According to a post by LMS Garena, Dragon Gate Team have been disqualified from the League of Legends Master Series (LMS). The news comes after thorough investigations done by LMS organizer Garena. Investigations showed that multiple team members were involved in potential match-fixing activities. Therefore, the Chinese organization won’t be allowed to participate in LMS moving forward.
In early April, LMS received reports regarding their owner, jungler, and coach, as well as their former coach. The reports alleged the team members of influencing games with odd actions, which altered the outcomes of games in a big way. Garena inspected Dragon Gate’s in-game comms, chat records, and replays of the allegedly fixed matches. Interviews were also carried out with both players and staff. The findings were later forwarded to Riot Games. Unfortunately, the exact matches that were fixed weren’t mentioned in the post.
After looking over the investigation reports, Riot Games concluded the following:
- Weijie Hu, the owner of Dragon Gate Team, won’t be allowed to run any League of Legends team in any region, either professional or amateur.
- Liu “JGY” Yang, the jungler of Dragon Gate, will be banned from all professional or amateur tournaments for approximately two years (18 seasonal months).
- Fan Jiang-Peng, the head coach, and Li Xin-Yu, the manager & coach, will both be receiving a 12-seasonal month ban from all LoL tournaments.
- Dragon Gate will be banned from the LMS indefinitely.
The replacement
This brings a dire end to an already doomed team. DGT placed dead last in the LMS 2019 Spring and were supposed to play in the Promotion tournament. Following their ban from professional play, SuperEsports will be promoted to the LMS after winning ECS 2019 Spring.
Rumors about a potential lawsuit from DGT have circulated shortly since the ban has been given out. These are just allegations coming from multiple sources that at the time of writing this article haven’t been confirmed.
The controversy brings another punch to the already weakened LMS region. A once strong region is at its lowest point in quite a while, due to very limited funding and the regional talent leaving to other regions.
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Published: Apr 24, 2019 12:55 pm