Competitive Ruling: Escalate Legion Gaming

I'm Hunter "Riot Hebble" Leigh, Associate League Operations Manager for North America. I'm here to provide context and results on the investigation around Escalate Legion Gaming for the North American Challenger Series Summer Qualifiers. In the days leading up to the Challenger Series ladder lock, multiple members of Escalate Legion Gaming (ranked team name “Team xELGx”) engaged in Ringing and Account Sharing in the Ranked Teams queue. This was verified using both testimony of involved players and internal account data. As a result of these actions, ELG directly affected the ladder standings and advanced their own position significantly.

RELEVANT RULES

9.1 Unfair Play The following actions will be considered unfair play and will be subject to penalties at the discretion of CS officials:

• Ringing. Playing under another player’s account or soliciting, inducing, encouraging or directing someone else to play under another player’s account. (9.1.1.6)

RULING

Escalate Legion Gaming willfully and purposefully violated rule 9.1.1.6 of the Challenger Series rules and violated the League of Legends Terms of Service in an effort to circumvent the rules of the Ranked Teams ladder, and will be subject to penalties.

COMPETITION PENALTIES

The players directly involved in carrying out illegal actions are suspended from all Riot-sponsored League of Legends competition, including the LCS and Challenger Series, until the end of the 2015 Season (November 16th):

• Brandon “Easy” Doyle
• William “stuntopolis” Chen
• Stephen “CloudNguyen” Nguyen
• Bryan “p0z” Kim
• Phil “Jynthe” Vu
• Will “Wildwang” Wang
• ELG Obama
• Cosmic Death
• moonway

Escalate Legion Gaming as an organization is also banned from sponsoring a League of Legends team in Riot-sponsored competitions until end of the 2015 Season (November 16th).

CONTEXT

Our stance on ladder manipulation has always been clear - intentionally circumventing rules or manipulating the tournament process for any reason is completely unacceptable. We will not tolerate individuals or teams who choose to manipulate their way to an advantage. One new aspect to this ruling is that we are suspending the players directly involved with the ringing and account sharing in the cases we confirmed - not the entire ranked roster. We did not find any evidence to suggest that other players previously on the ranked roster had any knowledge that the cheating was happening, or were even directly involved with the team at that point. As such, we’re assuming innocent until proven guilty. Amendment 7/8: The end date of the suspensions has been changed to the end of the 2015 Season from the start of the 2016 Spring Split. The suspensions will end on November 16th, 2015.