RNG Will Have To Replay Three 2022 MSI Matches Due To Ping Issues

On Friday, May 13, Riot Games announced that Royal Never Give Up will have to replay all three of their matches. The decision has been made to ensure competitive integrity due to ping discrepancies that happened in RNG’s three finished games.

Even before the 2022 Mid-Season Invitational began, Riot Games announced that this year’s League of Legends tournament would be different. As an international League tournament that features the champions from their respective region, there were bound to be some issues, especially in the current times.

Once again, Vietnamese LoL teams weren’t able to attend due to travel restrictions, missing yet another international event due to COVID. But while many expected that to happen, another region got affected by the pandemic.

Due to the ongoing COVID pandemic in China, the LoL Pro League (LPL) champions, Royal Never Give Up, weren’t able to travel to Busan, Korea, for the 2022 MSI, But instead of removing RNG from the competition, Riot Games found a solution.

The tournament organizers allowed RNG to compete in the 2022 MSI remotely from China, which was possible due to China’s relative proximity to the Korean servers. But there was another problem that needed to be addressed.

Since RNG were playing remotely, the Chinese champions were subject to higher latency, at around 35. In contrast, all teams in Busan would be playing at no ping.

Riot Games decided to implement an artificial ping to address the issue, so all teams would be playing ping of 35 milliseconds in a bit to level the playing field and make the games fair for RNG. Unfortunately, the artificial ping brought up more issues than Riot Games anticipated.

After the third day of action at 2022 MSI, Riot held technical evaluations to test out the competitive environment the players have been experiencing. The test unveiled that there were discrepancies between the ping reported in logs and the ping on which the games were actually played.

The tests were conducted after multiple pro LoL players complained about ping issues, stating that latency felt like it was worse than 35 milliseconds. Most notably, Evil Geniuses support Philippe “Vulcan” Laflamme stated that the ping felt very unstable, while his teammate Kyle “Danny” Sakamaki said that the artificial ping made it tougher for him to play.

“Following extensive technical evaluations of the competitive and training environments during the first three days of the 2022 Mid-Season Invitational, we discovered following Day 3 that there was a discrepancy in the latency being reported in the game logs for all matches versus what was being experienced in the Busan venue,” read the announcement.

“To address the issue, we are making a configuration change starting with today’s competition in order to reduce the overall latency to the intended level.”

In the end, Riot Games managed to confirm the concerns by finding out that the artificial ping was indeed experiencing issues. To fix the problem, Riot made configuration changes that would reduce the ping to the level it was initially supposed to be.

However, since games on the unstable ping had already ended, Riot Games decided that Royal Never Give Up would have to replay all three of their games in which their opponents experienced ping issues.

As a result, Royal Never Give Up entered Friday’s round of 2022 MSI with a 0-0 record, whereas the teams that RNG beat had their loss removed from the record.

As reported by Riot Games, RNG’s replacement games will be held starting on Friday and should finish alongside other group stage outings on Sunday.