale. We’re in a buyers market for LCS teams right now. (So if anyone wants to pool their money together and buy one with me, I’ve got like 100 bucks.)

The problem with these rulings, is that there’s no third party investigations, and no appeal process.  It’s basically just the word of a game developer, against the word of an alleged “wrong doer”.  I can understand these rulings being blind justice when someone is cheating or affecting the actual game negatively.  But when something this big happens, there needs to be some checks and balances, or else esports will never truly be as legitimate as traditional sports.