Chris “Riot Commish” Greeley here. I’m the Commissioner of the NA LCS. This past weekend we used a rule, the Awarded Game Victory rule, for the first time. In this Quick Notes, I want to talk about how the decision was made and continue to provide greater transparency about how the NA LCS functions behind the scenes.

THE CIRCUMSTANCES

In the Week 1 match between Clutch Gaming and Echo Fox on Sunday, June 17, the game server hosting the match crashed at 32:26 into the game. If you were watching the stream, the game simply froze on screen, and the players weren’t able to take any further action.

Our Live Operations team repeatedly attempted to Chronobreak the game during the stoppage of play, but due to the  server crash, the Chronobreak tool was not able to restore the game. After approximately 20-25 minutes of work to restore the game to its current state, we acknowledged that Chronobreak was not going to solve the issue.

GAME BREAKING BUGS & AWARDING GAME VICTORIES

The advent of Chronobreak has allowed us to avoid a number of situations in which a game impacting bug may otherwise have required a complete remake. Despite that safety net, we still know that there are going to be rare situations where Chronobreak is not available (for example, in the event of a game server crash or where a game breaking bug is discovered that simply going back in time will not correct or avoid).

In these cases where a critical bug is not the fault of either team (i.e., not a situation where a player knows of a bug that they, in our opinion, intentionally trigger to cause some kind of issue), and Chronobreak is not available, the inclination should always be in favor of a remake, except in situations where it would be more fair to award a winner based on the current game state than playing an entirely new game. In those cases, punishing the team that has the game in hand by remaking has to be carefully considered against depriving the other team of a chance to continue playing through an awarded game victory.

During the biannual review of the rules, we spent a lot of time with our statistics team pouring over game data looking for some set of criteria that were objectively indicative of victory. What we learned is that they don’t exist. Short of one team attacking the open Nexus with the enemy team dead, it is exceedingly difficult to articulate objective standards around when victory should be awarded in the case of some kind of terminal failure. Even the guidepost examples provided in the rulebook are sensitive to changes in the game, objectives, gold and experience values, and the meta.

Ultimately, the awarded game victory rule vests discretion in the Head Referee monitoring the game and entrusts them to determine whether, in extreme situations, an awarded game victory or remake are the most appropriate outcomes.

THE DECISION MAKING PROCESS

Our first priority in any situation where there is a bug that affects gameplay is to quickly ascertain what happened, whether we need to take some action (rather than just unpause and continue), and what options we have if some action is required (both practically and philosophically).

In this case, when the Head Referee’s view of the game froze, he asked the stage referees what they saw on the pro screens on stage. He quickly learned that all ten players had frozen as well, and each was showing a window that the game was attempting to reconnect. The broadcast team and the observers were asking about a pause, but the referee team concluded that no one had actually paused the game. This led our Live Operations team to believe that there was an issue with the game server.

The Live Operations team engaged the Chronobreak tool to try to recreate the game and get the players back into game as fast as possible. At the same time, the Head Referee (who was able to rewind the game through the observation tool) began to look for an appropriate point to Chronobreak the game to. However, after several minutes of working with the Chronobreak tool, the Live Operations team reported that they were unable to Chronobreak the game through standard methods.

The Live Operations team continued to work on the Chronobreak tool in an attempt to restore the game. In parallel, the Head Referee began planning for a situation in which he would have to choose between issuing an instruction to remake the game from scratch (including a new champion select phase) or awarding the game victory to Echo Fox. As part of our usual backstage procedures, the Head Referee pulled up the rulebook and reviewed the relevant portions to make sure he had all of the information at hand necessary to make a decision.

The awarded game victory rule turns on a determination that the team losing the game “cannot avoid defeat to a degree of reasonable certainty.” Put simply – what is the likelihood that the losing team can come back and win?

At the time of the crash, Echo Fox was up 7 turrets to 0. There was 1 inhibitor down on Clutch Gaming’s side, a 4 dragon lead and a 10k gold lead for Echo Fox. After reviewing the current state of the game (including towers, objectives, gold differential and objective timers), the Head Referee determined that in the event that the game could not be recovered through Chronobreak, that the victory would be awarded to Echo Fox because it was sufficiently highly unlikely, in his opinion, that Clutch Gaming could avoid defeat in the game. That doesn’t mean it was impossible – there are always situations in League where a team that is down by a large margin mounts a comeback, but that in this situation, it was highly unlikely.

After the Head Referee made his decision, we gathered the management from Echo Fox and Clutch Gaming backstage and informed them of the decision. Subsequently, we asked the players to take their gear, leave the stage, informed them of the decision backstage, and announced the decision on broadcast. At roughly the same time, we learned from our gameplay team that the likely cause of the crash was a bug which can manifest when a player selects Taliyah with smite in a game and disabled Taliyah for the remaining game of the day.

THE AFTERMATH

We have had several conversations with Clutch Gaming organization at all levels explaining our decision and rationale. Separately, we have reached out to all the NA LCS teams asking for feedback on the rule, its application in this game, and application to situations in the future. This is the first time we have used the awarded game victory rule, and we want to ensure that in the future the League and teams are aligned on the use of the rule in the rare circumstances where it may be needed. 

While we are confident in the decision based on the information we had on hand at the time it was made, we have subsequently taken a look through patch 8.11 statistics from the NA LCS and other leagues to get some sense of whether or not our conclusion on-the-spot makes sense. Across 131 games in NA LCS, EU LCS, NA Academy, LCK, CBLoL, CLS, OPL, and TCL:

• No team has lost when they had a gold lead as large as Echo Fox’ at thirty minutes;
• No team has lost when they had a 7 tower advantage;
• In 74 games where a team has had an advantage of at least 10,079 gold (Echo Fox’s exact lead at the time of the crash), the team with the gold advantage has won every single time.

Obviously, none of these statistics are dispositive and comebacks can happen, but the point is that such comebacks are few and far between, and when weighing between two unpalatable options (complete remake and awarded game victory), the Head Referee was and remains reasonably certain that Echo Fox would have been able to close this game out had the crash not rendered the game unplayable.

We have confirmed that the Clutch Gaming and Echo Fox game was derailed by a bug that can be triggered when Taliyah (or Karthus) spams abilities in fog of war. The bug drives CPU usage towards 100%, at which point the game server terminates the game. Due to the nature of this particular bug, even if we were able to Chronobreak the game, it is highly likely that the game would have continued to trigger this bug, rendering it unplayable. This bug was diagnosed earlier this week and a micropatch was applied to prevent it from occurring in the future.

Quick Notes is a NA esports series similar to Meddler’s where we’ll deep dive into topics that the community wants to know more about, discuss work in progress, and share our decision-making process.

Chris “Riot Commish” Greeley is the Commissioner of the NA LCS and ran League Operations for MSI and Worlds in 2017. He is a recovering lawyer from New York City who can’t write a rulebook in less than 50 pages. He channeled years of raiding on his Resto Druid into life in the bottom lane dropping wards and shooting glitterlances. You can find him on Instagram, Twitter and Reddit as @IAmGrza.