Competitive Ruling: Team Dignitas EU

Facts

On March 23, Team Dignitas EU (DEU) qualified for the the 4th seed in the EU CS Spring Playoffs. The team was unaware that two of their underage players will not be able to play in Playoffs due to Section 1.1 of the CS Ruleset that requires all players to be potentially LCS eligible next split. On March 26, DEU decided not to participate in the Playoffs with their two required, eligible substitute players. 

Relevant Rules

Section 1.1 of the official Challenger Series ruleset: To be considered potentially eligible to compete in the next LCS split, a CS player must have lived 17 full years (by or before the start of the next LCS split) and may not have any current disciplinary suspension from the LCS that would prevent him/her from playing in the first game of the season. [...] During the Challenger Series playoffs, all players must be potentially LCS eligible to compete in the next LCS split.

Ruling

DEU decided not to participate in Playoffs. As such, they will relinquish their Playoff spot and forfeit all playoff prize money.

Competition Penalties:

• Dignitas EU is subject to playoff prize forfeiture per CS Rule 9.5.4
• By not participating in Playoffs, DEU will relinquish their Playoff spot. DEU will be moved to regular season seed 5 and be placed in the Summer CS Qualifiers accordingly.
• The Playoff spot and 4th seed placing are transferred to Reason Gaming, the next highest-seeded team.

Context

Why advance a different team? With DEU deciding not to participate in Playoffs, DEU will relinquish their Playoffs spot and all the benefits of the Playoff seeds. To keep playoffs competitive, we will award benefits of the Playoff spot to the next seeded team. Teams were subsequently notified about the changes to the Playoff matches on March 28. Why do they forfeit prize money? As previously described in a similar ruling last season, we follow a “no play, no pay” policy for willful forfeits (meaning that the team could have still played, but they chose not to). We are deducting the money that they would have earned from participating in the playoffs, but nothing more. Why does the eligibility policy change between the Regular Season and Playoffs? Eligibility to compete in Challenger is less strict than in the LCS. For example, players can be younger than 17 and don't need to be work eligible in the region of competition, which allows many young, aspiring LCS players to flex their skills. However, in order to ensure that teams coming to LCS have rosters that earned their way in, we mandate that all players participating in a direct qualifier be fully eligible for the competition they are qualifying for. In this case, since the winning team of the Playoffs gets promoted to LCS, all participating players must be LCS-eligible.