RNG to Replay Its First Three MSI 2022 Matches After Ping Discrepancy Surfaces
MSI’s competitive integrity is back in the limelight
Cover-Credits:
Riot Games revealed that Royal Never Give Up (RNG) will be replaying its first three matches of the Mid-Season Invitational (MSI) 2022 Group Stage, which it had already won. The MSI 2022 kicked off on 10th May and a total of 11 top teams from around the globe are participating in the tournament. With ten teams playing the matches on LAN in Busan, Korea, the League of Legends Pro League (LPL) representative Royal Never Give Up (RNG) alone has been participating remotely from its team facility in Shanghai, China, due to strict COVID-19 travel restrictions.
To maintain the competitive integrity of the tournament, Riot Games artificially inflated the latency so that all teams play on 35 ms throughout MSI 2022. This move was already met with severe criticism from the fans and the esports community. Now, Riot Games has revealed that it is addressing certain issues with the ping discrepancies at the MSI 2022. Global Head of Competitive Operations Alex Francois released an official statement on 13th May.
What was the ping discrepancy problem?
Riot revealed that after extensive technical evaluation of the competitive and training environments at the Busan LAN during the first three days of MSI 2022, it discovered that there was a discrepancy in the latency in all of the game logs.
In simple terms, Riot stated that the teams playing from Busan at the LAN were playing on a ping that was higher than what was intended.
To address this issue, Riot is making a configuration change starting with Day 4 of MSI 2022 to reduce the overall latency to the intended level.
Many of the pros participating in the tournament already stated that the ping did not feel like it was 35 ms and that the latency was unstable.
Riot stated that it started its investigation into the issue after it received several complaints from the pros on 11th May. It then worked closely with its engineers and the participating team to delve deeper into the issue. On 12th May, the company set up a test environment and it discovered an error in the calculation of certain metrics that caused a discrepancy between the intended latency and the actual high ping experienced by players.
RNG’s replacement matches
According to Riot, this issue specifically only affected the teams playing from Busan, meaning that there was an unintended disparity in the latency in which Group B teams played the matches. Group B teams are RNG, Istanbul Wildcats (IW), RED Canids (RED), and PSG Talon (PSG). Riot Games said, “As a result, we have determined it is in the best interest of competitive integrity to replay all three of these matches [RNG vs other Group B teams]. These replayed games will be finished with all other Group Stage competition by Sunday, May 15; the replacement games will be held beginning tomorrow.”
Group B matches
As per the official MSI 2022 schedule, the teams in Group B have their second round-robin today on 13th May. After the first three days of the tournament, RNG was atop the group standings and the three other teams (IW, RED, PSG) had a scoreline of 1 (win) - 2 (losses). With three of the games having to be replayed, the underdogs of the group have a chance to retell the outcomes.
Riot Games apologized to the players, teams, and fans and promised to continue to work with players to monitor the LAN environments to maintain the competitive integrity of MSI 2022.
