Following the climate of bad news characteristic of a Friday the 13th, Riot Games released an important announcement for the progress of MSI 2022. In a note published this Friday (13), the owner of LoLzinho reported the detection of latency problems in the first three days of the tournament.
Problems with ping even in MSI 2022
As the Chinese team Royal Never Give Up (RNG) was unable to attend the event in person due to health restrictions in China due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the team is holding all matches remotely, directly from the training center, in Shanghai.
Given this, Riot Games decided to implement an artificial ping of 35 ms for all teams in order to balance things out. The problem is that the configuration doesn’t seem to have worked and several reports from players revealed latencies much higher than reported.
“Following an extensive technical assessment of all training and competitive environments during the first three days of the 2022 Mid-Season Invitational, we found after Day 3 that there was a discrepancy in reported latency in game data for all matches against which the players in Busan were experiencing. To address this issue, we’ve made a change to the settings starting with today’s games, with the aim of reducing overall latency to the desired level.”
RNG matches will be replayed
As a result, all matches held by RNG up to the third day of the MSI will be canceled and will have to be replayed. While the poor implementation of artificial ping may have affected all teams in the tournament, PSG Talon, RED Canids Kalunga and Istanbul Wildcats were the most affected, as they dueled directly against RNG.
“[…] as the issue directly impacted teams playing from Busan, matches involving RNG took place under a latency disparity between teams. As a result, we have determined that it is in the best interests of competitive integrity to redo all three of these matches.”
This means that the Istanbul Wildcats vs Royal Never Give Up, Royal Never Give Up vs PSG Talon and Royal Never Give Up vs RED Canids Kalunga duels – all with RNG winning – played on the 10th, 11th and 12th, respectively, will be replayed next Sunday (15)after the end of the MSI Group Phase.
The news brings two good news: the first is that the problem appears to have been resolved. The Riot team claims to have used several tools to detect the problem and has already made changes to the MSI server settings starting this Friday.
The second is that the rescheduling of matches will give an extra opportunity for the Brazilian RED Canids to seek a spot for the next phase of MSI 2022. For that, the Pack will have to beat RNG and hope for the Chinese team to beat PSG Talon. If that happens, RED will be able to play the tiebreaker on Sunday itself.
Source: Riot Games
