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On 4th April, T1 lost its second round League of Legends Championship Korea (LCK) 2024 Spring Split series to Hanwha Life Esports (HLE). Surprisingly, T1 did not even win one singly match and looked poor in performance. Following the series, during the press conference, T1 megastar Lee "Faker" Sang-hyeok stated that the ongoing and widespread DDoS attacks in South Korean League of Legends servers affected the team, leaving them unable to practice or scrim.
Faker Talks About DDoS Attacks
After the series loss against HLE, in the post-game interview, Faker talked about the persistent DDoS attacks and blamed this for T1's poor performance. T1 has been one of the most targeted teams in the ongoing DDoS attacks. The team reportedly has been facing a lot of attacks when they scrim and practice on solo queue.
Faker said, “In the process of preparing for the Playoffs, while other teams were able to practice, our team couldn’t practice in solo queue." T1's head coach Kim "kkOma" Jeong-gyun also chimed in on this, adding, "About practice condition, putting scrims aside, in solo queue because of things such as MMR there is definitely a difference. For the players... [pauses and chooses his words carefully] I think they are being disadvantaged."
Faker also reasoned that while lack of solo queue practice does not affect performance in the short term, he pointed out that it does affect preparation during playoffs, which is important.
There was a lot of backlash online when Faker brought up the DDoS attacks for the loss against HLE as an excuse. One Twitter user commented on this and pointed out, "Faker has lost a lot in the past decade and never made a statement like this. People calling this an excuse or cope are trolls."
The situation was explained a bit by League of Legends personality Marc "Caedrel" Lamont. He tweeted, "Apparently the DDOS attacks are hitting T1 so hard that they cant even scrim - teams are avoiding them because theyre constantly dcing so impossible to scrim the last few weeks. Also players are having to swap accounts all the time to try to even play soloq."
Notably, the first DDoS attack in LCK happened earlier in the Spring Split. As a result, during Week 6, the Korean league was forced to move to playing matches offline and pre-recording them due to various DDoS attacks affecting the LAN setup.
