League of Legends playoffs soured by allegations of cheating

We posted earlier about some of the aggressive strategies being employed by League of Legends players during the weekend's World Championship playoffs, but the competition has taken a darker turn with accusations of cheating levelled at teams World Elite and Azubu Frost.

As PCGamesN explain , the complaints revolve around a couple of giant minimaps that had been placed at the front of the stage for the benefit of the LA audience. By simply craning their necks around, players would be able to view a fog-of-war-free map of the battlefield, giving them a notable tactical advantage over the other team. According to spectators, and Azubu Frost rivals Team SoloMid , that's exactly what happened during the event.

The above photo, courtesy of Reddit , appears to confirm these suspicions, apparently showing an Azubu Frost member twisting his neck to look at the minimap, before pinging a warning to his teammates. Similar accusations have been made against World Elite in their match against CLG EU. To be fair to Riot, they did restart both games when players' wayward eyes were noticed, but it's possible that some illegal looking may have slipped the net. Riot are investigating both claims at the moment, admitting that "in hindsight, the potential visibility of minimap screens for players was a mistake". They're taking steps to avoid this in the future, so hopefully that should be the end of it.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.