LEC Remake Gives New Fans A Taste Of The Bad Old Days

Today was to be a day of triumph for the League of Legends Europe team, with a revamped LEC studio, exciting new broadcast set-up, and fresh new teams competing alongside changed rosters promising to bring a new wave of excitement for fans of European League of Legends. Instead, the very first game harkens back to the bad old days of LoL, with game pauses halting the excitement followed by the decision to remake the game killing much of the hype.

The opening match of the LEC was set to showcase an old rivalry for new fans, with Fnatic taking on a recently reformed SK Gaming to kick things off for the year. What was an exciting match quickly turned sour when Fnatic paused the game several times after crucial team fights, ultimately ending when Riot Games declared the game would be remade due to apparent lag affecting the Fnatic players. An unfortunate situation for any team to be in, but one that has especially bad optics when the team that is suffering from the technical issues that cause the game to be remade are losing the match.

Watch LEC Spring: Week 1 Day 1 Pre Show Stream from Riot Games on www.twitch.tv

When a game like this is remade, that includes remaking everything about the game including the draft phase. While this is perfectly acceptable, and even expected with the rules in place, the fact that Fnatic were given a second chance to try and fix the problems they had the first time around is what has fans upset. Banning the champions that you struggled with does make it look like you’re taking advantage of the situation, even if that is perfectly within your rights at the time. It also doesn’t help when whoever is running the social media for the team makes questionable tweets such as this, before deleting them when the backlash strikes.

Hey @FNATIC, you dropped this... pic.twitter.com/fTrmr8PsHa

— G2 Esports (@G2esports) January 18, 2019

No-one is suggesting that Riot Games chose to remake the game because Fnatic was losing, that line of thinking points to a conspiracy that simply couldn’t exist at this level of play. However, what was set to be an exciting resurrection of former rivals ultimately ended with SK Gaming winning their second match against Fnatic in a manner that was less than satisfactory. The saving grace of this whole debacle really is that SK Gaming proved to be the better team today, as lord knows the kind of fury that would have been leveled at Riot Games and Fnatic had Fnatic picked up the win in their second attempt.