Go4LoL Experience

Sunday we managed to get a team together to play in the Go4LoL Cup #74. Their website is pretty rough to navigate around and it wasn't entirely clear what we needed to do but eventually we got 5 people with gameaccounts set up and it let us sign up. We got a first round bye (winning!) and got matched up against a brutal team in the second round. They'd also had a first round bye so we got to play not too long after round 1 started. Their team had an average rating of 2091 which is just a little bit higher than our average of 794. (Ok, it's actually higher than that since ELOBuff counts anyone below 1250 as zero.) We were soundly trounced and pretty much had to rely on moral victories. Oh well, we were sorta expecting that to happen... I was happy just to actually get into the event for the first week. And then we played some more games on the standard ranked queues since we were all on anyway which was pretty sweet.

Now, the website isn't super clear and the game didn't run the way it seemed like it was supposed to. As I read the rules you were supposed to do picks and bans in a chat room beforehand and then just choose your champions in game quickly. The other team had the start button and just launched the custom game right off the hop and had us do the normal drafting process. This is worse than the stated rules because we don't own all the champions and therefore we ended up having to pick our mid and top champions before we wanted to just due to how we were lined up. Riot had just implemented the tournament code thing so maybe this is how it's supposed to work now and they just didn't update the site? That's what I was thinking, anyway...

Then I went to look at the result page for our match... It turns out the other team was cheating massively. Only 2 of the 5 people who played in the game were legitimately on their team. One of them was multi-accounting (their LoL account was linked to a different ESL account than the one on their team) and two of them just flat out hadn't registered at all. This meant before the match (while we were waiting for byes to be processed) they were able to look up the stats on all five members of our team but we couldn't find any information on three of them. Again, they were way better than us so that didn't matter here but it could have mattered in other circumstances. Regardless, it's pretty against the rules of the event. I'm not sure what the penalties would be if we'd noticed at the time and reported it but I'm going to email the organizers if I get around to finding their emails to ask them about it.

Mostly I think they were just really sloppy which makes me wonder again about the whole drafting in chat thing. Chances are we were supposed to do it there and the other team just slacked off...